To the break of dawn

Three things you should know about Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans:

First, see it.

Second. The reptilian eye. To say that Werner Herzog has an abiding fascination with man's bestial nature is a bit of an understatement. However, I think Bad Lieutenant is one of his best cinematic treatments of not just the somewhat banal human/animal comparison, but the more eerie attempt to view reality through the cerebral mechanisms of other species. The menagerie of (mostly non-mammalian) creatures in the film is lingered over obsessively by the camera eye. We are shown extreme close-ups of a sinuous snake moving through water; the ethereal fins of a fish swimming in a shallow cup; the warty skin, hissing mouth, and blank double-lidded eye of iguanas; even the exploded guts of an alligator hit by a car. All of this animal fetishization creates strange parallels between the unhinged sociopath that is Nicholas Cage at his finest and the dimly predatory, amphibious reptiles swimming, slithering, and shuffling their way through the (Bad) Lieutenant's life. Interestingly, this heightens the film's already notable exercise in destabilization and detachment. At any given moment, nothing is as it seems. Not only have all the generic cues (is this a B-movie or an art-house gem?) gone out the window, but the very notion of being emotionally invested in the on-screen action begins to wear thin with each successive bizarre twist of the plot. And yet, there's another axis of the film -- the mammalian one, if you will -- that's all big-eyed dogs and cute babies, and that doesn't ever let you get too far from cheering, gasping, and otherwise suspending your superior pomo disbelief. A fine line, and Herzog nails it.

Third. I love that the entire film was shot on those days (either mid-August or, most likely, sometime in March, when the heat isn't so oppressive) when dark storm-clouds roll over half the New Orleans skyline and cast everything in a particularly gloomy slate-gray hue. This is hands-down my favorite New Orleans weather, the kind of days made specifically for leaning over a porch rail, smoking a cigarette, and contemplating the mysteries of the human experience. So many films shot in "The South" tend to go for the yellow filter -- either gently vaselined to denote the sentimental South, or loudly overexposed for that insistent tone of edgy social commentary. Bad Lieutenant doesn't play that game, and it also doesn't mess around with Katrina kitsch. Aside from one FEMA marking on a door, there is no obvious visual reference to Katrina, and even the neighborhoods they show, roughed up though they may be, are not even a tenth as post-apocalyptic as much of the real CBD and Midcity still is. I felt like I was watching the pre-Katrina city that I remembered from my first three years of school -- a city that didn't need a massively destructive hurricane to be moody and poignant.

Bonus! Xzibit!