The great thing about a blog is that this medium is the unfortunate recipient of the most self-indulgent tripe imaginable. I’m sure, dear readers, there is nothing more worthy of your eye time than someone (myself) cracking out the vault of the most adored things to me as if it were a revelation of some kind. But alas, as I wage war with myself over the relevancy, or not, of journaling to my imaginary audience about something that in the grand scheme of things offers little more than another distraction from all the relevant things that probably need your attention…well you get the idea.
At some point in this process maybe relevancy will surface or I will run off and fight battles that have to do with something…but until then, I’ll just go on the merit that excess breeds wisdom, and indulge myself.
I do have an ulterior motive in presenting my dull analytic routine in regard to my latest review of a highly adored film that is always close to my heart (sigh…)
I’m not a big fan of Abel Ferrara. Aside from Bad Lieutenant, I find most of his work cold and removed to a point of dullness. I know it’s his style, but it just doesn’t rock my boat.
There is one stand out though: The Addiction. It is a brilliant film.
After posting about The Hunger the other day, The Addiction came to mind. Both cover similar ground in the sense of vampirism being a metaphor for addictions/hunger for desires, etc. The Addiction though is devoid of supernatural forces and is more concerned with the consumption ideologies and how we get trapped in ideas and our own pretentiousness, which dulls our spirit.
Being one wrapped in my own vein of intellectual masturbation, which at times breeds a kind of ineloquent pomp and ultimately a misanthropic distrust for the world and it’s inhabitants, this film has always spoken to me.
The Addiction focuses in on Kathleen Conklin (Lily Taylor,) a grad student in Anthropology working on her thesis. She is steeped in philosophy and in constant reminders of humankind’s aberrant behaviours, not to mention the pretentiousness of the academic elite, which is chilling in its own respect. Being in this environment is enough to make any sane person fall victim to the void and purposelessness of life. Ideas are infections like anything else.
Ultimately, Kathleen finds her way to the dark side via Anabella Sciorra’s cleverly named Casanova character. ‘Evil’ so it seems, at this point of excess, is very seductive indeed. What follows is a spiraling indulgence in the evils of humankind, which put simply is the indifference to life itself. This indifference is savagery at its most awful, captured so masterfully in one mass killing floor scene.
But we all know, sooner or later, that going down this road leads us to a point where we have to question ‘how can I live like this?’ We can only indulge so far to realize that we’re not really living at all, that we’re trapped by our own perceptions and ideas.
This is where Peina (Christopher Walken) comes in, the dark symbol of coldness and indifference: “Mankind has striven to exist beyond good and evil from the beginning. And you know what they found? Me.” Walken is both chilling and seductive, the anti-christ himself, but within his brief diatribes there is the contrary wisdom which exudes from him, as if to ask the question: why would anyone choose this kind of life…because it isn’t living at all:
Kathleen Conklin: What's gonna happen to me?
Peina: Read the books. Sartre, Beckett. Who do you think they're talking about? You think they're works of fiction?
In the end the choice becomes clear. We can only live in abstract ideologies and pretensions for so long until they drain the life out of us, until they burden us with the weight of our own importance and blind us to the wonder of this life we’re allotted for only a short time. If we indulge in the negative, either seduced by its cavernous depths, or in bemoaning its awfulness as we see it, we tempt it to envelop us completely. With The Addiction, Ferrara illuminates this dilemma with great skill and eloquence.
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