Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2006 | Page 17

Expanding the Horizons of Cinematic Narrative: A Textual Analysis of Nietzchean Themes in Five Abel Ferrara Films Film director Samuel Fuller once said, “The cinema is like a battleground. Love . . . hate . . . action . . . violence . . . death. In a word: emotion.” In the truest sense of the auteur theory of film, the primary, although not exclusive, source of a film’s emotional and ideational development resonates from the director’s perspective, feelings, and philosophy. The more one sees a director’s body of work, the more one comes to realize that the director is not telling separate and unrelated stories. Instead, it becomes apparent that similar ideas are being expressed through the use of images and dialogue infused with themes (Sherman and Rubin, 1969, pp. v-vii). This auteur theory is particularly evident in the cinema of American independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara, whose fourteen films since 1979 have mapped out an influential and controversial cinematic terrain. Working within commercial genres and with established actors, Ferrara still manages to produce dark, intense, thematically complex, and unapologetically controversial works that often push the envelope of taste and moral propriety (Filmmaker, 1996, p. 55). Of particular interest for this paper are five Ferrara films {Driller Killer, Ms. 45, King o f New York, Bad Lieutenant, and The Addiction) that employ ongoing themes and ideas inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900). Because of Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found on purely human terms rather than within the precepts and doctrines of Christianity, and his concept of the Superman and the will to power, his uncompromisingly provocative works have influenced such writers as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Similarly, director Ferrara—dubbed by some critics as the “bad boy of American cinema” because of his raw, nightmarish, violent, at times profane filmmaking style—trains his camera on characters wandering through a Nietzschean landscape. Each of Ferrara’s films has called upon, to varying degrees, the development of philosophical themes and ideas. His first feature, the cult classic Driller Killer (1979)—an early exercise in Nietzschean imagery—was a brutal tale of a struggling artist (played by Ferrara) who purchases a battery operated drill and vents his frustrations on New York City’s homeless. This was followed in the eighties by Ms. 45, Fear City, China Girl, and Cat Chaser—each film an intense, gritty exploration of the human condition.