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Popular Culture Review
Meanwhile, Ferrara’s films in the nineties technically became more
polished and stylized, thematically darker, and more philosophical. King o f New
York (1990) set the tone for his work in this decade, in which Christopher
Walken plays a gangster who gets out of prison and attempts to regain control of
the New York drug trade. This was followed by what many critics believe to be
Ferrara’s masterpiece, Bad Lieutenant (1992), a soul-searching crime drama in
which Harvey Keitel plays a corrupt, morally spent police detective seeking
redemption by investigating the rape of a nun. According to Ferrara, Bad
Lieutenant is a film about personal violence, noting: “People can lay violence on
each other just with words. You don’t have to shoot somebody to really hurt
’em” (Bouzereau, 1996, p. 207; Filmmaker, 1996, p. 55). Other philosophical
Ferrara works from the nineties were The Addiction (1995), a vampire film that
serves as a cinematic treatise on how it is fundamental to the human condition to
be susceptible to temptation, obsession, and being possessed by dark forces; and
The Funeral (1996), a philosophical, deconstructionist gan w7FW"G&