Expanding the Horizons of Cinematic Narrative
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Christian concepts of good and evil are fraudulent and meaningless:
Nietzsche asserts that what is good is all that heightens the feeling of power, the
will to power, power itself in man. Thus, for Nietzsche, all that proceeds from
weakness is bad. Happiness, he says, is the feeling that power increases, that a
resistance is overcome (Nietzsche, 1885; Nietzsche, 1886; Nietzsche, 1895).
Ultimately, it is intended that this paper illuminates Wim Wenders’
observation that the mission of the cinema is to create a self and discover an
identity (Kolker and Beiken, 1993, p. 1). It is hoped that this Nietzschean
analysis will provide the reader with a sharper sense of Ferrara’s artistic vision
and personal world view, as well as offer insight into Ferrara’s place within the
ranks of contemporary American independent filmmakers.
Driller Killer
In 1979, Ferrara, a New York University film school graduate, released
his first movie, Driller Killer. Written by fellow NYU graduate Nicholas St.
John, Driller Killer told the story of a frustrated artist who goes insane and starts
slaughtering people with a carpenter’s drill. Although it fits within the
slasher/gore film genre, Ferrara’s picture contained early signs of his penchant
for expanding cinematic narrative by infusing it with philosophical discourse,
primarily in dialogue and imagery that are influenced by a Nietzschean
perspective.
The most telling example of this is found in the choice of having the
denizens of New York City’s skid rows—the homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts,
the weak and diseased—become the hapless victims of the murderous artist’s
rage. Roaming the city’s alleys, sidewalks, and streets at night, the artist uses the
drill as a means of ridding New York of the “worthless” in society; that is, the
drill becomes the instrument for accelerating the demise of these “weak” and
“unproductive” individuals, which, for the artist, is already a foregone
conclusion (Driller Killer, 1979).
Here, Driller Killer's philosophical nexus rests in Nietzsche’s
declaration of Christian pity as anti-natural because it keeps alive what is
naturally headed for destruction. Nietzsche holds that pity does not alleviate
misery, but instead increases it by allowing the decayed to continue to fester
(Nietzsche, 1895). From this Nietzschean point of view, the law of natural
selection would be undermined by the artist’s attempts to redeem the lives of the
city’s derelicts; instead, in an extreme interpretation of what Nietzsche had in
mind, the artist eliminates life’s “losers” in a twisted enunciation of the survival
of the fittest.
The complexity of Ferrara’s Driller Killer is illustrated by the artist’s
own psychological fear that his failures as an artist and human being are heading
him toward a dead-end future similar to the lives of the street people he has
targeted for death. By finding an unnerving connection between himself and the
derelicts, the artist is symbolically acting out his own destruction in the bloody
mayhem he perpetrates (Driller Killer, 1979).