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Blood Rights

Photo by Jean Pierre Marois

Ring Around the Lips: Lili Taylor gets a taste of the vampire's life in Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction"

Abel Ferrara's 'The Addiction' carries the vampire myth to its symbolic end

By Richard von Busack

The recent avant-garde vampire movie Nadja leaves viewers with only one really memorable scene: Jennifer Jason Leigh look-alike Galaxy Craze submitting to the girl vampire Nadja and murmuring, "I don't know why I'm letting you do this to me."

I think I know why we let them do it to us. If vampires weren't a turn-on, I doubt if we'd have so many of them in the movies. Besides porn stars, they're the last remaining film characters allowed to have sex without guilt.

Of course, even sexiness isn't enough to save a movie like Vampire in Brooklyn--a legend touched by the likes of Eddie Murphy is guaranteed to have all of the mythic qualities sucked out of it. And considering Mel Brooks' current position as the king of day-late-and-dollar-short satire, his upcoming Dracula--Dead and Loving It bears all the signs of the imminent end of vampire chic--and not a moment too soon.

The number of really compelling recent vampire movies are few: Near Dark, Interview With a Vampire, bits of the Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rabid and now Abel Ferrara's remarkable The Addiction. By taking the myth of the undead to its most profound level yet, Ferrara almost undoes the genre for good. All one can hope for (the flesh being weak) in future vampire movies is more sexuality or even more parody.

Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant didn't follow the conventions of the police movie as much as it meditated on sin and redemption. Similarly, his vampire movie The Addiction actually focuses on the metaphysics of vampirism. It is a movie of ideas, more than a suspense film.

With his frequent collaborator, writer Nicholas St. John, Ferrara has made heroine Kathleen (Lili Taylor) a philosophy graduate student in New York. Kathleen is headed for the farthest shoals of moral relativism: the belief that two wrongs are equivalent because they're both wrong.

The movie opens with slides of the My Lai massacre, screened at a lecture. The slides have unsettled Kathleen. In this philosophy class, she's awakened to her own responsibility for evil: The massacre was committed by our troops; good civilians in America sent them overseas and thus we all share the responsibility for the dead children and women in Vietnam.

At night, while she ponders the individual's part in social evil, Kathleen is ambushed and pushed into an alley by a female vampire (Annabella Sciorra) who challenges her: "Tell me to go away. Don't plead with me; just tell me to go away, like you mean it." Kathleen, however, can't summon up the resistance to turn the vampire away, and is bitten and infected.

Pale, sick and miserable, the traumatized vampire Kathleen wanders grotty New York streets, riding a spiral into nihilism. Her thoughts (in voice-over) say that philosophy has no purpose; that the so-called all-important lessons of history are nothing more than a mask for human weakness and chaos, just as civilization is nothing but a pile of unburied dead bodies. In the library at NYU, she thinks in a voice-over, "Oh, the stench in here is worse than a charnel house." In another scene, she says of her philosophy studies, "The world is a graveyard, and we're the birds of prey picking at the bones."

Ferrara will have no truck with Kathleen's despair. The Addiction is a moral film, although, surprisingly, not a boring moral film. It suggests instead that vampirism is the will to power taken to its deadly extreme.

The Addiction is not the first movie to explore this possibility. One of the most interesting and amusing of vampire tales, the 1989 comedy Vampire's Kiss, turns the metaphorical parasite into a corporate monster. Nicolas Cage, an actor as beyond conventional notions of "comic" or "tragic" as the Nietzschean ideal is beyond good and evil, plays a self-important editor either bitten by (or, take your pick, mentally broken down by) a woman he picks up in a bar for a one-night stand.

He begins acting as he believes a vampire ought to act, sleeping under the couch because he doesn't have a coffin, playing the cool sadist toward his underlings at the office, wearing sunglasses after dark. His associates hardly notice; they think he's just practicing tough-minded management techniques, for which there will always be apologists (just listen to talk radio for a little while and you'll hear people justifying business practices that make the legions of the undead seem like the Peace Corps).

Vampire's Kiss is a ultra-dry satire, and the trembling victim, Cage's secretary, isn't smart enough to understand that her boss has cracked, and does his bidding. Sufficient will power would have freed her from the monster's spell.

In The Addiction, the situation is similar, although more serious. Kathleen is offered help from a fellow vamp--not from friends, she has no friends. Peina--Christopher Walken intriguingly and perversely cast as the moral center of the film--is a vampire who seems to be in Vampires Anonymous. He hasn't, he claims, tasted blood for 40 years, and he's using his isolation for a good purpose: to be an artist.


Photo by Jean Pierre Marois

12-Fang Program: Christopher Walken as a reformed bloodsucker

He offers to teach Kathleen a better way, passing on William Burroughs' Naked Lunch as a tip guide for what Kathleen will endure in withdrawal. She's unwilling to discipline herself, however, and in the movie's climax, she bottoms out as an addict to the vampirism that consumes her.

The film works as an entertainment as well as an argument, and it features first-rate acting by Taylor, who is forceful and even frightening. Taylor, who starred in Dogfight and Household Saints and had parts in Robert Altman's last two movies, has a bold personality to match her bold facial features. In this dangerous part, Taylor opens up on screen as totally as Harvey Keitel did in Bad Lieutenant.

As St. John has commented in interviews, The Addiction tries to find out why the mark of the cross keeps the vampires away. The only one able to resist Kathleen is a Christian handing out Bible pamphlets. In this, one of the wisest, curious, skeptical and most impassioned Christian entertainment since Graham Greene died, the implication is that the abandonment of faith contributes to the climate in which vampires flourish.

I can't agree. In the hands of oppressors, Christianity is a force against what most would consider "good": actions that result in the physical and spiritual well-being of the greatest number of people. And William Calley was a Christian; if God is in the foxholes, he's also persuading some soldiers to pull the triggers. The same Nazi soldiers that participated in the massacres remembered in The Addiction through documentary footage had "God Is With Us" engraved on their belt buckles. Surely, some of them must have believed it was true.

And yet, and yet ... Ferrara, as in Bad Lieutenant, knows how to put Jesus in a movie without making you despise him for it. It is the same skill that produced the similarly compelling Catholic passages in Greene's novels--passages that can be snickered at but not dismissed. A belief in evil is almost a necessity to make a convincing vampire movie. While the genre is endless, the conviction and the terror conveyed by The Addiction are rare.

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