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King of New York
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Abel
Ferrara’s career as a director took a while to really get going: a long
apprenticeship in amateur filmmaking and porno during the 1970s; the early
feature promises of The Driller Killer (1979) and Ms
.45 (1981); an impressively stylised genre piece in China Girl (1987); plus some television work and a few slight, rather impersonal
features (including Cat Chaser, 1989). The kinetic, dazzling,
flamboyantly violent King of New York, however, took Ferrara to a new
level of artistic achievement. As stunning today as it was on first release, it
gives the impression, at every moment, of reinventing the crime-gangster genre,
and even the cinema itself.
The
strong team of director Ferrara and screenwriter Nicholas St John fashioned a
remarkable series of urban dramas about law, crime, political power,
multi-racialism and ambiguous heroism: Bad
Lieutenant (1992) and The Funeral (1996) were among those to follow the breakthrough of King of New York. At the moment of its release, the middlebrow
arthouses were unresponsive to this achievement; the film gradually became
famous as a cult item on VHS, and in the closed chambers of cinema studies
courses.
This
is a less humanist reworking of the gangster genre than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather series, or even Brian De Palma’s melancholic Carlito’s Way (1993). Christopher
Walken is stunning as Frank White. He’s almost the Thin White Duke: pale, wiry,
opaque, as
translucent at moments as celluloid itself, “back from the
dead” like Noodles/Robert De Niro in Once
Upon A Time In America (1984) to regain his criminal empire. Ferrara even
manages to place a clip from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) in a Chinese mobster’s private cinematheque.
The
story is not easy to follow, even after multiple viewings (first-time
spectators, as I can attest from teaching it, are regularly befuddled). The
moves and counter-moves are multiple, and they radiate from numerous centres:
Frank and his inner sanctum; Frank and his wider social set (including his
canny lawyer); the two cops who are blindly sworn to bringing Frank to justice
(Victor Argo as Bishop and David Caruso – premonition of literally hundreds of
TV cop episodes to come! – as Dennis); and the circle of rival gangs (Colombian,
Italian and Chinese) that Frank sets out to destabilise or eliminate
altogether. This bold approach to fragmented, mosaic narration influenced many
in the ‘90s (such as Olivier Assayas) and beyond, but few have pushed it
through with such cinematic force and inventiveness as Ferrara did here.
Jimmy
Jump, the sharpest black assassin of the principal gang (Larry Fishburne, extraordinary),
as he explains to us, refused to visit White in prison, not wanting to see the
great man caged. But White’s itinerary is only an ever-expanding series of new
cages: his base of operations, his beat, finally the vast city itself. White is
a doomed man, the postmodern Mr Big figure fated to misrecognise the conditions
of his own power – but at least the film
gives him a classic envoi: “I don’t need forever!”
Ferrara
and St John work some engaging, neat variations on the given themes and stock
situations of the gangster genre at the end of ‘80s: White’s justification of
how building an empire on drugs can square with his benevolent urban
restoration; a rousing setpiece with singer Freddy Jackson that encapsulates
the Godfather trilogy’s equation of
show business, big business and criminal business; brilliant action showdowns
in the rain, on a train, and in a gridlock of motor vehicles; and (as in New Jack City, 1991) gangster’s molls
who, these days, double as crackshot bodyguards.
But King of New York both is and is not a
genre piece. It deliberately obscures or minimises narrative articulations
(absolutely no omniscient storytelling point-of-view here!) in order to immerse
us in a richly atmospheric noir world
– the expert use of cool blue tones, for instance, outdoes what Michael Mann
had already pioneered in Manhunter (1986) and on television (Ferrara had previously directed episodes of Miami Vice and Crime Story for Mann). What matters more than plot or coherent
character psychology here is the striking, expressionistic use of colour,
rhythm, music (the film blazed a trail in its extensive and sympathetic use of
hip hop), and a highly physical mode of acting performance.
Textual
analysis can never be more ecstastically rewarded than by poring over the
sequences of frames in King of New York,
as many of its fans have done by now. The jagged, headlong sense of movement
and action in space; the complete transformation of the mood and look of a
scene from its start to its end; the slam-transitions between sequence-blocks –
all of this is amazing, often copied but almost never equalled.
Although
Ferrara’s thick, hyperrealist style was decisively influenced by Mann, his
approach to this genre assignment is more akin to Monte Hellman (China 9, Liberty 37, 1978) or James B.
Harris (Cop, 1987), emphasising
minimalism, elision, ambiguity. Ferrara’s minute play with the formal tensions
arising from spatial uncertainties and long-held close-ups suggests the kind of
radical conjuncture that critics Antoine de Baecque and J. Hoberman have
described in John Cassavetes’ crime films Gloria (1980) and The Killing of a Chinese
Bookie (1976): the meeting of Carl Dreyer and the Quinn-Martin TV cop
series of the ‘70s. There is both proximity in time and affinity in sensibility
to Martin Scorsese at the moment of Goodfellas (1990), but Ferrara’s approach is,
on all levels, ultimately more radical.
As
in most deliberately bleached-out, attenuated reworkings of action formulae, King of New York presents itself as the
flickering of a strange subjectivity: back from the dead for a fleeting moment,
White gazes and moves and acts only as long as his body holds out and, the
moment his consciousness is extinguished, the film too is gone, like a motor
suddenly shut down. It is, in a different, more kinetic and nervy register, the
mode of Once Upon a Time in America:
mid-way between sentimental regret and the intimation of a crisis or apocalypse
that is simultaneously both social and personal.
This
peculiarly modern narrative form is, ultimately, the cinema’s way of offering a
poetic eulogy for a lost ideal of screen masculinity. Rarely has the Twilight of
a Gangster God been traced with the intensity and precision that Ferrara and St
John bring to this film. Subsequently, Ferrara will take this form down from
the heavens populated by special beings and chosen ones, and instead use it to
narrate the decline and fall of far more mundane creatures stuck in the mire of
crisis and malaise, gripped by a relentless death-drive powered by guilt for
some Original Sin: a cop in Bad
Lieutenant, a director and family man in Dangerous Game (1993), a philosophy-student-cum-vampire in The Addiction (1995) – right up to the point of The Blackout (1997), where the dark hole of
the subjectivity of an actor (Matthew Modine), literally shrinking into an iris
or getting chopped up by strobe lights, a truly cinematic apparatus, issues
onto a strangely serene sea of fantasy hallucinations, wish-fulfillment
scenarios, and other-worldly encounters with a lacerating, almost unbearable,
but necessary truth.
And
it is this path that Ferrara (now without St John) will doggedly follow along
in his subsequent period of life-saving personal sobreity, building a new home
and team in a new country (Italy) while ceaselessly coming to terms with the arising,
toxic demons of his past.
MORE Ferrara: New Rose Hotel, Mary, Pasolini, 'R Xmas © Adrian Martin 20 October 1991 / 28 June 1998 / June 2003 / June 2008 |
