Subjective experience, narrative, transcendence, and repressive institutions in Werner Herzog’s
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria — a phenomenological approach

by Yannis Mitsou

This essay explores the depiction of police states, through Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), two cinematic depictions influenced by both modernist subjectivism (in the film noir tradition) and transcendental visual and narrative traditions. I use the term “transcendence” here not in its religious but in its existential connotations, exploring the tendency of an individual towards Otherness and by extension freedom, against the limitations of both inner and institutional repressive forces.

In Bad Lieutenant Herzog expresses otherness through visual motifs against the background of a sinking city (both literally—the action takes place in New Orleans after the Hurricane Katrina, and figuratively) and Guadagnino does so through the ambiguous idea of magic in Suspiria. Unlike Dario Argento’s original 1977 film, witchcraft for Guadagnino is to be understood as both a liberating political power and an institutional oppressive power, similar to fascism or rather neo-liberal regimes, if one takes into consideration the emphasis on individuality encouraged throughout the film. In contrast to the cathartic fire in the end of Argento’s film, Suspiria’s ending here indicates the institution survives and evolves into a guarding force similar to the Catholic Church (“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame. But not yours”). Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, is again a variation on an older narrative, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. Herzog replaces the original’s religious emphasis with a guilt towards those oppressed in social reality—African Americans and a Mexican immigrant who appears in the first and the last scene and whose story frames the film.

Suspiria and various bodies. Notice the mirror as a motif and part of the visual composition.	Attractive aspects of violence. A threat lies in the heart of Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant.

What both films seem to share is their phenomenological emphasis on the senses, on corporeality as a way to approach social reality. Their political contradictions notably lie in their tendency to identify with the oppressing character or institution rather than the oppressed party. This comes through the narrative voice and is not without interest in itself.

Depictions of police states:
the corporeal and the subjective

A man in a scarlet jacket has just been shot, in Louisiana during a confrontation. “Shoot him again’’ the main character insists, as the sound of a harmonica already gives us the sense of a subjective, vaguely surreal, experience. “What for?” one of the gangsters asks, slightly annoyed with the eccentric request. “His soul is still dancing,’’ Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), the Bad Lieutenant, insists. Next to the dead body moves an apparently younger man representing the soul, in the same deep colored jacket and a mohawk, unconventional in appearance and passionate almost erotic in his freedom, powerful in a way we could never suspect the dead gangster to be. He is literally breakdancing, giving an air of spirituality and joyful celebration to the scene. Werner Herzog’s film is visually playing here not so much with the idea of mortality (the obvious interpretation) as with the motif of life as art, lived experience as a constant dance. What is the stance of the main character who apparently represents police corruption, brutality and abuse towards such an ideal?

In this scene the metaphysical aspects are carefully linked to subjective perception. In Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, on the other hand, irrationality takes the form of actual practice of witchcraft, seen objectively, as a historical phenomenon. It is linked from the very first image of the film to political action. On screen we see a girl approaching the safe space of her psychiatrists’ office, during a rainy afternoon, while an anti-capitalist protest in support of the Baader-Meinhof Group takes place, in 1977 Berlin. Later, gradually, as we shall see, witchcraft is linked to repression, the opposite tendency.

I look at these two films as representing a police state in a way influenced by both modernist subjectivism (in the film noir tradition) and transcendental visual and narrative traditions. I use the term “transcendence” here, not in its religious but in its existential connotations, exploring the tendency of an individual towards Otherness and by extension freedom, against the limitations of both inner and institutional repressive forces.

A quest for freedom dominates both film narratives and yet it is in their contradictions, thematical and ideological, that what they express becomes more vibrant, more personal to their creators. An implied threat lies at the heart of both film narratives. A threat we can describe as suspiciously familiar, taken not from the gothic tradition or the realm of fantasy, but directly from the world of everyday life, at least life as experienced by the socially conscious individual or the artistically inclined one. Giving priority to the senses is indeed a fascination the two narratives consistently share with their phenomenological concerns and their return to an existential idea of living intensely or “poetically.”

Both directors consider living consciously closely related to artistic experience with the perception of life, the ordinary, read as a creative act in itself. I use the term living consciously here as Andrei Tarkovsky defines it in his Sculpting in Time: Poetry, in this context, is not to be understood as a genre of literature but rather as a dynamic way for the individual to approach reality and reconcile themself with it, through trust in memory and through an active sensitivity to the outside world.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Another approach, not radically different but more focused on semiotics and the formal aspects of the idea of “poetry” is one suggested by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his essay Cinema of Poetry, which he first read in Italian in June 1965 at the first New Cinema Festival at Pesaro. Pasolini’s memorable description of the world of signs, by extension of cinema in itself, as a world of “memory and of dream” (Pasolini, 1976) clearly offers an understanding of poetic experience as expressed in the visual explorations of these two films.

The political connotations of such a seemingly individualistic exploration may often seem enigmatic. Yet phenomenology would reconcile the observer with the world of everyday life, through an emphasis on the flesh. That is a concern expressed notably by Maurice Merleau- Ponty, who carefully and repeatedly links visual perception with creativity and even artistic production, art with life. Here he offers a valuable theoretical context in my reading of the two films. Without negating the quest of a subject, phenomenology gives emphasis to an intended interaction with otherness and seeks meaning in this procedure, not in some pre-determined realm of reality, nor in the eye of the beholder.

Works like Phenomenology of Perception (1945) share with Suspiria and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans an emphasis on the flesh [2] as a means to experience oneself and a belief in lived experience as a reconciliation between the subject that observes and the world as the object of this observation. My main argument is that in both films, a desired transcendence is achieved through the flesh, through the conscious focus of both the narrative structure and the imagery on the human body. The need for the artist to observe and inhabit the world poetically, in the literal verbal sense, is creatively a natural extension of this corporeal priority. Corporeality and transcendence, an emphasis on sensual reality and a desire to exceed it, structure both films.

My understanding of violence is influenced by the ideas of Hannah Arend, whose book On Violence (1970) seems particularly close to what is depicted in Suspiria. We need to understand violence to understand the police state but that is not approached literally in Guadagnino’s or Herzog’s narrative choice. In these films violence does not necessarily coexist with the power structures; [3] sometimes it is narrated as repressive force, other times associated with either personal or social revolt. In the context of the two films, what distinguishes violence from its traditional framing is the Bacchic, ecstatic element attributed to it.

Although Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans precedes Suspiria by nine years, here I follow a thematic rather than chronological approach. Thus Guadagnino’s film, with its more operatic form and relatively conventional structure, will be the first to be discussed. The essay concludes with the more consciously philosophical exploration of similar themes, performed under a different cultural light by Herzog. Some open questions to explore are related to the nature of the relation between corporeality and transcendence in the two films:

• In the absence of a literal police force in Suspiria (the presence of an unsuccessful officer whose humiliation has more to do with the depiction of medieval male sexual fears about femininity) is it safe to perceive Witchcraft, historically often persecuted, as a similar force? Is it institutional in nature, in the context of the plot of the film?
• Is sensuality, as a common motif between the two films, liberating or misleading? Could it even be perceived as repressive?
• What exactly is the relation between corporeality and transcendence in the context of the two films? Not only as theoretical concepts, but also as narrative choice.
• What is the importance of storytelling in Bad lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans? Is it related to dream imagery?
• Is the fact that both films depict characters who could be described as authority figures as artistically sensitive and conscious in their thirst for lived experience ideologically charged in itself? How does this characterization influence the two films’ understanding of power structures and the actual possibility of a repressive police state?

Such questions are interrelated and to explore them constitutes my interpretive attempts rather than absolute declarations. What they seem to share as a philosophical concern is their thematic communication and their phenomenological concern about the relations between subjectivity and otherness.

Dreams and oneiric situation in the original 1977 Suspiria.

Transcendental self-expression and
artistic creation in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

Suspiria closely links transcendental self-expression and artistic creation, two concepts visually expressed through the depiction of a highly ritualistic dance: Volk, a Bacchic performance that replaces the (limited as a screen presence) classical ballet of the original Dario Argento 1977 film. Deprived of the directly religious or metaphysical connotations associated with this term in Christian existentialism,[4] transcendence” here is to be understood as a conscious attempt of a subject to approach otherness—in Suspira, the enigmatic American Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), a stranger in Berlin. Her intended movement towards self-achievement and expression is also directly linked with the creation of new realities, thus “poetry” in its literal sense of making or constructing new aspects of life. Artistic production is linked to lived experience. Albert Camus, when describing some archetypal “absurd heroes”, focuses on the actor, the individual that redefines and re-invents itself, through performance, every night. (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942), 73. In this light, the performative aspects of life are not an escape from reality but an active participation in it.

A link between phenomenological and existential readings of the term transcendence is to be sought exactly in this balance, this blurring of barriers between art and life. Luca Guadagnino’s body of work, echoing both Victorian aestheticism and Luchino Visconti’s operatic emphasis on the appearance of things as an ideal in itself, consciously follows this visual and thematic tradition. Here an intended transcendence would liberate the subject from barriers set by outward forces and, at the same time, re-create or re-interpret reality through art. Dance, in its emphasis on movement and t corporeal experience and a similarity to flight, perfectly summarizes these ideas.  

Witchcraft for Guadagnino seems to me, first and foremost a stand-in for this tendency to fulfill oneself and live everyday reality in artistic terms. Destructive, sensual and healing at the same time, Volk, the ritual dance of the Witches gives rise to realizing the need for a conscious self-fulfillment. Thus, for the participants at least, it becomes a political act in itself.

At the same time, it should be noted that in Suspiria, transcendence, a key existentialist concept, is often a contradictory force. Contradictory, in the sense that the film, both visually and thematically, depicts it as both as empowering and repressive. It is empowering in its depiction as an erotic, archaic and yet politically relevant force, alluding to both Sartrean ideas and a passionate belief in subjectivism suggested by 18th century romanticism. It is repressive in its actual regulation in the plot.

Repressions and contradictions in Suspiria

In contrast to the fairy tale, dream-like openness of Argento’s Suspiria, Guadagnino’s Suspiria presents transcendence as one more step in a search for a selected “family” that replaces the conservative placing at birth, the search for a group of individuals that share the same ideology and mentality. Berlin, and by extension, the educated, cosmopolitan, politically palpating and culturally sensitive Europe of the 1970s, is to be understood as the antithesis to the religious fanatism of the U.S. Amish community that Susie grew up with. In particular, the eroticism of the Dance Academy is carefully contrasted to the close-mindedness of the smaller community. And yet this liberating journey leads not to absolute freedom but to the formation of a new social structure, an actual institution that “guards” society’s dreams and fears through violence, thus exemplifying a human tendency towards cruelty: What appears as a feminist, politically conscious and artistically sensitive commune is also to be understood as a spiritual, not overtly religious cult, founded on a concept of guilt, as clearly and verbally expressed by Susie in the epilogue :

“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame. But not yours.”

The film is ambivalent in its stance towards an apparently repressive institution. Violence seemingly is the means to achieve fulfilment, a choice implied throughout the film and clearly expressed in the climactic Sabbath scene.

In Argento’s original movie this repressive, violent aspect of the Dance Academy is expressed through a declared, passionate repression against the autonomy of the young female students’ bodies and by extension against individuality. That was Argento’s main thematic concern and primal interpretation of the concept of witchcraft. In contrast, the more liberating associations attributed to the ritualistic performative act of Volk, not present in the original 1977 film, seem to resonate with Guadagnino’s conscious return to various personal themes and motifs: the eroticism, the emphasis on the sensual corporeal experience and an operatic intensity of feeling.

In contrast to the original Suspiria, the film takes up the platonic and neo-platonic tradition of love-as-pedagogy and teaching as an erotic communication; themes whose queer associations had already been explored by Guadagnino in Call Me by Your Name (2017). The development of a relationship between an older homosexual lover (erastes) and a younger “receptive” one (eromenos), a constant motif in Greek myth, is re-interpreted and echoed in Suspiria as a dual scheme of ritualistic teaching in the sharing of a common liberating, erotic experience in the bonding that develops gradually between Susie and Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton).The intense relationship between the two women is depicted as both erotic and pedagogical, exactly like the affair between Elio and Oliver in Call me by your name. Personal liberation is associated with communication and sensuality.

An inevitable elitism or contempt for those uncultivated and unable to participate in this powerful liberating dynamic like Caroline (Gala Moody,) the victim of a curse, is also evident in the narrative. Transcendence for Guadagnino, for all its existential theoretical roots, is not only related to personal self-expression but also clearly elitist in character, linked with a kind of personal sensitivity shared between kindred spirits that excludes those unable to participate in it—thus the importance of the creation of protective erotic bonds as a motif.

This elitist element becomes apparent in the ending. In the 1977 film, Susie (Jessica Harper) laughs, devoid of any feelings of guilt, in the rain, as the Institution is burnt to the ground. In 2018’s Suspiria the institution is carefully preserved. After all, “We need guilt (…) And shame”. If something is implied in Susie’s laughter in Argento’s last shot, it is that we don’t need guilt of any kind. The later film’s insistence on a notion of guilt is tied to the need for moral guidance and protection. The film even gives a positive light to what could be described as a repressive institution–even if based on apparently progressive concepts like the return to ecstatic corporeality and artistic sensitivity, political awareness and an existential focus on lived experience.

Before I turn attention to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) I would mention the importance of two key thematic elements that lie at the heart of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. As we shall see, both films share these elements in developing a theme about the balance between corporeality and transcendence. The political factor, that is, the presence of violent institutions and power structures, seem interwoven with these motifs.

The first motif is that of the ecstatic dance. Dance is seen as a political radical act because of the priority it gives to the human body (what Camus calls “the “revolt of the flesh"[5]) and because of the ideal of intense lived experience it expresses. In film we can see both the liberating Bacchic aspects of dance and its political connotations in the ecstatic dance of a street jester (Rolan Bykov) in an iconic scene in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966).The jester—whose tongue is later ripped out as a punishment for his heretic song, mirroring in a dark way Rublev’s later vow of silence—seems to embody pre-Christian ideas in a Christian world as he gives expression to secret, sometimes even menacing, yearnings through his Bacchic dance. At the same time, he is an undoubtedly modern creation, echoing once more Camus’ ideal of the artist as the perfect manifestation of the absurd. And he’s clearly a politically important figure in his existential self-expression and later persecution. The whole concept of the ecstatic dance returns in Suspiria and will find a clearly transcendental incarnation in Herzog’s film, where it will be linked more directly to spiritual yearning (“His soul is still dancing!”).

The second motif that the films share is the importance they place on dreams and dream structures. Dreams’ relation to existential and phenomenological readings of art, architecture and reality has usefully been explored by Juhanni Pallasmaa (Pallasmaa, 2008). In these two films, approaching life visually, as a dream, takes us to back to a belief in experiencing the word primarily through the senses; by extension, a return to cinema in itself