Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" tanked in theaters weeks ago, so why am I talking about it now?
First, because this month Herzog's southern tall tale will finally receive its deserved audience on the DVD cult circuit.
Second, because the Oscar nomination committee passed up another opportunity to recognize one of the best living directors. Sure, "Bad Lieutenant" isn't a masterpiece, but the Academy has set a precedent for awarding superlative directors for less-than-their-best movies. "Bad Lieutenant" did not receive one nomination. Why did this happen?
To admit Herzog's "weirdness" into the stylistic pantheon, to confront his unique aesthetics in a form more potent than "nature documentary," would necessitate a violent overhaul of the environment that breeds "Avatar."
It would be like Zizek's winning the presidency of Slovenia. How could we permit big-budget infantile ruminations about colonization and the mathematical sublime next to low budget poetry that pauses to think between breaths?
The lie is that "Avatar" appeals to a broader fan base, that it is entirely more accessible. I'd like to see James Cameron screen "Avatar" in the Congo or the Middle East.
Herzog has actually escorted his films to the ends of the earth and learned from audience reactions there. Cameron escaped into his own world of hyper-realistic savages.
Cameron's trick is to make his commentary obvious enough that calling computer generated blue people "savages" implicates the enunciator in a vague hate crime. This patronizing mythicization settles a social score by proxy: a paradoxical escapist "art" as praxis. American cinema loves portraying the worst of its country. "America" produced "The Wild Bunch" and "Taxi Driver" and "American Beauty"! Cameron's $280 million pretention is that this touching self-awareness is a marketable phenomenon, especially when it culminates in an impossibly happy ending.
What he has really done is create another layer between the critical faculties and the "issue at hand." Don't take offense with American imperialism.
Don't bother to evaluate the truth values behind these touchy claims. Take offense with his movie! All that's at stake is whether Cameron was "right" or "wrong." And smile at the flexibility of a market that masks the fruitlessness of its self-critiques beneath the Hollywood glam. Watch "Avatar" and feel vaguely guilty about being... what? Western?!
Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant" is a not-so-subtle parody of our self-destructive identification with the underdog. Nick Cage is a very bad lieutenant. He brilliantly constructs a stereotype of dirty-cop, fascist cowboy, cynical loose-cannon, which Americans invoke when a "higher justice" demands extermination. (This schizoid sense of justice is one of the top-five favorite subjects of Hollywood films.) Nick Cage plays an unpolished Dirty Harry, a transparently seductive dark-side of an individual in the justice system overstepping his system's bounds.
"Bad Lieutenant" demonstrates how Law is not a regulation of desires but a desire in itself. The clean-cut, by-the-rules masochistic cop is one side of this equation. Watching "Bad Lieutenant" reminds us of the other.
We begin to identify with the unleashed sadism of law enforcement in the movies because we too want to believe that America is hopelessly corrupt and that bureaucracy is powerless to stop it.
We want to punish and be disciplined, but not by Kafka's police. We want to be disciplined by "Bad Lieutenant."
To sum up: "Avatar" is about how Americans want to be good and "Bad Lieutenant' is about how Americans want to be bad.
It amuses me that the public has been so obsessed by what the production of the former fantasy has cost—monetarily, of course.