Abel Ferrara
The Addiction

"Vampires are lucky, they feed on the beings they find. We, on the other hand, devour ourselves. We must eat our legs to find the strength to walk. We must arrive to be able to leave. We must suck ourselves dry. We must devour ourselves until there’s nothing left but hunger. We give, give, and give like madmen, I don’t think this makes sense, it means nothing... Jesus said seventy times seven. No one will ever understand why, why did you do it? We already forgot you the following morning. What a pity." From The Bad Lieutenant, three years earlier.

Abel Ferrara, the director who has sung about abominations, crimes, and degenerations, about rapes and revenge, serial killers with an electric drill, gangsters, corrupt and depraved cops, vampires, theology, Catholicism.

Lately, thanks to its presence in the Amazon Prime catalog, I have watched and rewatched several times this film by the Ferrara - Nicholas St. John duo (for those who don't know, his longtime screenwriter and partner for nearly two decades, but who refused to write the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant due to too many implications and the radical nature of the Ferrara idea). I couldn't say which between The Addiction, The Bad Lieutenant, and The Funeral I have seen more over the past decade. Certainly, these are three films that are part of the structure of my love for cinema.

"For us, blood is not a special effect, but something that reflects the reality of the world. Terrible things happen in the world and we do not try to hide it. But it's not about spectacle. What matters is that someone gets hurt. It becomes a religious problem." Nicholas St. John

The Addiction, along with The Funeral (Fratelli), but perhaps in an even more complex way than the latter (which I still consider the greatest Ferrara masterpiece, besides being firmly in my top 10 of all time), represents for me the ultimate and deepest reflection/investigation of Evil throughout History and in human nature ever staged. In this film, there is such a collection of reflections and moral, anthropological, and religious/transcendent implications that it’s incredible for a work of only 82 minutes.

The story of the New York vampires is the most fitting metaphor for the dependence, sin and, ultimately, the evil itself that permeates humanity over the millennia.

Since school days, in fact, we are used to being told that History, so as not to be repeated, must teach, be learned, studied. But the lesson from Ferrara and St. John is that this is nothing more than an illusion, a reassuring, propagandistic view of events. Just as, on the other hand, pure propaganda is the philosophy itself.

That Time is not - as many, too many, want to believe - the cure or the way for the forgiveness of past faults. A cleansing, a convenient removal, a way of washing the blood that has been spilled. As if responsibility was not collective but only of a few individuals. In this lies often the emblematic and physiological search for a scapegoat.

While instead everything remains within us, in our history and essence.

The film talks about Determinism (consequently, the absence of free will), and, as always in the films of this Italian-American duo, about a quest for redemption, a conversion that shows the culmination in a journey of awareness of the existence of Evil and of one's own sins.

The film makes extensive use of voice-over and quotes from great philosophers and writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it does so critically, not as a mere intellectual exhibition, to shield itself behind a banal cultural knowledge.

Thus Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Feuerbach, Borroughs, are considered - and at times even desecrated - to discuss the film's vision, to articulate theses, not as an exercise for its own sake.

The Addiction is a dig into the soul, a rip in the mind. Compared to The Funeral, it still has a light at the end, a filter of hope, which is offered to the protagonist (Lili Taylor, an actress who deserved more in her career, also unforgettable in Arizona Dream and Six Feet Under), as she, unlike the Tempio brothers, is destined for the salvation of the soul at the moment of death.

"Demons suffer in hell"

A masterpiece. And yes, it’s not an exaggeration or an overused term, in this case.