“Self-revelation is annihilation of the self,” muses Kathleen Conklin, Lili Taylor’s philosophy student-turned-bloodsucker in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995), a visceral yet high-minded vampire film where metaphysical pronouncements flow as freely as blood. Here, the fluid runs inky black, not red, with Ken Kelsch’s refined black-and-white cinematography (evoking Gordon Willis’s Manhattan, 1979) giving the film an elegance that belies the harrowing nature of Kathleen’s violent descent into murderous depravity and grandiose existentialism. Although a minimalist work as far as its production value goes, with a handful of austere sets and a brisk 82-minute runtime, The Addiction overflows with ideas. It uses the vampire genre to evoke the AIDS crisis and the heroin epidemic of the time, as well as the horrors of the Holocaust and Vietnam, and much more. Intellectually and aesthetically audacious, the film exemplifies the creative independence that New York independent filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Lizzie Borden, and Ferrara had in the early 1990s. The Addiction was distributed by the maverick October Films just a few years before the company, named for the Russian Revolution, was bought by Barry Diller’s vampiric conglomerate, Universal, and became USA Films. (Oddly, just a month before The Addiction, October released Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, another low-budget NY-based black-and-white vampire film.)
A fascinating tension between the competing aims of its creators’ energizes The Addiction, complicating its seemingly hopeful ending. For director Ferrara, the vampire genre is a metaphor for his own struggles with heroin and the film is a bracing study in nihilism. Bluntly intercutting harrowing newsreel footage of the mass graves of the concentration camps, and the dead women and children of the My Lai massacres, the film suggests “we are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners,” or more colorfully, “the entire world’s a graveyard and we’re predators picking at the bones.” For screenwriter Nicholas St. John, a devout Catholic whose earlier collaborations with Ferrara include The Driller Killer (1979), Ms. 45 (1981) and the pornographic film 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976), religion offers hope, and the acceptance of Jesus offers the undead a road to be reborn.
The film is perhaps most cogent, and sharply funny, as a satire of academia, presenting the hermetic and all-consuming world of post-graduate work as draining and interminable as the vampire’s endless existence. For one group, the graveyard shift is in the library, for the other, it is in the alleyways and deserted streets of Greenwich Village. This is the rare vampire film where the protagonist’s thesis defense is one of its key plot points, and Kathleen earns her doctorate by spouting the same grandiose language that, in other scenes, marks her growing possession and insanity. A champagne reception to celebrate her academic accomplishment becomes the site of a wonderfully spectacular bloodbath—surely cathartic for the NYU students who ventured to the Angelika to catch the film when it came out
While The Addiction is one of Ferrara’s finest directorial achievements, the true driving force of the film is the versatile and mesmerizing Lili Taylor, whose quiet intensity always carried deep inner turmoil below a deceptively serene exterior. Taylor also powerfully conveyed different forms of possession in two of her key ‘90s films: Household Saints (1993) and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). In The Addiction, Kathleen’s emergence as a fully confident black-wardrobed, sunglass-sporting downtown woman who can annihilate any man she encounters–including Christopher Walken’s outrageously jaded and pompous vampire–is at once hilarious and chilling. Although the geographical distance she travels in the film is miniscule–just a few blocks around Washington Square Park–her existential journey is monumental. It is depicted with subversive ferocity, making it a perfect fit for Anthology Film Archives’s provocative and aptly wide-ranging series “Wandering Women.”
The Addiction screens tonight, February 6, and on February 8, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “Wandering Women.”
