Hail, back today with another film criticism episode, this time looking at the 1999 film Bringing Out the Dead by Martin Scorsese as part of my series of episodes looking at the religious themes from Scorsese’s films.
Now, when it comes to Scorsese and religion, The Last Temptation of Christ, the subject of my last episode, is an obvious choice, as it draws primarily from the biblical narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. And when I do the next episode in these series on the 2016 film Silence, I think it’ll be obvious enough why it was included. That’s less the case with Bringing Out the Dead, which is not overtly about religious subjects and which is not among Scorsese’s best regarded films. Why not Kundun, which is overtly about religious subjects? That was my first choice actually but it’s not very available and I wanted to make sure my audience could actually watch the movies I talk about. But I also realized that Bringing Out the Dead is an interesting counterpoint to Scorsese’s more directly religious movies.
Also, I think it was misunderstood and underrated. A big part of that is having Nicolas Cage as the lead. I think he did a great job with this film but we’re talking about the guy who starred in Con-Air two years prior with one of the worst accent imitations that has ever been committed to film, on par with Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A year before that Cage was in The Rock. Two classic Hollywood action blockbusters. And I wouldn’t call Nicolas Cage an action star like, for example, Keanu Reeves; he’s more often cast as the honorable everyman who gets caught up in the actions of action heroes and has to figure out how to do the right thing. And now he’s in a Scorsese film; at this point Scorsese had done Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino and there was no question in anyone’s mind that he was a real master of film, one of the greatest of all time.
And then, I think they marketed it more around being a Nicolas Cage film than a Scorsese film. And actually it is a Nicolas Cage film: Bringing Out the Dead casts him again as an everyman working through difficult moral choices. But it’s definitely not a Nicolas Cage film in terms of the expectations of the average moviegoer, and it’s not a Scorsese film in terms of the expectations of film critics, and so it bombed at the box office and got middling reviews, although Roger Ebert, one of the early champions of The Last Temptation of Christ, loved it. Ebert also gave four stars to the 2004 film Crash, with its sympathetic portrayal of a racist and abusive cop, so maybe take his opinions with a grain of salt, but he was right about Bringing Out the Dead: it’s a brilliant film even if it isn’t among Scorsese’s most legendary creations. Also of note, the screenplay was written by Paul Schrader, who also wrote Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ.
Cage plays Frank Pierce, an ambulance driver in New York City. We meet him on one of his night shifts, staring into his tired eyes as the credits flash. “The night started out with a bang,” he says, “A gunshot to the chest on a drug deal gone bad.” A witty pun with serious subject matter, but Pierce is completely deadpan. He tells us that he was good at his job but that things have gone bad and that he hasn’t saved anyone in months.
As with many of Scorsese’s films, the City itself is one of the film’s central characters. Neither Pierce nor the city are in good shape when the film begins. Like many of the film’s characters, he’s an addict, and it’s been a long while since he’s had a fix. What’s he addicted to? Saving lives.
For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets making infinite whatever you see. Once, for a few weeks, I couldn’t feel the earth… You wonder if you’ve become immortal, as if you’ve saved your own life as well. God has passed through you…. Why deny that for a moment there, God was you. (0:33:40)
But some time back he lost a teenage girl, Rose, and hasn’t saved anyone since. He’s burned out. He begs his captain to fire him but they’re not exactly well-staffed and so the captain refuses. He hallucinates, seeing the ghosts of people he’s lost, and Rose in particular. There’s that line, “Once, for a few weeks, I couldn’t feel the earth.” That’s a common trope for expressing a feeling of elation but it takes on a more specific meaning in the work of Scorsese and Schrader. In The Last Temptation of Christ, when Jesus despairs over the death of Mary Magdalene, he takes an ax—the film’s symbol of spiritual warfare—and attacks the ground itself. The world of Bringing Out the Dead is a world in severe disrepair, a world at the edges of finitude, falling into despair and death. Frank says that when you save a life, “You walk the streets making infinite whatever you see.” Through saving lives, Frank feels that the entire world is redeemed—saved from finitude—and feels himself above the decay and suffering of the material realm. In a dream later in the film, he sees himself pulling people up through the very street itself.
I mentioned in my essay on The Last Temptation of Christ that that film can be read as a kind of cipher for interpreting Scorsese’s other movies. I think that’s especially true here. But where Jesus in The Last Temptation was a reluctant messiah, Frank is desperate to be a savior but he’s failing. He did manage to save one Mr. Burke who had suffered a cardiac arrest, but there’s the rub: that’s someone who’s time had come, but Frank brought him back and now he’s in the hospital getting flogged back to life every time his heart stops, which can be a dozen times in a single night.
In fact, all of the major characters have their addictions. Larry, the first coworker Frank rides with during the first of the three shifts covered by the film, is addicted to food. Marcus, the second? Women. Tom, the third, is hooked on violence. Noel, the unhoused person whom Frank keeps running into, just wants water. Literally the most basic human need and he has a hell of a time getting it because of his social status. Mary has a heroin addiction, although she’s in recovery when we meet her.
Like Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Frank is in a struggle against Satan. Satan, in this film, is Red Death, a heroin-based drug cocktail that had recently hit the streets. Frank exists in a universe where everyone around him has some undeniable need they’re trying to fill. Red Death is the terminus of that field of need and desire. It manifests in the material world as exactly what its name suggests: fresh corpses bleeding into the streets over drug deals. Frank is as tempted by substances as anyone; after all, he’s not getting his fix from his usual habit. That’s another thing Frank has in common with the people around him. He smokes cigarettes and drinks, sometimes on the job. At the same time, death is an undeniable reality and Frank knows that any life he does save is a temporary waiver. But that’s not something he’s willing to accept: “The god of hellfire is not a role that anyone wants to play” (0:33:50).
So who’s God then? The dispatcher. That role is played by two actors, but I’m referring more to the role itself. The dispatcher throws Frank around into these various situations where he has to adjudicate moral choices; he’s sending Frank out into these moral perils, perhaps testing him, maybe just trying to use the resources available to address the kinds of problems that are coming down the wire. The relationship is parallel to the one between Martin Scorsese the director and Nicolas Cage the actor; Scorsese is sending Cage into the fray of the film’s scenes to draw from the actor the human response to difficult moral questions. And that’s why Scorsese himself is one of the two actors playing the role of dispatcher. Scorsese is known to develop scenes by having the actors improvise; I’m not sure that happened at all in Bringing Out the Dead, but it does illustrate Scorsese’s relationship to his filmmaking: he’s using it as a way of investigating moral questions.
The other dispatcher is Queen Latifah, which is another one of the film’s brilliant moves. Remember I mentioned that one of the other ambulance drivers, Marcus, was addicted to women? He’s also an evangelical and prone to turning medical resuscitations into tent revivals, complete with faith healing. Marcus is played by Ving Rhames and I really can’t emphasize enough what a fun and brilliant performance it is. But the woman whom he really loves, the dispatcher, wants nothing to do with him. Her name is Love, in fact, and she becomes his God, the unattainable object of his religious desires.
On the third night, Frank is paired up with Tom (played by Tom Sizemore), who is completely unhinged. Fortunately, that’s the night when Frank finally gets his break. Called to the scene of a gang shooting at an apartment building, he comes to the aid of a drug dealer who had tried to escape the shooting by jumping to a lower floor, landing instead on a section of fencing, with one of the posts driven through his abdomen. It’s grim, but Frank manages to save him. Back at the hospital, the drug dealer confirms for us that Frank got what he was after, saying to Frank, “You saved my life.”
If we take the Freudian angle, Larry and Marcus are driven by Eros, governed by the pleasure principle, seeking food and sex. Tom, on the other hand, is driven by Thanatos, the death drive. Freud’s work in the early 20th century largely concerned the drive for humans to seek pleasure, which he later called Eros. The nature of Eros can be explained by recourse to evolutionary biology: food and sex are pleasurable to us because they contribute to our survival as individual organisms and as a species. Those organisms who find food and sex pleasurable and thus seek them out are more likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations. And Eros explains anger and aggression as well, at least to some degree. Organisms who are willing to fight to get their pleasure are, again, more likely to pass on their genes. But Freud saw something in his lifetime which disrupted his theory: the first World War. Freud himself was too old to enlist but all three of his male children were directly involved and Freud’s home of Vienna was not far from the front. Freud’s existing theory of libido couldn’t account for the degree of senseless destruction manifest in the War, so in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle he refined the concept of libido so that it now encompassed two distinct drives: Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos is the death drive, which exists in tension with Eros and drives us towards self-destruction and violence. The idea was not originally Freud’s; he developed it based on the work of the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein.
In any case, Tom is the living manifestation of the death drive, and Frank’s out on the beat with him after finally saving a life. But to Frank’s dismay, things are worse than ever. Now every face he sees becomes that of Rose, the teenage girl he lost. Drunk and agitated, Frank gives in to the death drive and looks for something to destroy. So what’s the problem? Frank saved a life; why didn’t he get his fix? Why isn’t he walking on air?
On the one hand, the life that Frank saved was not that of some innocent child but that of a drug dealer. We meet this drug dealer earlier in the film as a sort of noble criminal who holds himself above those who are dealing in Red Death. Regardless, Frank has seen the effect of hard drugs on his community and he’s not enthusiastic about having perpetuated that environment by saving a drug dealer’s life. In another earlier scene, Frank stops in to check on Mr. Burke, the now-vegetative patient he had saved from a heart attack who is doing his best to die despite the efforts of the hospital staff. Frank hears Mr. Burke’s voice telling him to let him die, but he’s not in a position to make that happen. That’s another part of his job that Frank doesn’t want to accept: the part where people die not because of any sort of medical failure but because it’s their time to go. Frank wants to be a savior but he’s unwilling to take on the responsibility that that entails, responsibility for life and death. He doesn’t get his fix because you can’t have one without the other.
Frank isn’t religious, at least not that we can see, but then neither was Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ exactly. The Jesus of the film never has much reverence for orthodoxy—neither did the Jesus of the Gospels, for that matter—and even builds crosses for the Romans. For him, God is not a religious construct but an objective presence in his world. Religion is unnecessary. And both Frank and Jesus adjudicate life and death, Jesus having raised Lazarus.
It’s interesting that we use the word “emergency” to refer to the kind of events to which Frank and emergency medical personnel in general respond. The top-level etymology of the word is clear enough: an emergency is something which has emerged. But what does an emergency emerge from? The answer is the Real, the Lacanian real order, that component of our experiential reality which cannot be symbolized. Shootings, heart attacks, drug overdoses… these are not things that happen, strictly speaking; rather, they are labels that we assign to events post hoc. This is not to say that such things are subjective: if someone has overdosed on drugs, the event in question is unavoidably a drug overdose, but this status must be adjudicated through the presence of various sign-relations: medical symptoms, the material presence of the drugs themselves in the person’s system and the nearby environment, reports of witnesses, and so forth. These things constitute the symbolic reality of drug overdoses.
Emergencies are ruptures of the Real into our symbolic reality. Like Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Frank is a mediator between these two worlds, engaging in his own kind of hypostatic struggle, a struggle both within himself and between the phenomenally-distinct substances of our phenomenal reality: Frank is trying to keep the Real of death from stealing people out of the symbolic reality of their lives. In the case of Mr. Burke, that relationship has become inverted: Mr. Burke is effectively dead, but the surrounding sign-relations are telling the medical staff to continue working to keep his body alive despite the suffering that incurs.
There’s a question of medical ethics at stake here. The goal of emergency health care is to save lives, but should all lives be saved? Clearly the answer is no; the case of Mr. Burke is not at all beyond the realm of possibility: many people are kept alive despite significant suffering and the absence of any possibility of future quality of life. But that’s not the difficult question; the difficult question is, who decides? That role, in situations where medicine is involved, is unavoidably filled by the medical staff: they’re the ones who shut down respirators, cease chest compressions and defibrillation, and pronounce death. But, as we tend to do with serious matters, we’ve diffused that responsibility through a collection of social and legal apparatuses. If someone lacks a do-not-recussitate order and their family insists on their being kept alive, the doctor may continue to work against their better judgement to keep the patient alive. Doctors who act contrary to the family’s wishes will likely be severely penalized. Regardless, it is the doctor or other medical personnel who are deciding to act or not to act; if the family wishes someone kept alive, it is physically possible for the doctor to refuse to act and to allow the patient to die, whatever the penalties might be.
Law itself cannot determine, in the moral sense, whether someone should live or die. It is reactive; it must be selectively implemented through human action; and it is not a natural category but rather a social reality which is created by people. We can imagine a law which serves morality but we can with equal ease imagine a law which doesn’t and in fact we have plenty of real-world examples if we need further evidence. So law is not innately moral but must rather answer to morality.
So how then do we ground our social decision-making and actions when it comes to matters of life and death? I’d argue religion, but certainly in a very different way than religion is presently being used in these contexts. First of all, I think the role that religion plays in our moral judgement in general is, or at least should be, part of the broader role played by our storytelling. Right now, when religion is used to answer a moral question, it’s often framed with a question along the lines of, “What does God say about x“, where x is a subject of moral concern: abortion, euthanasia, medical intervention and recussitation, et cetera; and then an answer, “God says it’s fine,” or “God says it’s bad so don’t do it.” But those determinations are made based on a rich and complex narrative and a dialogue that’s taken place over millennia; to reduce all of that to a single bit of information is to drain that narrative of its meaning and of its collection of symbolic tools that we can use to apply those narratives to our lives.
We tend to think of fiction as being something that’s totally separated from reality but that’s not at all the case. Bringing Out the Dead takes place in a world we recognize; it is both predicated on and reinforcing of our shared understanding of things like hospitals, ambulances, and emergency medical personnel. This is true even of fantasy movies; Lord of the Rings is predicated on and reinforcing of our shared understanding of things like rings, armies, friends, corruption, and so forth. Gandalf’s being a wizard is incidental to his being a mentor and an old person who possesses a deep and rare knowledge of the world and a great breadth of experience. Sam’s being a hobbit is incidental to his being a gardener and a loyal friend. In fact, the truly fictional part of a fiction—such as the specific narrative of Frank the ambulance driver when there is no such real person—is only a very tiny portion of its overall makeup. Much of our knowledge of the world comes to us in forms that are, in themselves, indistinguishable from fiction; thus the efficacy of fake news from Russian-backed content farms. Not that such things can’t be recognized and identified, but doing so requires the context of other narratives. Definitely don’t take this as any sort of “there’s no such thing as truth” argument; there is truth, and fiction is a part of it, but that part is qua fiction: it doesn’t stop being fiction even as fiction is part of the broader substance of our reality.
What I’m getting at is that, when it comes to moral decision making, religion should be a part of a broader conversation grounded in stories, stories drawn freely from whatever religious traditions are available and relevant, stories from films like Bringing Out the Dead and other fictional narrative media, and nonfictional stories like individual accounts, research studies, and statistical analysis. This isn’t to homogenize these categories; we get a very different kind of knowledge from a good research study than we get from a good movie.
As an example of what I’m talking about, consider a discussion on the matter of allowing someone to die if they don’t have a shot at a meaningful recovery, such as the case of Mr. Burke in Bringing Out the Dead. A religious person might come to that discussion with something like Isaiah 38:1-8. The King Hezekiah is dying and God sends the prophet Isaiah to him to tell him to put his house in order because he’s going to die. The King prays, reminding God of his years of faith and devotion, and God grants him another fifteen years of life. Now, if we take this story in itself we might be led to conclusions like, “Pray for recovery and God will heal you.” But in the context of other stories, such as stories about what doctors are and what they do, stories like research studies that demonstrate that not everyone has a possibility of a meaningful recovery, and the stories that have given us our general knowledge of the world in which such recoveries don’t take the miraculous form that they did with King Hezekiah, this is clearly a non-viable interpretation. Plus, such an interpretation entails other conclusions about God that one might be reluctant to accept; not to put too fine a point on it, but if we take the story literally, God comes out as being a real dick, fully capable of giving someone an extension on their life but not doing so until placated with reminders of past devotion. Sometimes we do think that someone is done for and turn out to be wrong, but that’s not always a possibility. After all, Hezekiah’s survival was ultimately up to God, and it is indeed the case that, while we can influence the odds of someone’s survival, we can’t guarantee it. So with that in mind, maybe we look at the story of King Hezekiah and say, “Remarkable things can happen, don’t lose hope, but that’s not a possibility for everyone, so know when to call it.”
There’s a certain degree to which this is already the case: narrative is unavoidably a fundamental part of our symbolic reality and of our human experience in general. But we tend to detach our conclusions from their underlying narrative substrates, and that abstraction can disguise the origins and limits of those conclusions.
Taking an example, in the early to mid-20th century, radiographs of corpses found that many individuals had enlarged thymus glands. At the time, an enlarged thymus was thought to be abnormal, dangerous, and linked to sudden infant death. Based on this belief, thousands of children were subjected to radiation therapy to reduce the size of the thymus from the 1920s up until the 1950s. But many of the cadavers that were examined in autopsies and found to have small thymuses were from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Factors such as stress, illness, and malnutrition can cause the thymus to be smaller, and so the whole fear of enlarged thymus glands was based on a skewed sample. The radiation treatment was not only unnecessary but also harmful, leading to thyroid cancer in the patients and other malignancies. The bare claim “enlarged thymus glands are dangerous” became detatched from the story of its origins and so this harmful practice persisted for three decades.
In such an environment, I see the role of the Satanist as, one, to uncover the narratives behind purported facts, and two, to flood the narrative space of symbolic reality with counternarratives: stories and art offering perspectives that challenge the status quo. The world is incredibly complex, becoming more so everyday, and we tend to meet that complexity with reductionist simplifications. That’s like training a large language model like the now-famous GPT on very limited data (in fact, I suspect that’s less an analogy and more a literal description, that the symbolic order is in reality a kind of LLM, but that’s a matter for another time). By complexifying our narrative reality we train ourselves, so to speak, to meet the increasing complexity of the world we live in.
Works Cited
- Scorsese, M. (Director). (1988). The last temptation of Christ [film]. Universal Pictures; Cineplex Odeon Films; Testament Productions.
- Scorsese, M. (Director). (1999). Bringing out the dead [film]. Touchstone Pictures; De Fina-Cappa; Paramount.