Here is a lousy quote from the opening scene in Gone with the Wind:

There is a tendency in the state of Texas, and in southern literature, to imagine and fantasize about the 'Old South' as the last gasp of feudalism, feudal honor, feudal obligation, and its accompanying virtues and vices. This tendency credits the Old South with retaining special vestiges of nobility, and a connection between the earth and the people on it.

Let's try to clarify when and where feudalism existed. It was a form of politics, or social organization, that predominated in some parts of Europe, especially England, during the medieval period. It began falling to pieces in the Early Modern period, beginning with the Tudor monarchy; that is to say , it began falling apart under Henry VII. Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, used parliamentary process to destroy the feudal lords that put his ancestors on the throne in 1066; the destruction culminated in the English Civil War, which diminished not only the feudal lords, but the monarchy as well. 

During this same time period in Early Modern England, feudal lords began severing their relationships with their serfs and vassals; the lords sought to shift away from subsistence farming so as to enter the English wool industry and conduct lucrative trade with Europe. The movement to kick the serfs off the manor and to introduce shepherding was known as the 'enclosure' movement. While it temporarily solved some debt and financial problems for the English nobility, it ultimately created a wealthy merchant class that could maximize its own benefits from European trade. Henry VII and his successors saw the new professional bourgeoisie class as a source of power that would allow them to confront their dangerous nobles. 

So the feudal system in England began collapsing in the mid 16th century, just prior to the establishment of the first English colonies in America. 

Let's look at the South. Remember, Southern legends often associate the Old South with the feudalism of Old England.

Two facts about the Southern economy undermine the notion that it was a feudal system:

First, the dominant economic activity of the south was capitalist, and it came in two forms. First, cotton dominated the economic landscape. Cotton tended to exhaust the soil, and required the opening of new lands to continue its growth. Most of this cotton was sold to Great Britain, where it was processed into cloth. Southern planters sold the remainder to northern industrial states like New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The original southern lands--those that rested along the Atlantic, like the Carolinas and Georgia, were exhausted after generations of growing tobacco and cotton. So these states, especially after the banning of the international slave trade in 1808, specialized in breeding and exporting slaves to cotton plantations opening in Texas and in the territory belonging to the Louisiana purchase.

Now--what do these two facts tell us? Well, first, they bear no serious relationship to feudalism. In feudalism, both lord and peasant were stuck to the land, and as the land went, so they went. Land ownership was primarily a status symbol and a useful political lever; lords and peasant were judged on their ability to maintain a calm sense of order and habit despite raids, violence, and encroaching rivals. Though lands changed hands, this was viewed as ignoble, and lesser than maintaining custom and holding on to what one already had.

In the Southern United States, on the other hand, Westward expansion allowed the depletion and shuffling off of old soil, and old obligations for new frontiers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The South was not feudal in character. Though feudalism, and more specifically, classical notions of liberty, served as a productive intellectual scaffolding for the processes that occurred on any given plantation. So did traditional morality as found in the Bible. Southerners also used a sort 'scientism' to argue for the 'naturalness' of slavery due to the perceived inferiority of people of African descent. Through Southern society looked conservative and later, after the war, became conservative, it was in fact fairly radical form of agricultural capitalism. No one had ever quite used up soil and labor the way the South did in the years leading up to the civil war. Never before had there been such a worldwide demand for cotton, which we must remember is an inedible agricultural product. Southern planters used the land to grow a product that held no nutritional value. They relied on international trade to maintain their lifestyles, and to help feed their families, their workers, and their slaves. There was nothing feudal about it. The planters were bourgeois, callous, and rich.

By some accounts, when one assesses capital in the United States in 1860, slaves accounted for more wealth than all the railroads and all the manufacturing combined. Southern states viewed the Republicans as a dual threat, both to their wealth and their way of life. Republican candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, did not even appear on state ballots in many Southern states. When Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, and virtually all of the northern states, he only obtained a plurality of the popular vote, and not a majority. Southern states were shocked and outraged, though they had astutely avoided any displays of outrage when the mere plurality favored the South in 1844, 1848, and 1856 presidential elections. 

Now, I do not mean to denigrate the south simply to raise up the northern states as a collection of model states. States both north and south refused women the right to vote. Northern states treated untrained immigrant labor as expendable. Since northern manufacturing could not compete with European manufacturing, the northern industrialists demanded tariff protections to allow them to capture the supply chain to Midwest farmers and Southern planters. 

But as Barrington Moore points out in his classic treatise, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), the North did see a short-lived union between the interests of Northern industrialists and small farmers. What allowed this alliance? In part, it was the rapid formation of the Republican party, and the party's desperate attempt to pull together disparate elements of society to win elections that would swing the balance of power towards the creation of government-sponsored infrastructures like better roads, new cut canals, and continental railroads. 

The broader Republican campaign in 1860 made the alliance between small farmers and northern industrialists quite clear: "Vote yourself a farm--vote yourself a tariff."

Tariffs and hard scrabble farms along the Ohio River are not especially romantic. But they are a superior part of the American memory to the disturbing nostalgia of some Americans for a feudal Southern society that never existed. 

Ever since Basil Liddel Hart's glowing statements on T.E. Lawrence strategic genius, Lawrence's reputation has centered on his military accomplishments, rather than his achievements in art. This is a mistake. 

Orde Wingate despised Lawrence's record as a war-leader, possibly because Wingate recognized something of his own failings in Lawrence. But Wingate also felt that Lawrence abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too much the desert warrior. There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his supply line and keeping his troops on the march. Lawrence fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence's campaigns are often held up as a positive example of irregular warfare, and as a better way of fighting than what soldiers faced in the trenches of the First World War. Lawrence himself was not so sure that he was actually preserving life, or winning battles more efficiently. The numbers, in fact, indicate that he lost men at a higher rate than most British units that faced action on the Western front. This is not surprising. State control and industrial efficiency seems to reduce  casualties, either because men lose their willingness to die as a mere part of a 'machine' rather than as an individual warrior, or else because industrial society provides soldiers with better access to medicine and stable rations. State control also increases the number of prisoners taken, and reduces the number of prisoners slaughtered. 

British methods of warfare and 'state control' might outright reduce the 'proportion' of people who die violently. Lawrence noticed this, which explains why he heaps praise upon Allenby above and beyond any other soldier in the First World War, and why he denigrates Allenby's rival commanders not as butchers, but as unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud. 

So why does Lawrence seem attracted to desert warfare? His writings indicate that he appreciated the straightforward human practicality of 'desert' warfare. Yes, the violence in the desert was terrible, but it was coupled with a familiarity, a spirit of adventure, and a sense of honor that Lawrence never felt while working for the British military in Cairo prior to his desert campaigns. 

The Arab 'irregulars' that fought beside Lawrence risked hearth and home in an immediate way. More than one of Lawrence's fighters, in fact, saw their homes destroyed by the Turks in retaliation for joining with the Arab revolt. More than one Arab also saw his village destroyed, and his family annihilated, during the panicked Turkish retreats from Palestine and western Jordan. And so the Arabs often risked not only their lives, but their families and tribes to fight the Turks--and sometimes each other. The Arab revolt involved a type of warfare that was less organized in the sense of mass bureaucracy and written protocol, and yet no less sophisticated in its nuance and complexity. 

And so Lawrence wrestles with the following, implicit idea throughout Seven Pillars of Wisdom: He senses that the Arab way of war is more virtuous, honorable, and personally fulfilling than the sort of violence that destroyed the lives of his friends and brothers along the European Western Front. But given that Lawrence knows the superiority of British warfare for battlefield outcomes (Lawrence always suspects the British will emerge triumphant), is it morally acceptable for him to dabble in Arab nationalism and 'desert warfare'? Lawrence believes that Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia rightfully belong to the Arabs--but he is a student of history, and knows that even as he props up a certain brand of Arab nationalism, he is setting in motion a thousand difficulties for hundreds of extant ethnic and religious groups living in the same region.

Throughout Seven Pillars Lawrence examines his conscience, and recognizes that ultimately he has fought this war to satisfy his own peculiar appetite for violence, warfare, and chivalry. Many of his Arab friends admire him for it, but he considers himself a sham. The Arab irregulars, in Lawrence's eyes, live with the virtues of the desert; but he, their leader, merely wears the costume--he possesses the heart, but not the mind.

The Arabs who followed Lawrence died at tremendous rates--nearly sixty of Lawrence's two-hundred personal bodyguards perished within a year. Their villages burned. Their children and wives lived unprotected, and hungry. 

The European powers, on the other hand, featured stronger, centralized state governments compared with Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine. Even on the Western and Eastern fronts, preserved a macabre sense of decorum. Yes, terrible acts took place in the First World War--murder, rape, pillaging, poison gas and vicious trench fighting. But even then, the war in Europe obeyed strange rules: the taking of prisoners, the feeding of troops, and the separation between the war-front and the home-front. 

I conclude this letter with a couple of quotes from General Archibald Wavell, a man who fought alongside Lawrence in the Palestine campaign. 

 That is to say, Lawrence was too aware of who he was, and who he was not. He was British, and a bastard-born, and not of Arabia. His education positively dripped with the soaking benefits wrought from state-sanctioned security and comfort. But he fought alongside his friends as though he were an Arab prince. He never forgave himself. He loathed the Turks, and often justified his actions in the war as a chance to destroy something he loathed. In this light, Wavell viewed Lawrence as "a Hamlet who had slain his uncle neatly and efficiently at the beginning of Act II, and spent the remainder of the play in repenting his act and writing a long explanation of it to Horatio." (Wavell The Good Soldier, 1948, 59-61).

I think most people would say 'no.' Just like most people would refuse to follow Lawrence into Syria in 1911, before the war, much less in 1916, when the Arab revolt faced destruction along the shores of the Red Sea. But the people in our lives almost always say 'no.' That is what makes leadership, and art, and astonishing success so very rare. People say 'no,' because they are weak, and saying 'no' is easy.

And yet, people said 'yes' to making 'Lawrence of Arabia.' Perhaps it was perhaps, the sort of British thing to do, as when Lionel de Rothschild loaned Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the money to purchase the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal.

To return to Roger Ebert:

The Wind Rises is the final film from retiring Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. It is one of the most cynical films I have ever seen. It's cynicism runs deeper than a typical satire or tragedy, for it delves into the plausible human motivations behind inspiration, and darkly frowns at the cost of creative work.

Though rated only PG-13, the film works in the realm of dreams, and bears comparison to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Many of the same desires thrust through the subconsciousness of the characters of Lynch and Miyazaki: desire, envy, lust, jealousy, aggression, and resentment. Unlike in Mulholland Drive, Miyazaki's hero, Jiro Horikoshi walks out of his own dreams and back to his work desk, where he shakes off the thick, unsweetened syrup of subconscious imagery, and faces the cost of bringing his dreams closer to reality. 

And what, exactly, are those dreams? Jiro wants to build airplanes. He would love to fly them, as well, but his terrible nearsightedness prevents this. He finds his inspiration in the sophisticated, noble-born Italian aircraft designer, Giavonni Caproni. Caproni intrudes on Jiro's dreams, and together they explore the air and fly among the clouds, surrounded by women and friends, fame and fortune. 

Now, there is never any doubt in Jiro's mind that the planes he builds will be used for war. His friends (and Caproni) offer a variety of excuses for why this is okay. Japan must catch up with Europe. America will bully Japan if she lacks a strong military. Prestige is on the line. But most importantly to Jiro and his friends, military contracts offers the best opportunity to design aircraft. 

Even before the outbreak of war, Jiro sees that the world is full of pain and suffering. Earthquakes, roaring like a mythic beast, break the backs of Japan's ancient cities. When the ground stops shaking, fire belches across the landscape, and destroys all in its path as surely as if humans had torched the landscape. The desperate rural poor make their ways to the city, but can find no work; children are starving to death. It does not seem like it can get any worse. Jiro and his friends do not want to build weapons--no, they want to build planes. But in a world of earthquakes, firestorms, urban poverty and fear, adding another war-machine does not make much of a difference. 

Jiro begins to work on a new fighter plane. For aircraft designers, fighter planes represent the luxury standard. Fighter planes must fly higher, faster, and lighter than any other aircraft. The air-frame must handle intense stress at it soars through the clouds, and ride the extreme limits of aeronautical mechanics. 

Long hours at work compel Jiro to sacrifice the health of his young wife, a tuberculosis patient who gives herself completely to his dreams. His wife becomes a fire by which he can warm his hands, but that he knows she will soon go out. The family, for Jiro, provides no hope for the future, but instead acts a crutch for the present, allowing him to continue his work without pause. With no investment in the future, Jiro shows little interest in the ultimate outcome of his work. His plane must fly. Incidentally, he predicts that 'Japan will blow up.' And indeed, by the end of the film, it does. Not one of his planes survives the war. Many pilots die in the seats of his aircraft. But he got to build his plane. He got to dream with Caproni. 

The plot of Miyazaki's film rebels against the liberal orthodoxy of 'good taste.' It tells a tale of creativity, inspiration, and sacrifice, all of which culminates in a nihilistic fusillade. Jiro isn't just building any warplane--he's building the Japanese Zero, an aircraft at the forefront of one of the most aggressive, brutal campaigns of the twentieth century. The Zero allowed Japan to initiate the war with the United States at Pearl Harbor, but it did not allow them to win it. The industrial might of the United States eventually crushes Japan, and the last fully-imagined planes Jiro sees are American bombers, not Japanese fighters.

Advanced scientific education, rather than leading Jiro towards a world-improving wisdom, leads him into a narrow, creative fever. When he reaches the end of the film, his planes are wrecked, but his dreams remain. His wife, long dead, waves to him in the distance. Caproni, his idol, asks him if it was worth it. The ground smokes, blackened from war. The skies, however, remain blue with possibilities. 

For all that, the movie's tone never wallows in self-pity or doubt. The colors never darken for more than a few moments. By and large, people are nice to each other. The story is told exclusively through Jiro's eyes, and he seems to fight off the darkness, even as it utterly pervades his life. He never gives in to despair. 

The Wind Rises celebrates creativity and genius. But it acknowledges its costs. Miyazaki is, by critical acclaim, a creative genius. Does he believe he has found a private solution to the moral tensions he examines in his story of Japanese aircraft designers? It is impossible to say. But if he has, he does not reveal it. 

Miyazki has chosen to wave farewell with a film of psychological plausibility and deep cynicism. 

In this space, I do not think I have ever talked about film. It is something I study and write about privately, but there seems little use in placing it on display. I'm not interested in starting up anymore dialogue about movies. But I want to make an exception to that habit for at least one post, because Bad Lieutenant, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans  are two films deal especially well with issues that I enjoy examining.

Bad Lieutenant, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans feature outstanding performances from Harvey Keitel and Nicholas Cage. It's not the sort of work that everyone can appreciate. Americans rarely suffer enough to understand what they are watching in these films. But in both cases, what is happening is great and terrible and rude, and needs a little more recording---out of respect, I suppose. 

Glancing around the internet, the critical writing on these two films seems to me to be inadequate in its attempts to describe what occurs on the screen. Occasionally, someone like Roger Ebert might mention that the two films are distinctly different. But then he's forced to spend so much time describing the plot that he does not have the opportunity to cut into the body and look out the the eyes of skull. Ebert often waited to do this until a third or fourth viewing, which is something I do not think he got to do with these two pictures.

Both Bad Lieutenant and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans tell the story of bad cops. Not incompetent cops, but evil cops--agents of the state that enforce rules arbitrarily, and with little regard for the purported values or rights of the citizens whom they are sworn to protect.  Both films feature outstanding, risk-taking performances from their lead actors, Harvey Keitel and Nicholas Cage. Unlike most films, these movies neither sensationalize nor glamorize drug use. The two bad cops are addicts. They abuse their authority and harass and steal from those who stumble into their way. They gamble recklessly (though not unreasonably) and marvel at the turns of fortune. They cringe, stumble, and suffer their way through each night and day without rest, and with even less hope. These are not typical protagonists. They are not anti-heroes, either. They differ from what's found in spaghetti Westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and gangster films like Goodfellas. These protagonists differ, because they are not cool. They know they are not going to win, but they do not have the courage to lose. In the context of modern can't-lose America, this makes their journey art, rather than popular fantasy. They stand as absolute challenges to America's identity as a protestant, hard-working, Christian nation.

BAD LIEUTENANT 

A lot of critics cite Bad Lieutenant as existing in a harsher world than Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But this depends entirely on one's willingness to embrace the film-maker's vision of morality. The Herzog film, in fact, exists in a more realistic and less compassionate world than the Ferrara film, even if Herzog smiles more along the way. 

Crucially, Ferrara never explains why his Lieutenant has gone bad. We never learn the circumstances surrounding his downfall, or the proximate causes of his behavior. When did he begin using drugs? When did he lose his faith? When did he emotionally abandon his family? None of this matters. Ferrara is not interested in social explanations. The film differs from naturalism, for it makes no attempt to show a sequence of consequences. There is not really much of a plot, but instead a series of hellish, rotating scenes, each one compiling the misery of a man soaked with evil, and painfully aware of it.  

Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant operates in a medieval moral universe. Men fall; men must blame themselves for their fall, and only through the miracle of Jesus can human-beings find hope and salvation. In the film, miracles abound. The Dodger's lose to the Mets in a seven game series after going up 3-0 over the first three games--an historical impossibility, as no team in the major sports has ever lost a best-of-four series after sweeping the first three games. Christ appears (physically appears) throughout the film in various icons, until he wordlessly steps before the lieutenant, and allows him to unleash his guilt. When the image of Christ dissolves, the lieutenant finds himself at the feet of the woman that will guide him to another pair of sinners--two young men that violently raped a young nun and desecrated a Church. He wants to kill the two young men--he wants blood revenge, an eye for eye. Why? For the sake of some bloody concept of justice wrapped in fear and anger. He wants revenge for the nun who was raped. Doesn't everyone want revenge? And won't God demand revenge on him for all the crimes he has committed? But the nun does not want revenge. She has insisted that the boys go free. And so instead the lieutenant gives the two rapists $50,000 in drug money and puts them on a bus out of the city. He shows mercy: foolish, helpless and theologically essential Christian mercy. By abiding in Christian forgiveness, the lieutenant proves his faith, even if his mind is still filled with dread and doubt. Finally, the lieutenant is killed immediately after sending the two boys out of the city; his death immediately follows his one act of penance, and thus ensures his salvation. 

It is possibly the most Catholic film ever made. It is certainly the film most in tune with Roman iconography; this is the world of blood spattered martyrs, redeemed through suffering. It is a movie that depicts medieval, European Catholicism, rather than the slushy, politically democratic Catholicism we typically find in America.

Now, if one believes in Christ, the film's ending should in fact come across as optimistic--redemption achieved! God forgives! Miracles abound. But if you do not believe in the existence of God, then the ending steps into yawning, delusional nihilism; if the viewer is brave enough, the triumph of delusion is so supreme as to achieve a high station in artistic achievement, even if it's an achievement incomprehensible to most passerbyers--if you do not like this movie, do not worry. Most people cannot understand Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear either. 

PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is an entirely different experience. It features an intricate (though inessential) plot. The tone, as Roger Ebert pointed out, is comic, rather than tragic. The stakes for the lieutenant's soul are less clearly definable, but still quite high. Herzog, as is his custom, is more interested in unpacking the light-headed irrational foibles of man. It's Nietzsche with a camera, albeit with a more sexually mature mind. 

Interestingly, Ebert calls Herzog more forgiving than Ferrara. But it is forgiveness on a totally different scale. Herzog's forgiveness stems from nature, and falls like the rain or blows like a breeze--it comes from nature, and is not miraculous in the slightest. If Herzog laughs at his characters, it is because there is little point in haranguing them for their evils. God's not going to damn them, or forgive them. Given their finite existence, we might as well not take them too seriously, and laugh for their sake as well as our own.

Ferrara, in his film, traces the crippled the life of a lonely man, and then saves that man's soul just before he destroy's the body. Herzog damns the entire system--all of America--but merrily laughs and marvels at his protagonist's wild and unorthodox courage.  Ferrara's lieutenant lives in a medieval nightmare; Herzog's lieutenant lives the American dream, but he lives with the constant fear of waking up.

The clues begin early on. The lieutenant is back on the job after partially recovering from a back injury. He requires a life-long prescription to Vicodin, but what of that? Everyone takes something. Before long, the Vicodin isn't enough, and so the lieutenant starts abusing harder drugs that he steals from the yuppies and street thugs wandering around New Orleans. Sustained with chemicals, the lieutenant returns to work just in time to take a lead role in investigating a mass homicide. The mass homicide is a top priority, his captain notes, which means that overtime pay is authorized. If you're a cop, mass homicide pays handsomely. The sweet smell of monied bureaucracy thus initially appears at a systematic level--the entire force financially benefits from criminal bloodshed. In Herzog's own words, the lieutenant exists "in the bliss of evil." 

After that, a lot of plot happens. All of it is especially well portrayed. There's a bit about the lieutenant's alcoholic dad finally going sober, and another bit about the lieutenant's prostitute girlfriend breaking free from the world's oldest profession (but only after the lieutenant makes enough money to support her). The part about the iguanas is pretty cool, and it takes place in the context of a wild and reckless investigation ... Tracking the plot of this movie is like counting the turns on a roller coaster: yes, you can do it, but it's better just to enjoy the ride. The more important aspects of the film are the characters who are on the ride with you, and the environment through which the tracks travel.

Throughout the film, Herzog's lieutenant seems certain to die violently. He has, at one point, at least three different groups trying to destroy his life. The more obvious the danger, the more risks he takes. But the risks prove far more calculating than one might suspect. Unlike Ferrara's lieutenant, Herzog's clearly knows how to conduct police work, and how to manipulate the system as precisely as possible, all as a prelude to victories in family and fortune. The lieutenant straddles the line between rule-breaking and rule-enforcing, and this proves useful to all of the other characters in the film. And so he lives. Indeed, we all rely on these people each and everyday. We admire (and use) the people that rebel against the system, even as we ruthlessly enforce those rules that seem to us especially just and pertinent. 

After two hours of plot, the police force promotes the lieutenant to captain; the band plays 'God Bless America.' The captain leaves the ceremony with his prostitute-turned-homemaker wife, and drops her off their new, well-manicured suburban home. God bless America, indeed. The lieutenant peered deep into the depths, found a way to make those depths work for him, and came out the other side with a hot wife and an extra bar of rank. But throughout, the lieutenant is thoroughly human, and thoroughly American. He is also thoroughly despicable.

Throughout the film, nature nibbles at the weak buttresses of civilization. The first shots of the film are filled with the ravaging, fast-rising waters of Katrina, where Cage's lieutenant dabbles with heroics, but risks more than he intends. In the middle of the film, the lieutenant approaches the scene of an auto accident--a truck has turned over after striking an alligator that wandered onto an access road. The last shots of the film take place in the Aquarium of the Americas. Here, the water is controlled--carefully kept in vast glass containers holding thousands of predatory sharks. In America, we have nature firmly under control, don't we? Nature also attacks the home of the lieutenant's father, who resides in a rotting plantation-style home; the image wordlessly evokes the memory of Southern slavery, and the 'civilization' that allowed for the brutal, race-based enslavement of nearly half its population. As a child, the lieutenant tells us that he found silver spoons buried in the yard; he and his prostitute girlfriend smile at the idea, and fondly wonder at the miracle of silver spoons.  

Nature and desire suggest that our moral structures offer little protection in times of need. When Katrina hits, God and government disappear. Herzog's film dances with this level of moral hurt in its knees; it might not be graceful, but the effort is astonishing and tremendous. A lot of the credit must go to the screenwriter, William Finkelstein, who appears in the film as a gangster that wants 'more than his share.' 

When writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roger Ebert noted that most movies "are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic." 2001, in Roger's estimation, transcended this approach and attempted to fulfill a basic human need for intelligence. The Bad Lieutenant films are not transcendent, but they are also not strict servants of human desire. They push us to explore suffering, and challenge the moral conventions of our time. Plato, perhaps the harshest dramatic critic in the history of thought, would have despised these films for subverting the moral structure of established institutions--but Plato would have loved the way a bad lieutenant can make you think!