Zoë Lund and the Dialectical Method of Bad Lieutenant

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As an undergraduate in the 1980s I took a class on Ernest Hemingway taught by poet Donald Junkins.  Late in the semester, Junkins invited a bunch of us over to his house to watch a Hemingway documentary. The video opened with some stock footage of Hemingway: There he was aboard a deep-sea fishing vessel; here alongside a trophy animal; there with a bottle of booze; here with a woman, and so forth. The narrator commenced the video with a bravura the producers must have imagined fitting for the masculine writer. “Hemingway,” he announced, “Fighter. Hunter. Fisherman. Drinker. Lover.” I must admit, it sounded promising to me at the time. But from the back of the room Junkins boomed out, punching the words, “How about writer? How about that?” I remember this keenly because it introduced me to something I’ve thought about ever since, that is, the ways in which artists are portrayed after death, when they’re helpless to counter the narratives of their personal lives, their foibles, their private moments. Nowadays, I cringe when someone tells me about how this dead writer behaved badly, or how that late director did x, y, and z scandalous things. I’ll answer, “Yeah . . . but, like, what about the book he wrote?”

It’s not a new story, and of course there’s much of interest in a personal biography outside an artist’s work. There’s also great value in examining the intersection of work and private life. But a danger arises when personal narratives about artists threaten to subsume the work, when commentators favor titillating copy over engagement with the art.

It definitely happens with Hemingway, still today, and it does, too, with the late Zoë Lund, screenwriter. 

Let me say something at the outset. Yes, it’s true, Zoë Lund embraced heroin. You can hardly read a piece about her that doesn’t mention it, nor one that doesn’t reference her sexiness, her lithe form, or her New York hipness, for that matter. Of course, the European press does a better job with her, as does former husband Robert Lund, who thankfully foregrounds Zoë’s copious artistic production on his website. But much of the material on Zoë Lund still suffers from a fascination with her drug use and her good looks. So, yes, I understand that Zoë Lund used heroin, and even that its effects have in certain ways shaped her art. But the full horizon of her intellectual and artistic capabilities has little to do with heroin use. On the contrary, Lund was always an intellectual, an aesthete, an artist, heroin user or not. She was, in fact, a fantastic writer, a fact that gets lost in treatments of her work more often than not. In a reconsideration of her most celebrated work, then, maybe we can examine Zoë Lund, the writer, as Donald Junkins would have us do. 

Lund is best known for the screenplay of Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film she co-wrote with director Abel Ferrara. The film is legendary in crime and cult movie circles, and equally celebrated amongst art film adherents. Should anyone need a thumbnail synopsis, the story goes like this: A nun has been raped, and a New York City cop (Harvey Keitel) tries to solve the case, more for the reward money than anything else. He goes about the entire film drugging, drinking, gambling, and stealing his way further into trouble. But like the saintly nun who forgives her rapists, the Lieutenant undergoes a psychic and spiritual transformation. In the end, he achieves a Christ-like martyrdom through a gesture of supreme sacrifice.

Officially Lund received co-writing credit with Ferrara, though many agree that she wrote the script on her own. Even Ferrara says as much in places. Still, more than a few have countered this claim, and others have amended it, pointing out either that the script was incredibly short, and thus somehow incomplete, or that the film was scripted by Lund but fleshed out by others. In the aggregate—and there are too many sources and claims to note separately—the nitpicking amounts to a trivialization of Lund’s work. What’s much more important, I think, is to look at what Lund herself said about screenwriting. Actually, part of the problem in recognizing Lund as the sole author of the script, aside from the fact that she can no longer advocate for herself, is that commentators haven’t considered the very notion of screenwriting as Lund uniquely conceived of it. 

To wit, Lund likely never intended to write a verbatim script for the film, something she could have done easily had she desired. Nearly everyone, Ferrara included, acknowledges that she was a prolific writer, and that she typically added all sorts of detail to the scenes and characters she wrote. “Zoë could write 150 pages,” says Ferrara. But to all accounts, she delivered only a 65-page script for Bad Lieutenant. This was intentional, I believe, part and parcel of her technique for just such a film. Lund envisioned Bad Lieutenant as what she termed an “organic” work, one in which the thin script would encourage actors, directors, cinematographers, and especially the writer to evolve the material as it’s filmed. Consider a case in point. In a short piece about the unconventional screenwriting, Lund details some problems with scenes involving the Lieutenant and his two mistresses. Because the shoots weren’t working, she scripted two additional scenes with an entirely new character, a sort of junkie-philosopher whom she plays herself. She wrote the scenes “spontaneously,” she says, and turned the excision of the original material into something artful, something better than what had existed previously. What results is an artistic transformation few writers could pull off, a feat involving a kind of dance between scenes and characters, some now gone and others newly present. It’s daring work, in fact, that which requires incredible talent and vision. Lund writes:

“My character took over the salient material from the now-absent mistresses, and then, gained a life of her own. I added an entirely new element to those scenes that had nothing to do with the old mistresses. This profound content was conceived spontaneously, as I thought about this new character, and of the as-yet-unmet needs of the film as a whole. In sum, I believe that the elimination of the mistress scenes, and the addition of my character, created a better film. It’s a perfect example of how a spontaneous and creative attitude at every stage of production can solve most any problem. Of course, the most dire problems may end up being positive developments.”

Importantly, the spontaneity Lund cites should not be regarded as some form of “winging it.” Rather, such improvisation (her term) should be understood as a crucial element in what she calls the “dialectical process” of filmmaking, something that occurs naturally in the evolution of a narrative like Bad Lieutenant. Often, she explains, “one is obliged to turn a loss into a discovery.” It’s true that some of the press on Bad Lieutenant references the on-set improvisation of the actors and the director’s free-wheeling style. Rarely, though, are Lund or her methodology discussed at any length.   

Throughout Bad Lieutenant, Lund’s intelligent writing pushes the film toward its conclusion, drawing it ever-closer to its courageous and fullest artistic realization. Specifically, it’s through the nun’s confession scene and the “vampire speech” that Lund’s abilities shine. Here the Lieutenant really begins to understand what he can achieve through atonement, through complete and utter sacrifice.  First comes the nun’s scene. In a confession that the Lieutenant overhears, the nun refuses to name her rapists to the priest, explaining that Jesus would want her to love the “good boys” who violated her, even though they did not love her. It’s this act of forgiveness that moves the Lieutenant toward his own transformation, closer to his ultimate, cleansing act. He walks out of the church even as the nun continues with her confessor. In a note on this scene Lund writes, “LT can’t help but start up. As if the NUN knew he was there and cried out to him. Asked him to complete her mission.” Again, though, it’s Lund’s method that figures so crucially in the success of the scene as it operates in the film as a whole. She’s careful to point out that she wrote the scene spontaneously: “[S]cenes such as the nun’s confession [. . .] were absolutely spontaneous [. . .] I made use of all my talents and my experience as an actress. This nun was a kind of saint, and I write all that as if I were inside the head of a saint, acting out everything, as if it were some kind of profound improvisation.” (It’s interesting to note how Lund’s experience as an actor also informs her writing—more of her dialectical process at work.)

Then, in the “vampire speech” that follows, the Lieutenant is pushed even further. The junkie-philosopher character returns to the story to describe the unique suffering of the heroin addict who, unlike a vampire, must feed off his own body. Of course, it’s a metaphor for the suffering of those fated to make some sacrifice, to “give crazy,” as the character says, like the nun does in her act of forgiveness. Here, too, the script was entirely improvised, and yet it’s absolutely crucial to the larger message of the film, and integral to the transcendent, artistic zenith achieved in the final scenes.  Lund notes that she wrote the speech just five minutes before the scene was shot. It becomes the thematic companion to the nun’s confession, indispensable without it, and vice versa. The junkie tells the Lieutenant, whom she has just shot up with heroin:

“Vampires have it easy. They Feed on others. We have to feed on ourselves. We have to eat away at ourselves ‘til there’s nothing left but appetite [. . .] We have to give, and give, and give crazy. ‘Cause a gift that makes sense ain’t worth it. Jesus said ‘seventy times seven.’”  They’ll never understand why you did it. They’ll just forget about you tomorrow. But you gotta do it.” 

The speech, Lund writes, “propels the LT onward.” He’s now coming to a full understanding of what’s required of him: forgiveness and sacrifice. Jesus advised that we must forgive those who sin against us, “seventy times seven” times if need be. It’s a hard truth for the Lieutenant, but as the junkie-philosopher says, for those in his position there is no choice: “You gotta do it.” 

In the final scenes, both Passionate with a capital P and grittily urban, the Lieutenant gets high with the two rapists, gives them $30,000 in drug money that could have saved him, and sets the “good boys” free—a gift that leads to his death, but also to his apotheosis. And it’s all been developed through Lund’s dialectical/improvisational method, writing that moves the story toward what is needed. More than other screenwriters, Lund was able to intuit certain things about characters and story; she could spontaneously identify a narrative need and create art on the spot. Throughout Bad Lieutenant, her writing continually awes us. There are cringe-worthy scenes of incredible pathos alongside ones of religious ecstasy, ugly scenes alongside precious ones. But it all works together to create a unified artistic whole.

We should begin to think of her work, then, not as the product of someone who “loved heroin,” or as the surprising (!) work of an “exquisite beauty,” but as a piece of art created in a spirit of intentional improvisation and artistic courage. And if we examine the technique Lund embraced, we arrive at a finer appreciation of what she achieved and how she has managed to do it. Hopefully, too, we’ll gain a greater appreciation for Lund herself, for the writer Zoë Lund. Though it’s unlikely many people know it, Lund wrote several unproduced scripts and developed lengthy ideas for others. She completed a novel (yet unpublished), wrote poems, and acted in a host of films before her death in 1999. She was involved in many ongoing art projects, and yes, it would be great to see some of them realized. But as she herself was fond of saying, “That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is.” 

Perhaps it’s best just to think of what might have been (or what should be). 

In a telling piece she wrote about Bad Lieutenant, Lund notes how the story continually evolved on the set, with her frequent re-writes and emendations. On the one hand, she laments the fact that no final script existed at wrap time because so much was not written down. The script girl, she says, should go back over the film and create a document, post facto. “Then,” she writes, “the script as actually implemented will truly exist in its entirety. This will be very fulfilling to me, as I feel my work of art exists nowhere on paper. I don’t grieve too much, however, for it lives on film.”

Indeed, it does. 

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