Instances of Crypto-Transgression #2: Tommaso

Adam Lehrers finds crypto-transgression in Abel Ferrara's 2019 film that brutally complicates prevailing ideas about recovery

Abel Ferrara is still most widely known and admired for the films he directed during the first 15 years of his career. Even the deepest film heads appear to associate the artist best with the ‘70s New York grit and grime of early films like the punk rock slasher tropes of Driller Killer, the rape revenge fantasia of Ms. 45 and the religious odyssey cum dirty cop drama of Bad Lieutenant. This isn’t to the fault of anyone, of course, given that Ferrara developed an aesthetic theory of genre cinema so specific and iconic that the films he’s made in the recent past that fall outside the confines of the stylistic parameters set by his early work are appallingly under-promoted and under-written about. But it’s also tragic – Ferrara has made some of the greatest pieces of film art throughout the 2000s and the 2010s. Perhaps what makes these films fall under the radar is that they notably reject the confines of genre cinema all together. Whereas movies like Driller Killer or The Funeral felt like intellectual and art house deconstructions of genre cinema tropes, Ferrara’s recent work can only be described as works of arthouse cinema. Not only is the director’s enthusiasm for Fassbinder and Pasolini on full display, he has also largely turned away from the hyper-violent sensibilities of the grindhouse and towards a focus on deeper metaphysical themes: religious doubt, spiritual rebirth, addiction and recovery, and love among them.

Many of these recent films are masterpieces that should emphasize Ferrara as one of the world’s premiere film artists. In 2014’s Welcome to New York, Ferrara cast the sexually domineering French brute and world class thespian Gerard Depardieu to reenact the events around the New York arrest of French politician and once accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, ruminating on the evolution of New Left radicalism into cynical finance-driven neoliberalism and the death of political hope in the process. 2011’s 4:44 finds Ferrara reimagining the apocalyptic thriller as a quiet, character piece that simply looks at a couple, portrayed by Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh, loafing around their apartment, fucking, making art, and awaiting the end of existence as a comet heaves forward towards Earth. Perhaps most notably, Ferrara’s Pasolini casts Dafoe in the titular role of his favorite artist and icon of the Italian arthouse Pier Paolo Pasolini. Refusing to allow his film to be subsumed by the constrictions of the biopic, Ferrara instead focuses on the days leading up to Pasolini’s murder after the release of SALO and communicates profound notions about the contradictions of artistic genius and pop culture fame. I don’t make this claim lightly: Ferrara’s 2010s work has been as strong as some of the greatest film artists of our time. Gaspar Nóe. Paul Thomas Anderson. Pedro Almodovar. Lars Von Trier. These are the artists that Ferrara deserves to be mentioned alongside, and the failure to properly promote his work is one of the most profound anecdotal pieces of evidence concerning the decline of film culture.

2019’s Tommasso is arguably the least seen of all these aforementioned Ferrara projects, inarguably one of the greatest films of recent memory, and likely Ferrara’s foremost achievement as a film artist. It is also the best example of Ferrara’s evolution from a transgressive grindhouse stylist to a CRYPTO-transgressive arthouse auteur. During the early, drug addled halcyon days of Ferrara’s career, it was clear that his films were made to appeal to the same sensibilities that were driving the disgustingly atonal junk punk music of no wave and industrial – they were violent, confrontational, and very fucking sonically loud (Driller Killer especially is not just notable for the fictional scuzz punk band depicted within the film but also because it’s one of the loudest underground films ever made.) Those movies were designed to piss off parents, basically. It is the art of an angry young man and it’s highly successful in its approach to transgression and confrontation. 

But Ferrara is an older man now. He’s settled down, relocated to Rome with a young wife and child, and living a drug free lifestyle. The provocations of his latter day career are infinitely more subtle and, ultimately, deeper and more troubling than those found in his early work. Tommasso is a film that defies its own limitations at every turn. It’s an artwork that begins as a narcissistic cryptic biography and evolves into a bleak statement on the contradictions of being and the ultimate impossibility of spiritual growth. It is the exact kind of artwork that I myself want to create; where the personae of the artist collapses beneath the ramifications of the contradictions that the artist inhabits. Similar to what I did with Communions, Tommasso is a kind of recovery story in which recovery remains an impossibility. A lie. The fraud we buy into to give meaning to a survival that we don’t deserve. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts and wields an encrypted poetry that genuinely threatens all the lies we tell ourselves to keep our feet on the ground in a liquid modernity that threatens to wash us away

In Tommaso, Dafoe — who has become Ferrara’s most consistent collaborator — gives career defining work playing a filmmaker and writer that shares quite a few commonalities with the auteur behind the camera. Like Ferrara, Dafoe’s Tommaso is in recovery, married to a young woman with a young baby, and living in Rome away from the excesses of his life as a hot shit filmmaker in New York and Miami. Dafoe is one of our greatest character actors and has regularly delivered fascinating performances in spectacular films by Lars Von Trier, Julian Schnabel and Paul Schrader, so it’s not without humility that I boldly claim the following: Tommaso is the actor’s most interesting and best performance of all time. It’s a rather postmodern gesture: Tommaso is largely a hybrid of both Ferrara and Dafoe’s personas. In addition to his shared characteristics with Ferrara, Tommaso also has Dafoe’s Yoga-honed strength and agility and similarly makes a living as an acting teacher. This allows Ferrara to encode the morbid self-attention of the project within the characteristics of Dafoe and successfully kinks what could be a banal self-portrait, allowing the film to evolve into something stranger and most disturbing.

Tommaso is undeniably Ferrara’s recovery project. There are a few sequences in which we see Tommaso attending AA meetings and sharing stories of addiction and degradation that one can only assume are Ferrara’s own stories of his crippling addictions to crack and heroin and the self-aggrandizing artistic narcissism that those addictions propped up. It is in the film’s focus on addiction where we can locate and identify its crypto-transgressive character. Surrealist artist and poet Leonora Carrington once wrote that, “In order to unchain our emotions, we must observe all the elements that are used to keep us enslaved.”

“All the false identities that we unconsciously embrace through propaganda, literature, and all the multiple false beliefs that we are fed since birth.”

Like Ferrara, Tommaso is clean. But in opposition to just about every single work of recovery narrative I’ve ever read or watched, Ferrara knows the program too well to see it as a totalizing metaphysical rebirth. He knows that sobriety, even if it purifies your body of toxins and rids you of the necessity of lying, doesn’t free you from the narcissism, character defects, and malignant jealousy and pettiness that compelled you to use hard drugs, drink and engage in risky sexual behavior in the first place. Ferrara refuses to succumb to the ideology of sobriety less it distracts him from the truth of existence: he is broken. We are broken. However much we might improve our health and life, we are never truly free. We are perennially enslaved to our own neurosis, and the closest we will ever get to freedom — artistic or otherwise — is to face this reality head on with courage and poise. This is the existential horror that Ferrara’s film approaches. 

The atmosphere of ambiguity that opens Tommaso is subverted early in the film when we quickly realize that Tommaso is much less settled in his sober and married life abroad than we are initially led to believe. His rigorous yoga and his dedication to his wife and child start to feel less like they are enriching Tommaso’s life spiritually than they are barely filling the void vacated by narcotic bliss. Despite all these signifiers of growth and maturity, Tommaso is floundering. He has become possessed with a demonic resentment of his wife, who he is absolutely positive is cheating on him. After total failure to communicate with his partner, he eventually turns towards his AA comrades, desperately hoping that someone might have the kind of wisdom that will guide him back towards health and spiritual calm. One such recovering alcoholic tells Tommaso that anger clutters the mind, overriding the potential for more positive emotions to guide us towards inner peace.

This is Tommaso’s most devastating philosophical provocation: its titular protagonist is free of substance, but he is hardly free of himself. If anything, absent the cocaine and the heroin satiating his anguish and diluting his inner turmoil, his psyche has only become a crueler and more fucking unusual imprisonment. Sobriety might be the best choice for our lives, suggests Ferrara, but it can’t save you. Totally absent the gore and sexual transgression of his early work, the most brutal art that Ferrara has ever made lurks just beneath the stylish and beautiful arthouse veneer of Tommaso. Watch it, and see what I see. This is how we break free of ideological norms and the stupid dogmas and hallow pieties that saturate the culture industries. Ferrara tells the fucking truth, god damn it! Can you handle it? 

The film does have some formal and narrative precedents in the recovery canon. Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31 features a more recently sobered heroin addict who spends the day after leaving rehab reconnecting with old friends before choosing to forego sobriety all together. Perhaps better matching the implicit violence and nihilism of Ferrara’s film, however, is the 1931 literary masterpiece Will O’ the Wisp by French modernist, weirdo and Nazi collaborator Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. That novel follows a decadent French petty bourgeois who has wasted his life on pussy and junk and tries to reconnect with the world fresh out of rehab. He fails – totally and completely. The novel ends with his suicide. 

Tommaso, on the other hand, doesn’t end with the protagonist’s suicide, but it does end with violent death. Marcus Aurelius once said that the consequences of anger are more grievous than the causes of it. Tommaso, no longer able to numb his rage and his toxicity with heroin and alcohol, gives into his most pathological, narcissistic, jealous and misogynistic impulses. The films ends with Tommaso, the artist so clearly based on the auteur himself, walking into his home knowing full well that his young and beautiful bride is there with her lover. He’s carrying a gun. He finds them in the bedroom – they are fully clothed but that doesn’t break Tommaso’s resolve. He dispassionately raises the handgun, aims it at the young man, and shoots him directly through the heart. He then puts the gun to his wife’s head: “LOOK AT ME!” he demands of her.

Never mind the fact that Ferrara has turned a misogynistic murder fantasy into one of the greatest works of art of his illustrious career, that’s just content. The greater achievement is his refusal to succumb to the typical narrative conventions of the recovery drama. Tommaso isn’t some pussy, James Frey-esque “I used to be such a big bad drug addict but now I’m OK” kind of story. It’s way darker than that. It suggests that a broken man will be broken with drugs or without. For those of us in the audience that have wasted our own years stuffing our veins with junk and clogging our noses with blow, it assaults the single delusion we cling to to justify the pain we endure in our sobriety. Perhaps we are just as contemptible sober as we were as drug addicts. Maybe, Ferrara suggests, opiated bliss was the only thing preventing us from becoming the murderers we never thought we were capable of being. 

Elegant. Brutal. Subtle. Forty years into his career, Ferrara’s transgressions are more encrypted than ever before, but no less challenging. A film of Bataillean violent contradictions, Tommaso has invaded my psyche like few films of recent memory have.

Illustrations
1, 3 and 4: Willem Dafoe in Tomasso
2: Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant