Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, THE ADDICTION, NADJA

If the old adage is true that no one ever thinks about you as much as you think, then and only then, Bad City, Unreal City, the City of Devils. You can at least write about how no one ever thinks of you, or change it so they do, either way, will your muse tell you? And like so many before me in the swamps of the East Side and Brooklyn, I've submissively followed my vampire anima like a doting Renfield, scooping up any fly turns of phrase or spider ideas she cares to drop behind her, protected from harm only by some half-remembered Hegel quote kept around my neck. Lonely in the throng of my fellow lonesome vampire secretaries, aging and dying as far back as those modernist vagabonds being ejected from the White Horse Tavern, all of us old, decayed, drug from one Annexia to the next, while the same vampire muses stay young and lush and flush in their coffin pages and occasionally celluloid.

Artistic communities are druggy communities or they're hack communities. The East Village now can only be afforded by rich NYU students, old bastards with rent controlled apartments, and German or Japanese ex-pats. The rest of us, the Allies, are chased across to Brooklyn, scrounging in the cracks between the ghetto and the rich hipster zones for a cheap rent that doesn't involve getting jumped when coming home in the dead of night, drunk as a lord, and often. But back when you could live there for only $500 a month (with a roommate), there was a rash of female druggie vampire artists there, serving well as metaphors for the city itself, and AIDs and drug addiction. The thriving anonymity and the mad dash of youth through the gates of decadent pleasure that was downtown existence lent itself to the vampire who relished that the city never slept. Now we live in squalor in Park Slope and make double what we used to, everyone's in bed by midnight, and we can barely afford a gallon a day Coke Zero, cigarette, and coffee habit (luckily AA is still a buck).

But there's always the 90s to revisit, and now, thanks to a genius female Iranian director, there's an indication some element of the black and white vampire urban druggy denizen dream lives on, in a sub-section of the Interzone, where its forever the 80s and LPs and cassette mix tapes are still the hard currency of connection. Iran's Bad City (aka Bakersfield, CA) the paradise of an eternal spring break in a town one step away from the clankety-clank of Eraserhead. In Persian with English subtitles!



"Dependency is a marvelous thing," states Lili Taylor to her doctoral thesis advisor as a segue for shooting up with him. "It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctorate material." Of course she's going to give him more than a taste of the white horse; she's going to drink that opiated blood and bask in a double craving being satisfied. The point is, this girl's got interesting things to say, both out loud and in the coolest voiceover narration in all of cinema, a veritable doctoral thesis in action courtesy longtime Ferrara collaborator, screenwriter Nicholas St. John. And Taylor brings just the right mix of zonked conviction to his words; never pretentious, always cognizant of word's inadequacy, the ideal doctoral candidate who's following her thesis to its "the horror, the horror" nadir/pinnacle, embracing the madness and physical decomposition (i.e. the rotting teeth so common to heroin addicts). It all starts when she's accosted on the street by vampire Annabelle Sciorra who throws her into an alley and gives her the bite while telling her to say go away, which Taylor just can't do. Sciorra's hot, exotic, who could say no? Therefore, it's all the victim's fault, but is that rationalization on the vamp's part, or one of those things like they have to be invited in or can't cross your threshold?


Too zonked to care, and so I relate to Taylor's subsequent journey, her rapture over her newfound abilities and widened perceptions, even if they compel her to confront the horrors our usual sensory blinders obscure; her later decomposition similar to, say, Cronenberg's Fly remake, watching their own slow motion decomposition with a scientist's dispassionate eye.  They're in it for the knowledge, for the cracking it wide open, like true investigators. They don't cling to outmoded parameters of self. I remember scaring girlfriends and co-workers with my own rants about how I could see through time and space was an illusion, foam flecking from the sides of my mouth. Her fellow doctoral candidate and study buddy Edie Falco, for example, is pretty horrified by how far off the deep end diving board Taylor's going.  Taylor all but sneers: "Your obtuseness is disheartening as a doctoral candidate." She's right, and it's clear just who's gonna ace the thesis dissertation because she's seen beyond the veil and waltzed past all the old dead men still wrestling with phony differentiations between past and present, free will and destiny. Taylor's addiction, her disease, has organized her life, broadened her perspective, and made her as quintessentially New York as Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction (1995).

With its artsy black and white photography, The Addiction would look great on Blu-ray, but like so many Abel Ferrara movies seems mired in royalty disputes with international consortiums, so all I have to remember it by is my letterbox DVD of dubious origin. Even under such primitive conditions  it's a stunner that manages on a flop house budget what Coppola's Dracula couldn't with all its smoke and Zoetrope mirrors, to create a piece of durable horror pop-art cinema with mythopoetic Murnau roots. The hydra polyp magnifying glass lectures and plague likenings of the first Nosferatu are here reflected in microfiche revisitings of the My Lai and a visit with Falco to an Auschwitz exhibit. No one just dies in this vamp universe, there's no time - and they were never living anyway, not in the sense you mean below 14th Street. Instead, their cool undoes them, as being artists and academics they're smart enough to know that unless they say yes to dangerous experiences (unprotected anonymous sex, heroin, biting) they'll have nothing interesting to say in their art or thesis, and wind up just another flyover hack. Victims are told all the time that receiving the disease was their decision, like a "welcome to the disease which there is no cure for" bathroom mirror urban myth.

Taylor is so good in the lead its almost supernatural. She's low-key, sexy and very convincing. She owns the role, the film, the city, and with nothing but a low purring whisper that seems born to say Nicolas St. John's clear-eyed lines. Abel must have lost his shit when he saw how good she was, how great this film was gonna be. Too bad more people can't get behind it, perhaps from lack of experience with either STDs, drugs or philosophy or New York and its druggy artsy undertow, the stolen shot seediness Abel captures better than anyone else, the NYC that's still wild and woolly, every storefront a decaying mass of failed punk band stickers. You could fold images of Taylor in her shades (below) right in with Warhol's black and white Edie Sedgwick, Velvet Underground, and 'moving portraits' factory footage and not miss a mink-lines "beat."


Re-watching it lately for purposes of this post, I started writing down relevant quotes and found myself wanting to write down the whole script. So many great lines that are like manna to any starving college graduate alcoholic or drug addict: "Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find." I lived by those words while drinking myself into oblivion along with this movie. Watching Taylor convulse on the street in withdrawal reminded me of when I would try to get to and from the liquor store, literally right next door, and one flight of stairs, a twenty taped to my shaking hand, trying to get my 1.75 of Ten High and make it back up to safety of The Thin Man without falling, vomiting or convulsing on the street and winding up at Bellevue in the care of old Bim.

"... little turkeys in straw hats."

So yeah, this is right up there with The Lost Weekend for the authentic NYC 90s addict-alcoholic experience. "Self realization is annihilation of self." Skooly D, a longtime Ferrara collaborator, appears and scores while Taylor wrestles with her habit's thousand dimensions and finding a way to excuse and forgive thd self-destructive tendencies clotting human history's arteries with crimes so vile they crash time's mainframe. Christopher Walken shows up for a few killer moments, luring Taylor to his apartment, draining her nearly dry, while boasting how well his habit is under control and urging her to read Naked Lunch. What a dick. Cypress Hill beatboxes the soundtrack with druggy raps pitch-shifted through a blunt and a half: "I want to get high / so high" while Ferrara's camera prowls the sticker-and-graffiti-caked turf, and if you were a big partier in NYC in the 90s, then damn, this be like a goddamn scrapbook. Meanwhile, your city is gone but the buzzy flashback of that first e and c stroll at dawn after an all-night sesh lingers decades in the blood, which is why Taylor wants to drink it. Like all good druggie downtown vamps, she wants the blood rich with opiates and pheromones, the double nice secretions once the drugs trigger massive release from the pituitary gland (just ask the drug-dealer alien in Dark Angel [1990] AKA I Come in Peace). That's the best there is. By comparison, sex is strictly for the tourists.

Galaxy Craze

At last there's an Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in "Bad City," actually amidst the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. A place where rock anthems are still and forever relevant, it's forever the 80s, all while Madonna stares out from her poster and the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. "The first western Iranian vampire movie" has a startling doppelganger effect in Sheila Vand's similarity to the film's writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, as she's an amazing character, a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed women in Iran's repressive milieu, wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's cape (or Nadja's hood), she preys mainly on male predators, waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way; most of the men in the film yammer away like spoiled vain children, figuring out how to come onto her or why she's shadowing them, all but young, insecure but semi-cool Arash (Arash Marandi), a Lynch-ish young go-getter forced to give up his prize car to dad's evil drug dealer (Dominic Rains, below), a giant, buff, coked-up, abusive tattooed pimp with a habit of sticking fingers in girls' mouths (which turns out to be a big mistake). Thanks to a chain of events, Arash gets his car back, and a suitcase full of drugs and money. Even with his blood rich in ecstasy, though, after a costume rave, our girl holds off indulging, instead engaging in a slow motion moment, beautifully set to a madly whirling disco ball and White Lies'"Death," a perfect song to bring them together as it builds slowly from just another click track into emotional sweep and grandeur all the more special for seeming to come so guileless and true, the Let the Right One Inverse of Sixteen Candles: "I love the quiet of the nighttime / the sun is drowned in deathly seas / I can feel my heart beating as I speed from / the sense of time catching up with me."


A lot of movies use pop songs, but how many 'get' the heady deep tissue impression pop music makes on the young, how the right songs come pouring from radios like poems conjured from their own unconscious, there to linger and associate this moment, this now, which has completely stopped, or at least slowed way down, with this song? Dazed and Confused, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rushmore, The Big Chill, i.e. not very many. A Girl Walks Home Alone might be the first where not only does a song enhance the mood, pages of dialogue are being beamed silently outwards while characters barely move and the music plays.


Slight as it is, Amirpour's film sits nicely between the druggie black and white vampire girl genre, the Jim Jarmusch-Tom Waits graveyard at the edge of town tramp vibe, and the 'down and out' black and white 16mm post-neorealist movement from the early 00s in South America, films like Bolivia and Suddenly (Tan de Repente). I would have dug it if the film slowly turned to color during the ecstasy scene, then slowly back down to black and white for the come-down, but I'm always hoping more films will try that. Or any, besides Coffin Joe's Awakening of the Beast (1969) and Oz. God damn it.


Either way, the film does nail exactly what ecstasy is like via the rush of blood in the ear sound editing and the way a teasing hottie will surround you with auric tentacles of come hither only to brush you off in an instant and send you reeling, with the double kick of heady intoxication and sudden, short-shock shame. And in its own way, Amirpour's film does it all one better, because she brings real storytelling to scenes that in Jarmusch's hands would just be actors waiting around inside skid row shots until Jim's film can runs out. Instead slow motion really reflects the temerity of the moment, while we wait for Anash's hand to come out of a glove compartment and the slow drone music drives us onwards, we move into the future, tapping our typewriter train ride way to Annexia, Zentropa, and on and on, loyal as Oskar, doomed as Håkan before him, ready for our William Tell routine, one goddamned Seward asylum fly at a time... and no drug ever so sweet as to turn the city ever again to color.