The Waiting Room
On 'Bringing Out the Dead' and the liminal space between Heaven and Hell's Kitchen.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.- Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
The late-hour darkness of Hell's Kitchen and the scalding white fluorescents of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Hospital aren't really all that different. One might mistake them as opposites; the streets are where dealers, demons, and substances take lives, whereas the hospital angels dressed in white save them. But upon a closer look, they're all but the same: One, stuck in a purgatory of transition from the neon peep shows that populated Taxi Driver and Hardcore to the Disneyfication that would take over the mid-90s — a barren desert of displacement, a wasteland of public health failures as sex workers and queer communities are left to die from AIDs and the crack epidemic ravages communities of color. The other, the hospital — and by extension, the EMS vehicle — is a purgatory of its own, where a man can die and be resurrected 17 times by angels so desensitized to the cycle that hope and despair are feelings replaced with only two states: Urgency and nonurgency. A man resurrected 17 times is a man neither saved nor lost -- nor are the men who travel between the purgatories of darkness and illumination. Whether their periphery is obscured by pitch black or blinding light doesn't matter. They're a living ghost, a witness to the cohabitation of life and death, unified in how much we as people fear committing to one or the other.
Appropriately and presciently, Bringing Out the Dead sits squarely in the center of the question Paul Schrader has dedicated his craft to answering, mirrored in how Nicolas Cage's Frank is caught in the crosshairs of his haunting past and his threatening future. This is no Christmas story, but we are treated to our own iteration of the warning ghosts of time. John Goodman's Larry represents Frank's past, the sole external reminder that Rose existed and Frank could not — did not — save her. Ving Rhames' Marcus embodies this present intersection in Frank's life, a bombastic storm of God and Vices, Faith and Impulse, moved by the sacredness of life and accustomed to the casualness of death. But it is Tom Sizemore's Tom whose angry volatility is what Frank is most at risk of becoming. It is not Tom's indifference that is Frank's greatest warning (indifference is natural in a purgatorial world), but Tom's decisiveness in Death and his resentment of the people they are meant to serve threatens to be Frank's worst outcome.
That resentment is not entirely unfamiliar to Schrader's earlier written works where innocents need saving from the Sins of the underworld. For however much Travis Bickle is a cautionary tale, is he so much a caution to masculinity, or a caution to what could happen to a person if the world around them descends into increased depravity? In some ways, Bringing Out the Dead feels like an apology to the worldview of his past as Frank decidedly rejects a mindset that demonizes every person in his path. In other ways, the film telegraphs the romanticism in the wake of the despair of Schrader's later Lonely Men, a desire to be saved by love, yes, but to find the love within oneself, buried in the viscera of violence and rage, and emit it into the world.
Frank can't decide whether to blame himself, blame God, or blame Man. In the end, he must abandon the desire for blame and accept that all there is, is what is, and what isn't. Rose is dead, and all he can do is his best to save the next one.
Patricia Arquette's Mary at first glance might be that next one. While watching, my partner pinpointed the parallels between Nicolas Cage rescuing Arquette from a drug den to De Niro's rescue of Jodie Foster from the clutches of child trafficking. But once again, Schrader isn't the same cynical man of past. Mary saved herself once, pulling herself out of the dual purgatories of drug-filled streets and harrowed hospital halls. As her father is trapped in a state of in-between, so Mary is dragged back down, frequenting those haunted liminal spaces she worked so hard to escape.
This is a film of in-betweens. No Heaven or Hell, no Good or Bad, no Savior or Saved. Frank and Mary save each other, as the most hopeful kind of love does. Frank's final violent act is remarkably gentle, an acceptance of himself, an acceptance of God, an acceptance of Man. Frank ceases to seek salvation in anyone but himself, learning from Mary that such a thing is possible and reciprocates by untethering her to her own state of transience. She can't grieve if there's nothing to grieve, and she can't rejoice if there is no miracle to be had.
And so death is the question and the answer, the fear and the reprieve, neither everything nor nothing. It just is. And together, Frank and Mary can at last now be. ✿
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