Review

Like all of Abel Ferrara's work, this is not an easy film to watch. It is violent and unpleasant with a high and bloody body count and filmed for the most part in a blue tinted semi-gloom (although the DVD transfer appears brighter). But again, like all Ferrara's other work, one finds oneself thinking about it long afterwards and even viewing it again, against one's better judgement.

Ferrara's main asset in this film is Christopher Walken. Ferrara is clearly completely fascinated by his lead actor (as is also evidenced by his remarks in interviews) and the camera concentrates on the latter at length in close up and from every other angle. In a scene in a nightclub, everything is filmed in a dark blue monochrome, except for Walken who retains his normal pallid flesh tones. This unrelenting and almost brutal attention has the curious effect of throwing into relief Walken's ethereal and vulnerable, almost fragile qualities. (As one critic, Gavin Smith describes it, he manages to exude a kind of menacing vulnerability). But Frank White, Walken's character, in no way embodies any of these qualities. Quite the contrary. He is a ruthless cold-blooded killer - a gangster with grandiose pretentions to acting as a kind of twisted moral watchdog. This curious contrast between fragility and extreme violence creates an ambiguity that forms much of the interest of the film.

To be continued...

Brenez on Walken's acting

2.The Ghost

What do you want me to tell you? My soul is sad
- Straw Dogs

Second case: the actor throws off his relation to expressivity. Another historic moment in acting, highly theoretical, takes place at the start of Abel Ferrara's King of New York. The narrative programme offered by the character of Frank White (Christopher Walken) is very rich. This figure of totalization accommodates the realization of evil (the king of the underworld) and the possibility of good (becoming Mayor of New York and doing social work). He is the initiator of action and of a final serenity [l'ataraxie], the energy of desire and the spectral character of the project... But the actor's burden isn't too heavy (moreover it couldn't be, it's when an actor has nothing to perform that the real problems begin), and Walken adopts an admirable solution to deal with it.

White leaves his prison like he would leave a haunted castle. He climbs into his endless black limousine, crosses over the bridge, the phantom comes to meet us: we are in New York, traversing the nocturnal, lower depths of society. Surrounded by his two body guards, White travels through streets filled with drugs, prostitution and poverty, populated with small hordes of gaunt and exhausted figurines: the subjects of his kingdom. Walken's face doesn't exhibit any affect, neither judgment nor reserve, it's without intention but also without attachment. It isn't impenetrable since he doesn't dissimulate anything - it remains unqualifiable. Certain phenomena vary its appearance (the light, its movement, the passing of cigarettes), but the plastic variations reinforce through contrast the stillness on this face, the effect of what the reverse field reveals. A labour of pathic abstraction renders impertinent the very attempt to seek what type of relation associates this creature to the external world or, on the contrary, disassociates him from the real. The shot/reverse-shot renders absent any emotional rapport between White and the exterior. Therefore, we have here the evident inverse of the hypothetical Kuleshov-effect: it's the Walken-effect, this sovereign phenomenon of suspension, indeed of suppression by the actor of the pathic juncture between figure and world. But this suspense isn't empty: between the miserable exterior of the damp streets and the luxurious interior of the limousine, between the subjects and their sovereign, between Vivaldi's music and the snatches of popular music, between the most manifest differences, reigns an indistinction attesting to the non-expressivity of the actor and which makes of this screen-face the ghostly emanation of the street: a résumé of the reverse field. Walken plays the vampire of exteriority.

Walken works next on the rapport between the singular emotional event and this unqualifiable ground of apathy. The latter acts in such a way that it displaces the emotion that the situation portends: for example, in place of an angry motion, Walken executes a little dance of joy. But the particular emotion leaves the foundation of apathy intact, which subsists in each punctual affective manifestation, and will return systematically at the end of the singular emotion, as if it would absorb it brusquely without the emotion being able to leave a trace. Walken produces a kind of pathic hiatus between the emotional accident and an inaccessible depth of the figure, that of the negative to which White belongs and to which he will very serenely return at the film's end. With the result that what Walken has invented, and that he works on all through King of New York, concerns an unprecedented performative [actoral] rapport between the detail and the whole, between mimetic actualization and pathic totalization: he has invented in his own actor's body an expressive non-junction between gesture and deportment, between an emotional singularity and a general apathy.

Soundtrack

Walken essentials