TS Eliot, Y2K, and Street Preaching: A Loose Exploration of the Mythological and Biblical in Bringing Out The Dead
Going long on the severely underrated Schrader/Scorsese collaboration for the 25th anniversary of its release.
The world is ending. Isn’t it obvious? There are micro and nanoplastics in everything we consume. The weather gets wackier with every changing season. Crime rates in major metropolitan areas are up— just ask your parents. Young people are destroying the concept of the nuclear family, of monogamy, and they’re starting botox and retinol in their early 20’s. Major publications are shuttering, or being absorbed by media conglomerates, the middle class is disappearing, prices are rising and wages are not rising to meet them. The sky is fucking falling. We are no longer living in precedented times. Seems like there’s nothing we can do. Except, everyone else in history has been certain the world was coming to an end. Doomsaying is always in style, from Nostradamus to any young kid with a Tik Tok account and a general sense of ennui.
Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead was released theatrically in late October 1999, jutting up against the anxiety of the impending turn of the millennium. Y2K sparked its own little panic about the end of the world— and while we are somehow still here, the world as we knew it no longer exists. Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s adaptation of Joe Connelly’s novel is littered with mythological and religious levels of impending doom. Hell, the release of this film was the end of an era; it was the last film to be released on laser disc. Bringing Out the Dead is a parable about the end of the world, looking down the barrel of the year 2000.
In its opening moments, BotD invokes TS Eliot via his poem The Hollow Men. “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” These might be the most often cited lines of poetry in pop culture today— they’re deployed to signal that something massive is happening. “The night started out with a bang,” are the first words spoken in this movie by Nicolas Cage’s Frank Pierce. A deft inversion of this sentiment, but a reference nonetheless. What is an ending if not a new beginning? Conclusions are quiet, but the things that start up when the dust settles are cacophonous. Mountains rise up from rumbling, roaring earthquakes. Death comes out in whispers, and we are all born into this world with a cry. Or in some cases, reborn.
We descend with Frank and his partner from night two, Marcus (Ving Rhames), into a basement level goth club. It’s a veritable den of sin, and we find that a man is unconscious, or possibly dead. His name is Freddy, but he goes by the moniker I.B. Banging. Pierce kickstarts Banging’s heart with the help of some trusty Narcan while Marcus delivers a very convincing sermon (Rhames beautifully CHEWS the scenery). Our limp goth comes back with a sharp inhale, timed perfectly with the climax of Marcus’ preaching— it starts (or restarts) with a bang.
Nicolas Cage’s eyes are revealed in flashes during the opening credits; they are tired, glazed, and dark circled. It’s as if he’s both Odysseus visiting Hades and Dante spiraling in the Inferno. He’s around ghosts, the dying, and “spirits born half-finished” constantly, and he spends his days off visiting Our Lady of Mercy Hospital. To put it lightly: he’s seen a lot. His role is literally to bear witness to peoples’ passing. These paramedics are our mythical war heroes, our ancient poets, and our martyrs. Happiness, however fleeting, comes from saving a life: “Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world…You wonder if you’ve become immortal, as if you’ve saved your own life as well. God has passed through you. Why deny it, that for a moment there— why deny that for a moment there, God was you?” We watch Frank save Mr. Burke’s life at the beginning of the film. For a moment, God was him. We witness this transubstantiation twofold in the bookend to Mr. Burke’s story. Burke’s spirit speaks to Frank through his comatose state, imploring Frank to kill him out of mercy. He wants to be released from his misery— a fun tidbit when you remember that the Lady of Mercy Hospital is nicknamed Misery. Frank has the chance to become God once again, but he has his misgivings. First he giveth, but can he taketh away? Near the end of the film, he decides to honor Burke’s wish. Frank does this by taking on Burke’s medical accoutrements, or “mantle” if you will. He takes his breathing tube in his mouth, and he attaches Burke’s electrodes to his own chest. He has freed Burke from his physical form. Frank becomes Burke who becomes God.
In the film’s background noise we hear repeated utterances of “Red Death”: a new type of heroin that (shocker) kills everyone who uses it. At the risk of going for low-hanging fruit, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the relationship between plagues, end-times, and religious texts. Red Death is an allusion to the fictional plague in the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Masque of the Red Death.” The titular Red Death has swept the land, like many a historical plague (be it Biblical, the Black Plague, or even the Covid-19 crisis that ground our world to a halt only a few years ago), creating an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear and anxiety. The main character (I hesitate to use the word “protagonist” here) is Prince Prospero, and he hosts a party in his castle for those who are there to avoid the mysterious disease in sequester. One by one they are all killed by a mysterious guest who is the Red Death personified. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. Sure, going towards something that has a high chance of killing you is ill-advised, but in troubling times, what do we have left? Though the medical professionals in this film find themselves annoyed with these drug users who seem to be “asking for it,” what else can they do? The drug may be called Red Death, wrapped up in all catastrophic connotation, but sympathy and empathy can be found in the text for these people, no matter how foolish their actions. At the end of the day, they’re sick like everyone else that Frank Pierce treats and tries to save— their lives aren’t worth any less. This is a very forgiving film, in which all these sinners are seen as worthy of redemption and salvation. Hell, we even get a classic Pietà homage at the film’s end.
Case in point, enter Cy Coates. The aptly named Mary Burke brings Frank on a walk with her, at first saying she’s visiting a friend who’s sick and lives in a dangerous building. Frank, our Odysseus/Orpheus/Dante, goes upstairs with her despite her desire for him to stay in the lobby, and sees that Mary is meeting a smooth-talking man named Cy and his partner Kanita. Cy, which we can assume is short for Cyrus, is a name of ancient significance. Cyrus comes from the ancient Persian Kourosh (or the ancient Greek Kurios, if you’re still thinking about the ending of 300), which translates roughly to Lord of the Sun, or throne. Cyrus, in my culture, is known as the king of kings. Cy Coates has a bit of a regal flair about him, and he and Kanita usher Mary into their apartment. After waiting a bit, Frank bursts into Cy’s abode, all jewel-toned and rose-adorned. He even has a mechanical art piece on the wall, of Mt. Vesuvius erupting, complete with real plumes of smoke trickling out of its frame. Cy’s operation is somewhere between The Underworld and the Island of Lotus Eaters. He refers to his home as “an Oasis,” or as “Dayrise Enterprises;” he’s in the business of selling sleep. Everyone is there to forget about their problems, their families, their connections to the outside world— an outside world that makes it impossible to sleep. Cy, our king of Hades, gives Frank a little something to help him relax. However, it has the opposite effect: it drives Frank a little mad, in fact. He wordlessly goes down the hall, slings Mary over his shoulder, and walks out of Dayrise Enterprises; a modern-day working class Orpheus and Eurydice. This ends a little better than the mythical tale, however, as he doesn’t get a look at her until they’ve exited the apartment. Though she’s upset, he still manages, finally, to get some rest at her apartment.
Cy is a bad guy in a sea of bad guys here, but he’s no big bad. He’s not responsible for peddling the Red Death to every desperate drug user. However, he still takes advantage of sick people when he can. On the third and final night we spend with Frank Pierce, Cy is suddenly the one in need of help. We find him impaled on a fence, many stories above the asphalt below. Despite all that Cy has done to piss Frank off (rightfully), Frank turns the other cheek. God once again becomes him as he saves Cy’s life. Apocalyptic times call for apocalyptic saviors — with the impending turn of the millennium is borne a man who can rise to meet the moment. A pint-sized nun with a megaphone is present at seemingly every street corner, proselytizing about the inevitable end of the world if our sinners don’t “put down that crack pipe.” Sister Fetus is a mouthpiece for a vengeful god, a god of fire and brimstone. What she fails to see is that Frank Pierce is the one doing the work she’s preaching about. The poor, huddled masses cannot get themselves out of the hole they’re in. It takes a figure like Frank, who doesn’t care if an unwell homeless man’s suicide attempt is a “waste of resources,” or whether or not he should save Cy Coates because of his contribution to societal decay. As much as his partners want to refuse, he won’t even turn a blind eye to the fetid “frequent-flyer” Mr. Oh. It sounds corny, but he embodies the true Christian spirit, and his actions are much more Christ-like than a preachy nun with a megaphone. Every impending apocalypse does, in fact, call for a false prophet with a soapbox, and she does fit the bill quite nicely.
Bringing Out the Dead takes place over three days— the obvious (tired) thing to point out would be that it’s the same amount of time as Christ’s resurrection. When a character in a Scorsese film is Christ-like, you can’t quite ignore that. The second thing that a well-read person could point to is that three days is also how long Dante spent in Hell in Infierno. The way Frank wanders out of Cy’s apartment with Mary in tow bears a slight resemblance to Dante rescuing his beloved Beatrice from Hell as well, and both films have the same redemptive ending (in Dante’s case, the ending is the Paradiso). New York City in some ways seems to be a liminal space reminiscent of Dante’s Purgatorio, in that there are those “spirits born half-finished” and the ghosts that all the paramedics admit to seeing. Frank is haunted by a woman named Rose, whose spirit seems not to be done with him until his final acts of lifesaving in the film — she exists in limbo, appearing in places/times where the veil is thin. Frank’s final act before relieving Mr. Burke of his corporeal form is to save Noel from the wrath of Tom Wolls. In order to do so, he must descend into the bowels of the city, entering New York’s own hellmouth. He watches his partner, Tom, beat the life out of Noel, and is moved to save him. He calls in backup and finally ascends back to the realm of the living (or half-dead), finally having saved someone considered unworthy of saving out of pure compassion. The cycle has been reversed; Tom has taken and Frank has given it back. Moreover, he has saved Cy from the balcony and Noel from the basement (as above, so below, etc).
The last thing I’ll discuss here is the concept of light and how its employed here. The city is almost always swathed in darkness— the majority of the light we see comes from the ambulance sirens, or the indoor lighting at the hospital. A certain light gives a statue of the Virgin Mary a neon halo: a fitting image for the uncertain time ahead. Our salvation might not look how we expect it to, but it’s there if you look for it. In fact, in order to survive the changing of the times, one must change with the times. An image of antiquity merged with urban neon is the perfect avatar for how to survive the 21st century.
It seems that the world didn’t in fact, end, on January 1, 2000. And despite what some people might tell you, it didn’t end on September 11, 2001, June 6, 2006, or December 12, 2012. It would be dishonest, however, to say that things haven’t changed in a massive way since then. The places remain the same, but the world we live in is almost unrecognizable, from technological innovation, to the collapse of capitalism, to the slow decline of the neoliberal project. We always think the world is ending because the world as we know it is. I’m not certain that Scorsese and Schrader had that in mind explicitly when adapting Joe Connelly’s novel for the screen, but it trickled out of the film regardless. Bringing Out the Dead draws upon its mythological, religious, and poetic influences to make a statement about how whatever change was coming after 1999 was going to be seismic. The world didn’t end, but the world we live in now is not at all the same world as the 1990s. The film’s New York City is almost a liminal space, with permeable membranes allowing pieces of the past to slip away and the trappings of the future to filter in. But, no matter what flows in and out of our temporal reality, one thing must remain: compassion for one another.