“Iguana / Alligator footage by Werner Herzog.”

This tidbit of information appears in the closing credits of Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but it might more usefully have been conveyed in the opening titles, if only to give audiences a better idea of what’s in store. Though it borrows the first half of its name from Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film, and likewise tells the story of an out-of-control, drug-addicted cop, the movie is neither a remake nor sequel; it’s a Herzogian exercise of another kind altogether. (Both directors have said they would have preferred the new film not be titled Bad Lieutenant at all, but Herzog was overridden by the producers, who envision a somewhat dubious franchise boost at the box office.)

In contrast to Ferrara’s pitiless redemption parable, Herzog offers dark comedy, an exaggerated exploration of what he calls “the bliss of evil.” The movie’s first shot, of a snake slithering sinuously through fetid water, is at once a metaphor for that evil and an inside joke, tweaking its own obviousness. You have to wait until later in the film for the alligator, which watches forlornly by the side of a highway where its mate has been run over, and the iguanas, which jitter on the screen to “Please Release Me.”

And then there are the bipedal reptiles. Central among these is New Orleans policeman Terence McDonagh, played with loopy intensity by Nicolas Cage. (Is it a coincidence that he essentially shares a surname with Cage’s inept stickup man in Raising Arizona? Another inside joke?) When we first encounter Terence, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he is a dutiful cop by the undemanding standards of the Big Easy. He and his partner (Val Kilmer) have been sent to check that all the prisoners are evacuated from a prison in which the flood waters continue to rise. When they find that one has been left behind, Terence, in contrast to said partner, chooses not to let him drown. This act of minimal heroism does not go unpunished, however: In addition to ruining his $50 Swiss underpants, Terence suffers a back injury he is assured will plague him for the rest of his life. Cue the Vicodin.

Flash forward six months, and Terence has moved on to harder stuff, which is to say pretty much anything he can get his hands on, whether through property-room larcenies or the shaking down of coke-addled clubbers. (Though he will later self-righteously declare, “Everything I take is prescription--except for the heroin,” this is not in fact true.) Throw in mounting gambling debts thanks to a bad eye for college football, a prostitute girlfriend being menaced by the mob (Eva Mendes), and a killer crack dealer he can’t seem to bring to justice (Xzibit), and our bad lieutenant is having a very bad week.

Herzog directs the film with ironic whimsy, mixing the understated and over-the-top in equal measure. Some scenes are filmed like a horror movie, with low angles and tracking shots that follow Cage as an organ thrums menacingly; others are more openly playful. But all teeter precariously--and by design--on the fence between awesome and awful. That the film tumbles frequently into the former category and rarely into the latter is a testament to Herzog’s dexterity: Making a bad movie this good is harder than it looks.

He is aided considerably by Cage, who mines the reservoir of repressed mania and offbeat charisma that made him such an interesting young actor in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would say this is his best performance since 2002’s Adaptation, if that didn’t seem like damning with faint praise: No star working today chooses his roles with such emphatic disregard for quality. Canting his shoulders at a stiff angle and pursing his lips, Cage offers a portrait of a man out of kilter physically as well as morally. And if, on occasion, he overdoes it, well, in this context overdoing it is essentially the point of doing it at all. His bad lieutenant is the twelve-vehicle pileup of human car wrecks, an invitation to cinematic rubberneckers everywhere.

Christopher Orr is a senior editor of The New Republic.

The absence of Barack Obama from Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall may be explained in many ways, and one of the explanations may be his view of the world. He is kein Berliner. No, he is not soft on communism, not least because there is no longer any communism, at least of the classical kind, to be soft on. In the video message that was broadcast to the commemoration--it allowed him once again to have the stage to himself, and to describe his own election as a climactic event in “human destiny”--Obama spoke all the right words for all the right sentiments. But his portrait of the Atlantic alliance was curiously passive, as if it defeated totalitarianism by example, by believing what it believes, and not also by challenging the Soviet Union, and blocking it, and deploying missiles, and supporting dissenters, in ways that many progressives found “destabilizing.” Obama declared that “the work of freedom is never finished,” which is true enough, but the urgent question is what he means by “work.” Consider an example. A few days before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, there occurred the thirtieth anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The dictators’ commemoration of that happy day in the history of their dictatorship was ruined by rallies of democrats and dissidents. Obama’s response was to intone wanly that “the world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice.” So does “witness” count as “work”? Was the Soviet Union brought down by “witness”? We did not, on our own, bring the Soviet Union down--it collapsed, pathetically, on itself; but we assisted keenly in its collapse. Are we assisting in the mullahs’ collapse? I think not. Our Iran policy seems not to have discovered the connection between Iranian nuclearization and Iranian liberalization. The only sure solution to the former is the latter. It is no longer a fantasy to contemplate a new Iran. For this reason, American support for the democracy movement in Iran (he sounds like Bush! and he calls himself a liberal!) is not only a moral duty, it is also a strategic duty. Such support might indeed be “destabilizing,” but there is no stability in Iran anymore, there is only a vicious tyranny fighting for its life against a popular uprising that explains itself with principles that we, too, espouse. It makes sense that the man who takes no side in that fight did not make it to Berlin.

There are two ways of regarding the cold war. The first is to view it admiringly as a struggle between philosophies as they were embodied in states, so that the victory of the American idea over the Soviet idea was a victory of good (not innocence) over evil--a time of anxiety and grandeur, in which reason and courage defeated the most murderous political system in history and averted the greatest danger in history. The second is to view it condescendingly as a contest between two states swollen with power imposing their interests on a world that needed instead to be fed and clothed, each with its ideological excuses for its global ambitions, both on the verge of obsolescence of one sort or another--an era made mercifully archaic by globalization and hybridity and interdependence and connectivity, a low and useless era. I expect that Obama would concur with bits of both views. But his absence in Berlin makes me wonder whether a word need not be said for the pertinence of the legacy of anti-communism to the foundations of American foreign policy. Anti-communism, after all, was a doctrine of human rights. When it negotiated about nuclear weapons, it negotiated also about human rights. It was not embarrassed by the moral analysis of governments and movements, and it insisted that such an analysis has strategic implications. It preferred dissidents to regimes, even when it engaged with regimes. How can any of this be immaterial to our quandaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, and elsewhere? How can the totalitarians and authoritarians, religious and secular, in those crucial and hazardous regions be understood without a moral vocabulary? To be sure, a moral vocabulary may easily justify abuses; but not as easily as an amoral or an immoral one. Liberals no longer remember that anti-communism was once a glory of liberalism. The president is so busy breaking new ground in foreign policy that he may not see that the ground of his foreign policy is broken. His renunciation of idealism has brought none of the rewards of realism. Conflicts that were supposed to be transformed by his magic are immune to his magic. He has no magic. There is no magic. His trip to China, where the subject of human rights was “raised,” has shown this again. When he gets back, perhaps he will meet with the Dalai Lama, but not for the purpose of “strategic reassurance.” That blessing is reserved for Hu Jintao. It makes sense that the man who refused to meet with the Dalai Lama did not make it to Berlin.

If democracy had holy days, November 9 would be one of them. But on the morning of that day I awoke to find that the editors of the op-ed page of The New York Times, in their ceaseless quest for mental refreshment, had decided to correct the one-sided favorable press that 1989 has enjoyed for decades and invited a Leninist to explain the meaning of the occasion to their readers, who were hotly instructed by Slavoj Žižek not to fall for the illusion of progress, because capitalism does not provide the “life of sincerity and simplicity” that the rebels of 1989 sought, and that “socialism with a human face,” which was what they really desired, “deserves a second chance.” I ended the day watching Hillary Clinton, who represented us in Berlin, reflect for Charlie Rose on the “new walls” of our age, not “the visible of the concrete and the barbed wire,” but the “walls of ignorance and extremism,” of “oppression and impoverishment.” She was not wrong, but she was vaporous. Some of the ills that she noted are the result of walls, but some of them are the result of the lack of walls. When she mentioned “the walls that exist in the mindsets” of suicide bombers, I recalled the undeniably hideous but undeniably life-saving wall in Israel. Sometimes the only response to a mental wall is a physical wall. Walls protect. Walls confine and walls define. Walls exclude and walls include. In one of his notebooks, Frost scribbled a little epitome of his great poem about the versatility of such hindrances:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

Something there is that does and after all

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.

No, 2012 is not quite the pointless cinematic exercise that G.I. Joe was, as I noted in my review last week. But that’s no reason not to repurpose some of its more notable dialogue for an alternative literary experience:

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire may be the worst-feeling feel-good story ever committed to celluloid. The protagonist, Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe), is 16, morbidly obese, and illiterate. Her indolent mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), treats her like a slave, beating and abusing her incessantly. Her father, on the rare occasions when he shows up, seizes the opportunity to rape her. These violent attentions resulted in her bearing him a child when she was twelve; as the film begins, she is pregnant with another. The first baby has Down syndrome and is named “Mongo” (“short for ‘mongoloid,’” Precious explains); to her good fortune, the little girl lives with Precious’s grandmother, except when Mary briefly imports her to the apartment for social-worker visits so that she can continue receiving the welfare check the child entails.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

By Christopher Caldwell

(Doubleday, 422 pp., $30)

As its subtitle makes clear, this is a book about immigration, Islam, and the West. But at the same time this is also a book about a particular moral culture, a set of attitudes, habits, and beliefs that has developed in Western Europe over the past sixty years. There isn’t a good shorthand way to describe this moral culture. Sometimes it is called “political correctness,” though politics as such does not define it. Sometimes it is called “the culture of tolerance,” though at times it is not tolerant at all. Christopher Caldwell mostly winds up calling it the “European project,” which is not bad, since it implies that it is something that Europe is still building, an ongoing but incomplete enterprise, a “project” for the future.

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse

Film Forum

The Maid

Elephant Eye Films 

Peter Greenaway, the British director who was educated as a painter, first came to wide attention in 1982 with The Draughtsman’s Contract, a silky comedy about seventeenth-century aristocrats. Greenaway then promptly set out not to build on this success, undertaking one eccentric film project after another. It was almost as if he were determined not to grow cumulatively, as most of the best directors have done. Of the Greenaway works that I have seen, only two of them--quite unlike each other--stand out in memory. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a modern comedy that revealed how sex can be achieved in restaurant restrooms. Prospero’s Books, a slanted view of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, put the future in debt to Greenaway by preserving John Gielgud’s exquisite reading of Prospero.

Over a decade ago, I trundled my good-natured family across miles of southern Switzerland to see every building I could by Peter Zumthor, who is this year's winner of the Pritzker Prize. Then as now, most of Zumthor's work was off the beaten track, not only literally but metaphorically, little known to the general public although admired by professionals. What drew me to make the trek to his work was what, from pictures, appeared to be its conceptual rigor, its unabashed monumentality, and an attention to detail so fanatical that every threshold, corner, and joint seemed to become an opportunity to rethink the way hands make buildings.

Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer. It is an unexpectedly burning question, as the newspapers regularly demonstrate. But both the answer to the question and the reasons for raising it require a broader introduction.

There have been many times in recent years when one bemoaned the explosion of media that have provided public forums for so much incompetence and ignorance, not to speak of prejudice. Matters became worse after September 11, for two additional reasons. The first is the propagation of a climate of fear, of ever-present danger from ill-defined foes, which led in the West, and especially in the United States, to a plethora of security measures ranging from reasonable and useful to ridiculous and demeaning. Penetrating and perverting institutions and individuals, this fear collided in the Muslim world with a complex ideological and psychological evolution that led many people in Muslim countries and communities to a reflexive and often self-destructive brutality in reaction to the slightest whiff of verbal or visual provocation.

The Clinton Tapes:
Wrestling History with
the President

By Taylor Branch

(Simon & Schuster, 707 pp., $35)

In her infamous first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm swings for the fences and proclaims that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She means that journalists use their human subjects and then dispose of them; that we con them in person by "preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness"--it occurs to me to note that however bleak print's future seems, journalism will at least never run out of material--before gutting them in print. This was a provocative thought in 1990, in those years of innocence before the Internet turned the guttings into a spectator sport.

Up from History:
The Life of Booker T. Washington

By Robert J. Norrell

(Harvard University Press, 508 pp., $35)

I.

Once the most famous and influential African American in the United States (and probably the world), Booker T. Washington has earned at best mixed reviews in the decades since his death in 1915. Black intellectuals and political activists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the present day, have generally seen Washington as a conservative racial accommodationist, yielding to the repressive power of Jim Crow and urging American blacks to abandon their political struggles for equality and instead to set their sights on a future of manual labor and petty property ownership.

Chris & Don: A Love Story (Zeitgeist)

My Winnipeg (IFC)

19th Annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival

In 1964 Christopher Isherwood published A Single Man, a novel about a homosexual man and his state of spirit after his lover dies. Now comes Chris & Don, a documentary film about Isherwood's lover and his state of spirit since Chris's death. The subtitle of the film is "A Love Story." The picture makes the worn term fresh, moving.

The principal place is the couple's home in Santa Monica, where Don Bachardy still lives. They met in 1953, when Chris was forty-nine and Don was eighteen. Isherwood was already a celebrated writer; Don was a good-looking youth, intelligent and vital but just a youth. Isherwood's diaries, quoted in the voice-over, detail what we would know anyway. He was smitten: so deeply that, far from any embarrassment about homosexuality (a condition he had long since superseded), the age difference did not deter him. Don's response was unworried and full. The pair began to live together, and, allowing for a few separations through the years due to Chris's teaching jobs, allowing too for a few sidebar affairs by both, they remained together until Chris's death in 1986. In effect, which is much of the film's point, Don still lives with Chris.

In the mid-1950s, a photographer named Robert Frank, lately emigrated from Switzerland, drove around the United States to see and to join his new country. He shot pictures. The results, or his choices among them, were published in a book of eighty-three photos called The Americans, which was an immediate and lasting success. The book was not only a unique way for a newcomer to learn about his new home: in some ways it showed a social candor that was as yet unusual in photography. In his introduction to the book, Jack Kerouac wrote: "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." We can still look over Frank’s shoulder and see that poem in the making.