As Fellini’s 8 ½ has come to exemplify the complexities of the “film-within-a-film” narrative form, Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game (aka Snake Eyes, 1993), which employs the same “hall of mirrors” reflexivity and autobiographical rendering of the filmmaking process, can readily be considered the dark flipside of Fellini’s seminal meditation on art and life. Both films blur the distinctions between the film itself and it’s own creative process; both are mid-career/ mid-life crisis films with actors associated with the work of their directors essentially “standing in” for him (Marcello Mastroianni in 8 ½; Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game); and both films employ a fragmentary discourse to convey the dissolution of their protagonists’ mental state.
But where Fellini’s film concludes on a hopeful note with Guido’s muddled filmmaking journey leading to self-reconciliation and spiritual/ artistic regeneration, the director of Ferrara’s “inner film” wields a dark mirror that reflects the hidden ugliness of the “outer film”, corrupting, nullifying and destroying the film without as the film within takes its nasty shape and infects its host. The opening scenes establish the fragmented narrative discourse that pervades the film.
Dangerous Game begins with a quiet idyllic family dinner at home with Eddie Israel (Keitel, resembling Ferrara with his long, shaggy greying locks), his wife Maddie (Ferrara’s then-wife Nancy) and their son Tommy. Eddie is about to leave for Los Angeles. He and Maddie make love, then he visits his sleeping son and whispers “Don’t forget me, kid. I’m your daddy”. He walks down the snowy New York boulevard to presumably catch a cab to the airport.
The white on black opening credits which follow are accompanied by a voice-over in which Keitel/ Israel informs a woman (and the viewer) that he is making a new film and persuades her to sing “Blue Moon”. Next, in stark contrast stylistically to the New York sequence, is a grainy, handheld cinema-verite segment in which Israel, in shaky close-up, waxes poetic upon the narrative and themes of his new film “Mother of Mirrors” as if for a “making-of” television documentary. A graphic at the bottom of the screen reads: “L.A. Rehearsals”. The character of Claire, he says, has found her “old life” of sex and drugs to be a “lie”; she has had a spiritual conversion and discovered a new “truth”.
Another documentary-style scene follows, with Israel and crew setting up on a soundstage and Frank Burns, who will play Russell (James Russo), reviewing his script. Whereas the previous segment has the feel of an interview on a television monitor, this “backstage” footage has an immediacy that suggests unmediated observance of actual events by the viewer or by a documentarian.
The viewer is then thrown into the “Mother of Mirrors” film diagesis, with Frank’s character Russell menacing his wife Claire, played by actress Sarah Jennings (Madonna), while trying to persuade her to return to their swinging, drug-fueled lifestyle (“You should have been Mother Cabrini… instead of a middle-class pill-popping neurotic!”) Ominous music plays on the soundtrack and a blue haze envelops the proceedings as if to call attention to the artificial nature of this inner film and the movies in general.
The inner film world is suddenly shattered by a return to the doc-style “backstage” footage as Eddie coaches Frank to intensify his performance. Back on the stage, Frank and Sarah continue rehearsal. Speaking his lines as he pulls her toward the bathroom mirror, Frank states that the eyes are the windows to the soul: “So let’s see what happens when you step in front of the mirror”.
As they move to stare at their reflections, the narrative shifts abruptly from the actors playing their parts on the soundstage back to the alternative world of the characters of “Mother of Mirrors”. Frank/ Russell now wears a suit and Sarah/Claire wears eyeglasses (another mirror/ mask) and the haze and soundtrack music have returned. As Russell holds Claire and terrifies her, the camera zooms in slowly, removing the backs of their heads from the shot and filming only their reflections in the mirror, asking the viewer to question fundamental notions of reality, performance and identity.
Driving the point home, the narrative suddenly jumps back to the “Rehearsals” documentary footage, with Eddie discussing the Claire character with Sarah in the dichotomous terms of spirituality and carnality and heaven and hell, each analogy the reverse mirror image of the former. As he attempts to clarify a point, he defers to someone off-camera named “Nick”, obviously the screenwriter Nicholas St. John who pens the majority of Ferrara’s films, Dangerous Game included. This adds a further dimension to the doppelgangers discussed thus far.
There has been the doubling of directors Ferrara and Israel, wives Nancy Ferrara and Maddie, actors/ characters Frank/ Russell and Sarah/ Claire, and the blurring of the film Dangerous Game with its inner film “Mother of Mirrors”, as well as various behind-the-scenes segments of the latter that seem to exist in a diagesis of their own. Now it stands to reason that this segment is actually footage of actors Harvey Keitel and Madonna discussing the Dangerous Game script with St. John and not part of any constructed fictional narrative.
A later “backstage” segment has Israel discussing a shot with an off-screen “Ken”, an obvious reference to Ferrara’s steadfast DP Ken Kelsch. Furthermore, various scenes on the soundstage are framed with shots of take-clappers, one of which reads “A. Ferrara K.Kelsch Dangerous Game” rather than “E. Israel Mother of Mirrors”. Such infinite mirroring leaves the viewer forever unsure of what reality the film is seeking to convey. The next sequence of “backstage footage” is titled “Principle Photography” and begins with Eddie coaching Sarah.
Once again, It is soon revealed that it is reflections in the set’s bathroom mirror that are being filmed rather than the actors themselves. Eddie is trying to coax Sarah through a meltdown brought on by the demanding nature of her role. He eventually exits the frame to direct from off-set and the viewer is left with Sarah crying and screaming for direction. It would appear that this is actual behind-the-scenes footage of a very real Madonna reaching her own breaking point. There are constant references throughout the film to Sarah being a “bad actress” and a “commercial” commodity and it would not be unreasonable to assume Ferrara cast the singer for these associations.
This sequence, in which the camera maintains its shot, often keeping her head out of frame, finds the singer working beyond her usual ability in emotional power. Later scenes, as well as the previous ones referencing St.John and Kelsch, support this reading .
The scene abruptly shifts back into the “Mother” diagesis, the mirror literally exploding and the backstage storyline being replaced with the inner film narrative’s haze and music. Again, it is the mirror rather than the actors that is filmed. Russell’s face is bathed ghoulishly in a flashlight beam as he delivers a monlogue about the hypocrisy of Claire’s conversion, a perverse demon tormenting her for her spiritual aspirations.
With all the doubling and blurring of characters in the film, it is only James Russo /Frank Burns/ Russell that maintains a distinct consistency throughout. He is pure sadistic evil on-set and off and his sadism and self-destruction prefigures the downward spiral that Eddie Israel will descend into as he makes his film. Burns, like Russell whom he portrays in “Mother”, is a desperate, drug-crazed, promiscuous and violent alcoholic. It is suggested by both Eddie and Sarah that he lives this way to remain in character; however nothing in the course of the film leads one to believe he is capable of any other behavior.
Frank seems most alive when allowed to slap Sarah around and butcher her hair with scissors; he appears to relish the degrading invective he hurls at her. His violent misogynistic nature is socially sanctioned under the cover of Ferrara/ Israel’s “art”.
When he is in bed with Sarah and talking to Eddie on the phone, he tells the director she is a “whore” that can’t act. She responds, tellingly, that he has had sex with “a girl in a script” rather than Sarah herself, and angrily departs. Frank then goes into another room where a jealous female coke-dealer has apparently been waiting for him. She berates him for his rude behavior and he slaps her around to get his drugs.
Later, in a violent outburst on the set, he calls Sarah “a piece of shit” and berates her acting ability after abruptly cutting a scene in the middle. “You’re not on TV now, bitch!” he screams, another veiled slighting of Madonna’s pop icon status and acting ability. He accuses her of “not (being) there”, literally failing to reflect his performance. Israel throws him off the set and counsels him in his trailer (after throwing Frank’s cronies out, essentially clearing the set a second time), telling him to do more drugs and booze, or less, for the sake of the film, and reminding Frank that the “Suits” didn’t want him in the picture. This threat to Frank’s livelihood is incorporated into his performance when Russell rants about losing his high-paying job.
Finally, Frank, with Eddie’s apparent collusion, will (it seems) literally rape Sarah on film as the crew looks on in bewildered discomfort. Eddie encourages Frank to “Do it!” as Sarah screams in apparently real pain. Like Madonna’s breakdown, Russo’s entire performance seems too real and unsettling to be simple acting, and one questions the motivation behind Ferrara’s casting choices. Following the apparent rape, a distraught Sarah yells that Frank can’t act and has to do everything “for real”. Eddie tells them that the scene is over and she cries “No it’s not!” The inner film and the “real life” of the outer film have become inextricable at this point. The next scene is a quiet intimate conversation between Eddie and Sarah as she recounts another rape earlier in her life that resembles too closely the inner story of Claire and Russell.
This sensitive Eddie appears in marked contrast to the director who has pushed Frank Burns to his breaking point in order to achieve new depths of cinematic depravity. As the production progresses, Eddie seems to take on more and more the viler aspects of Frank/Russell’s shared personality. Frank is the embodiment of Eddie’s own sinister impulses which the production of “Mother of Mirrors” brings to the fore. The distinction between the outer film and the inner is quickly eroded. The “Mother” performances are no longer in a separate diagesis with accompanying musical motif and the haze of artifice.
They are incorporated into the backstage segments, with cutaways to Israel on set often interrupting the scenes to direct and comment. He is now embroiled in this realm, not outside presiding over it. The inner film has slipped beyond his control and he has become but another actor within it. Power chords, dollies and microphones now crowd the frame as the actors work, and the technical jargon of crew members is often overheard along with Eddie’s intrusive direction (“That’s right, she’s not there”, as Frank collapses with emotional intensity). Art is no longer separate from life, the world within has expanded to swallow the without, or perhaps the real world has come to dominate the world of artifice.
The TV-documentary style segments continue throughout. In one of these, Eddie tells his actors that Frank is essentially saying “You’re gonna serve God or me”, reflecting Eddie’s own (and Ferrara’s, we may assume) megalomania disguised in the role of film director. “The ultimate is to feel pain and suffering because then you have a chance to survive.” In Israel’s impassioned pleas for Frank to “dig down to hell” for his performance, there is the implication that Keitel/ Israel directing Russo/ Burns is but an extension of Ferrara directing Keitel.
Furthermore, Ferrara references his previous collaboration with Keitel, Bad Lieutenant both generally in Eddie’s spiritual dissolution through drugs, spiritual vacuity and despair, and specifically in the final moments of the film, when Israel sways deliriously in front of a window talking to himself, a virtual copy of a scene in the previous film. The narrative also pays homage to Mean Streets, Keitel’s earliest work for Martin Scorsese (whom Ferrara admires and is often compared to), in a scene in which Israel recounts a surreal sex act mingling blood and semen just as Keitel’s character Charlie does in the earlier film.
Documentary-style footage late in the film has Israel/ Keitel recounting his days in the Marines, but this is Keitel’s own story, one he has told in various interviews. Thus Eddie Israel morphs not only with Ferrara but with the legacy of the actor playing him as well. As these examples demonstrate, the actors themselves here become as intrinsic to the narrative as the “characters” they are portraying. The mirror motif so obviously delineated in the inner film’s sequences is given a variety of expressions in the outer narrative.
There are countless references to dichotomies, doubles, fragmented identities and keeping the world at bay. A conversation in a restaurant with Eddie, Sarah and some Hollywood types is dominated by such allusions. Eddie asks why everyone in L.A. wears sunglasses to which Sarah replies “Because we know how ugly everyone is”. Richard Belzer is trying to fund his film, a script which he wrote “himself”, but with “someone else”. A woman reveals that her father was married to both her mother and her grandmother.
A cutaway shot features a gaggle of superficial Hollywood fashionistas making the scene at the crowded bar, striking poses in their sunglasses and finery. L.A. is all mirrors, deception and surface. After making love to Eddie, Sarah abruptly departs in the same manner she had previously ditched Frank, drawing a direct parallel between the two men. Television screens dominate the discourse in unusual ways that suggest no real difference between what is on the screen and an objective reality.
Eddie is often seen watching dailies on two or more screens at once, seemingly needing many “mirrors” to filter his art and reflect reality. Even off-set, his world is constantly mediated by film images . A party scene features several cutaways to a televised boxing match, but these are presented without a border to convey that the images are in fact on television and the TV they supposedly play on is never in shot. Additionally, in one “Mother of Mirrors” sequence, Russell plays a sex tape of Claire on the TV insisting that there lies the “real Claire”. New York City and Los Angeles comprise reverse images and dichotomies of Eddie’s world. New York is snow, quiet streets, privacy, health, stability, family life and the “real world”.
The scenes there feature a calming classical music piece that seems to be diagetic. Los Angeles is sunshine, public sphere, traffic, crowds, decadence, superficial relationships, chaos and the artifice of movies, all to the pulse of garish neon and gangster rap. Eddie succumbs to the seedy appeal of L.A. and begins wearing dark glasses at all hours and steadily partying. His “real” New York life intrudes on his new existence in the form of a surprise visit by Maddie and Tommy.
They arrive with their own “set” of clothes and luggage, invading Eddie’s space (both physical and psychological) and Hollywood lifestyle. He initially tries to play the part of family man, but is unable to reconcile the two realms and shuts his family out of his life by ignoring them and watching dailies. Maddie accuses him of being “so California”. As Russell tells Claire in “Mother of Mirrors”, “You’re dying to confess every…thing you’ve done…I ain’t ready to bare my soul to nobody!” Moved by self-loathing, Eddie decides to confess his countless infidelities and substance abuse to Maddie in New York. Whatever questionable good intentions he may harbor, he chooses to confess to her on the day of her father’s funeral as he can’t live the “charade” anymore. He once more enters his sleeping son’s bedroom, but is now unable or unwilling to remind him that he is his father.
Violently rejected by Maddie, he is soon on a plane back to L.A. As Dangerous Game draws to its conclusion, Eddie Israel is alone in his hotel room with only a female admirer and images of his film on various monitors for company. The shooting has apparently wrapped and the cast and crew have gone home, his wife has left him and he wastes his days and nights in a drugged stupor, hallucinating and talking to himself. The “Mother of Mirrors” filming has destroyed his life by exposing his corrupt soul to the daylight. Frank and the film can no longer substitute for his own depraved impulses.
No longer able to hide his nature behind the status of film director, he has reached a point of no return and, like Frank/ Russell, must now live out his dark cinematic visions in life instead of art. The footage he watches suggests that his actors have been destroyed by the film as well. The images grow more and more harrowing. and it becomes apparent that it is Eddie, not Frank, who is Sarah’s true tormentor as well as his own. He yells at her, calling her a “commercial piece of shit” (now using the very language of Frank) and informs her that she needs him, he doesn’t need her, just as he no longer needs Frank to stand in for his own troubled soul. Madonna’s shocked reaction to Eddie’s vitriol again suggests an exchange that was unscripted.
Cruelly playing the role of Frank/ Russell himself, Eddie finally badgers Sarah into achieving the line-readings he desires. He wants her to somehow truly and fully become Claire (“I asked you to throw the script away and give me something from you…You just gave me the script again!”), just as both he and Frank have come to embody the role of Russell and his life and the world of the film have become hopelessly and tragically enmeshed.
The soundtrack of the footage with Eddie screaming insanely at his actors carries over into cutaways of Eddie and a film being shown on his plane ride: “Why don’t you pick up the knife and stab this fucker! Who…is Claire?!” The footage on the monitor then shows Frank with a straight-razor to Sarah’s throat. Eddie’s voice says “cut”, but Frank keeps the knife to her throat, dragging her across the set as the crew erupts in chaos. Eddie’s voice is heard yelling to Frank to let her go. Seconds later, as Eddie viciously browbeats Sarah yet again, she refers to herself as “an actress who just got her throat cut”. Eddie reminds her that she is a very famous person and asks her if this is the image she wants to project to young girls, again blurring the icon Madonna with her cinematic alter ego(s) Sarah/ Claire.
The narratives have simultaneously unravelled and converged. The last shot of Eddie is of him lying unconscious and alone in a pool of vomit by the toilet. This closes the outer narrative of the making of “Mother of Mirrors”. But there is a last visitation to the inner film’s diagesis, with its trademark music and blue smoke. Russell approaches Claire and points a gun to her head.
There is a cutaway to Russell’s face as the gun fires, then he slowly walks away. Although the formal construction of this scene points to it being part of the film within the film, after all that has gone before it is impossible to know whether Frank has actually murdered Sarah. Claire/ Sarah’s final words to him before the gun goes off add to the ambiguity: “If you’re gonna do a scene like that do it when you’re sober.”
The credits roll, this time with Bob Dylan singing “Blue Moon”. While Fellini’s film-within-a-film ends with a circus and celebration, the director of Ferrara’s inner film is left with madness, death and despair. In the film’s final moments, as Eddie sits strung-out in front of the TV, the German film director Werner Herzog appears on-screen in an interview. “I shouldn’t make movies anymore, I should go to a lunatic asylum…I feel no happiness..”. But the warning comes too late for Eddie, who has all ready rolled snake-eyes in the dangerous game called “Mother of Mirrors”.
Film and life have swallowed each other and only oblivion remains. II. Themes/Values The essence of Dangerous Game seems reducible to two main thematic concerns: The fluidity of identity and the potential volatility of art. These two notions, like the mirror maze constructions of the film itself, are interrelated to a degree that at times makes one indistinguishable.from the other. Is it an inherent instability of the human persona that yields an equally unwieldy art form that he is then unable to rein in and control? Or does the creative process itself act as a catalyst, producing such fissures and incompatibilities within the artist’s psyche and rendering him a hapless victim of his own creation?
Ferrara, like Fellini and other auteurs of the classic international art cinema, is content to ask the questions while implying there are no easy answers. It is impossible to say at what precise moment these characters and their doubles – in particular, Eddie Israel and Frank Burns – revert to, or embrace, the darker sides of their personalities. It is equally futile to wonder to what degree the Mother of Mirrors film shoot contributes to the downward spirals of all the central characters. It can only be assumed that the splintering of identity is inextricably bound up with some dark and unpredictable force lying beneath the piece of cinematic art on which they collaborate to produce. As suggested above, the notion of a fluid identity in regards to Frank Burns/ Russell is suggested by the spectator’s inability to find a discernible difference between Frank the actor and Russell the character.
The fluidity here is precisely a lack of difference. Unlike the public (director/ artist) and private personas (husband/ father) of Eddie (which eventually break down as we have seen) and the clear distinctions between the actress Sarah Jennings and her character Claire (although there is clearly not a distinction at times between the actresses Sarah and Madonna, who plays her), Frank and Russell have at some point become a single unified sinister force.
The viewer can only assume Frank has not always “been” Russell. He is at least a somewhat successful working Hollywood actor, and therefore must have some sense of responsibility and social decorum. The drugged out, violent and uncontrollable madman that he at some point becomes must conceal a former essential Frank, though what this man was like, or how similar he was to the character Russell, is impossible to say. It seems quite reasonable to assume that Frank is a kind of meter that gages how far the film is spiraling out of Eddie’s (and Ferrara’s) control and taking on a life of its own.
The production becomes a demon of sorts that brings to the fore the true frightening nature of the actor, perhaps against his will, and this same dark force destroys all it touches.
The director is in charge of this creative process but equally a victim of its malevolence. It is difficult to reconcile the inversion of Eddie, his descent into Hell, with the man we are introduced to at the beginning of the film. He is a loving husband and father, as well as an ultra-cool and insightful filmmaker at the top of his game.
His dalliance with Sarah and partying lifestyle can be excused as celebrity behavior, the price of fame. Shutting out his family is part of the creative process, the stress of the job. The duality of his nature is revealed so slowly, so subtly, that even his encouraging Frank’s substance abuse and tolerating minor violence toward Sarah may be written off as his efforts to create a more powerful and gripping film. But by the end of the film(s), he has allowed and encouraged Sarah to be raped and cut on camera, and perhaps even murdered. He has destroyed his family by revealing his infidelities to Maddie at the most inoppurtune of times.
Finally, he is reduced to a delirious degenerate, alone with only his precious film footage and the nullifying comfort of various chemical substances. The viewer realizes almost suddenly that if this is in fact the same Eddie, he is a damaged corrupted one who has allowed his creation to twist him, and (through him) others, to its evil will. While Frank’s transformation, or infection, is off-screen, Eddie’s is at the core of the film but remains as hidden to the viewer, in a sense, as it is to himself. All the markers are there, but the clues can be baffling. In the end, the same questions remain. Is the director in fact the author of these tragedies or does the nature of a work of art determine the actions and behavior of those involved in its creation?
The twin themes are driven home by the fact that not only does the film within, Mother of Mirrors, refuse to be contained by its host Dangerous Game; but the host film is indistinguishable from its own creative process. If Madonna is Sarah and Keitel is Eddie, then it follows that Eddie the director is Ferrara the director as well. As delineated above, the narrative form and style of the film consistently blurs the lines between the film itself and its own production.
The viewer is consistently forced to interpret the nature of the “realities” presented. Perhaps it is the unpredictable and uncontrollable volatility of making Dangerous Game itself that permeates and infects all that we see.
The more layers of identity that are exposed , the more questions we are left with. The personas collide with one another and blend together until there are no clear-cut distinctions between actor and character, art and life. Harvey Keitel is at once the character and director Eddie Israel, the actor Harvey Keitel, and the director of all the above, Abel Ferrara. It is then, perhaps, the force of a volatile art form that directs all these players, at once producing a cohesive, if utterly fragmented, cinematic vision while dismantling all notions of stable identity.
Ferrara’s film, and life, veering out of control is the very subject of Dangerous Game, which therefore is inseperable from the inner film of Mother of Mirrors. The morphing identities of Eddie/ Frank/ Keitel/ Ferrara battle each other to produce a work of art. The art produced, by its very nature, destroys them, either by twisting their personalities into evil, ugly doppelgangers, or by revealing their true deformed and corrupt essences. |
