Trash Caviar: Nicolas Cage Fighting The Ghost Of His Dad

Nicolas Cage and his father are locked in eternal sexual combat.

Each day they slay each other only to rise once again, like Heðinn and Hǫgni, except instead of Viking axes they use, I dunno, giant inflatable dicks or something.

Well, maybe not the real Nic Cage. I’m talking about the film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, my go-to suggestion for anyone who has gotten their toes wet with Con Air or Wicker Man and is looking to dive deeper into the Kabballah of Cage’s extended filmography. On paper it’s a gritty drama about a violently corrupt and drug-addicted cop trying to hold his life together while he investigates a murder. If you watch the movie, though, I think you’ll find that to be an unsatisfying explanation.

It’s simply too absurd, too odd to take at face value. Making an exhaustive list of this film’s idiosyncrasies would take more time than either of us have, but summed result of all these odd choices is a jumbled, vaguely dreamlike experience. By employing tools of Freudian dream analysis**, we can cut through the confusion and arrive at the true point of the movie:

The character study of a man who has both hated and feared his father since childhood, and constantly needs to sexually dominate other men (and women) as a form of proxy warfare against his father’s omni-present specter. He uses women as both a currency for establishing superiority over other men and as an outlet for his suppressed rage towards his mother, whose inability to stand up to his father he blames for ruining his childhood.

** If you are concerned about my lack of formal credentials allow me to assuage you. I have read multiple Wikipedia articles on Freud, and I have “Lacan: A Graphic Guide” somewhere on my bookshelf (original texts are for nerds). You are in highly capable hands.

What Happens

First, some context.

Nicolas Cage plays Terence McDonagh, a homicide detective in New Orleans, and the story begins in the ruins of the city in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina (thanks again, liberals). Nic Cage rescues a prisoner trapped by the floodwater, but not before complaining about ruining his fifty dollar underwear. Ostensibly this scene is supposed to show us that he’s a “complicated” good guy.

Ok, sure.

It flashes forward 6 months to “present day” and we learn that, in some unseen accident, Terence has sustained an injury that has left him opioid dependent and in near-constant pain. When he asks his doctor if he’s going to feel this way forever, the doctor replies with the dismissive tone of a McDonald’s cashier who’s been asked for the 10^th time today if the McRib is coming back this summer.

This kicks off a rapid descent into crippling drug addiction (and gambling too, I guess) which he must balance while also investigating a grisly multiple homicide. He alternates between hunting down his next fix and infiltrating gang circles in order to crack the case.

Although he has a hunch about who is responsible for the murders, he is prevented from arresting his suspect by pesky relics of democracy like “constitutional rights” (Honestly, the founding fathers had no idea what it takes to run a police department). As his addiction gets worse, his gambling debts mount, and his leads grow cold, he turns to increasingly depraved means in order to achieve his ends. Aggravated assault of the elderly, rape, murder—Pretty much nothing is off the table for Terence McDonagh. He is, as we are to learn, one real…bad lieutenant.

That, at a surface level, is what happens. Now strap in while I tell you what it really means.

My Mom Is A Fish

I told you already that Cage aka McDonagh hates his father and is filled with anger towards his mother, but you need not take my word for it. He tells us so himself.

One of the first “present day” scenes shows him snorting a cheeky line of cocaine in his squad car before walking onto the murder scene. While searching the house, he enters the room of a young child killed in the crossfire. He finds and reads aloud a poem which is ostensibly about a fish but, when we view the scene as a dream, can be broken down as tacit confession at having witnessed an early life primal scene (for you un-lettered folks, that’s Freud speak for seeing your parents having sex).

 “My Friend Is A Fish” by Babacar Ndele

My friend is a fish.
He live in my room.
His fin is a cloud.
He sees me when I sleep

No one else is present when McDonagh reads the poem, so no one can verify its existence within the real world of the film. I, for one, believe there is no poem. There is certainly no Babacar Ndele. Much of the film is experienced subjectively through the stupor of whatever c*cktail of uppers and downers McDonagh happens to steal from the evidence room that day, and there are numerous instances throughout the film of him seeing things which definitely don’t exist. What we are seeing is McDonagh, upon being confronted with the tragic death of a child, suddenly being transported via hallucination to the moment his own childhood “died”.

“My friend is a fish”—Fish, though not as overt as snakes, are still phallic dream symbols. “My friend” in this context is his mother. He refers to her as “he” because, being too young to have any conception of sex or gender beyond his own, he assumes all other people are “fish” with male genitalia.

“He live in my room” // “He sees me when I sleep”—These two lines are an inversion of what really happened. He distances himself from the painful memory of catching his parents having sex by telling it in reverse. In reality, HE walked into his PARENTS’ room and watched them when he believed they were sleeping.

“His fin is a cloud”—Seeing his mother naked, he saw that she did not have a penis. Her “fin” was missing. Misinterpreting her cries for pain and his father’s actions as violence, he assumed that his father had somehow stolen her genitalia.

The lingering trauma of this scene is hinted at in the “author’s” name: Badacar Ndele. Or, when you rearrange the letters, Bad Clear Bean. He is already associating missing or “clear” male genitalia with negative emotions. He cannot process why, but he feels that they are bad.

Although we meet McDonagh’s father several times throughout the film, we never see the mother. They divorced early in his childhood, likely soon after he witnessed the primal scene. In the fractured timeline of his childhood, then, he would forever link the primal scene—his mother’s submission and the loss of her genitals—with the collapse of his parent’s relationship. Submission means castration means your parents are getting divorced and now you can’t afford to go to Disneyworld for Christmas.

At the conclusion of the poem, camera pans to nearby desk and shows a fish swimming in a nearby tank. You might say that this implies that the poem is a) not a hallucination, b) written by a child and not McDonagh, or c) probably about an actual f*cking fish, you pseudo-intellectual dum dum. But before you call me names, I should tell you two things about that fish.

1. It was a Betta fish, colloquially pronounced BAY-tuh, like the pejorative used by “Alpha” males to describe men who can buy their girlfriend tampons without having an existential crisis.
2. You cannot put two male Betta fish in a tank together because they will literally murder one another.

This scene is clearly meant to convey symbolic meaning beyond the literal happenings of a man reading a poem about the fish. It is coded language meant to fulfill—as all dreams do—a deeply held, unactualized wish.

For example:
“I wish I had more free time.”
“I wish I felt more financially secure.”

Or, in the case of Terence McDonagh:
“I wish I could avenge myself on my mother for abandoning me my in childhood, and ritualistically engage my father in hand-to-hand combat until one of us is dead or unable to continue.”

For Terence McDonagh this became more than a wish—It became an obsession with avenging himself on his parents for his perceived childhood betrayal.

Apex Sexual Predator

Obsessional tendencies are like psychic tumors, multiplying, dividing, and subsuming healthy tissue in their endless need to grow. See ya never, “Emotional Intelligence”. This is “Castration Anxiety” territory now.

What began for McDonagh in his childhood as a simple fear of his father grew broader and more abstract until it became the fundamental principle guiding his every social interaction. All men, in essence, are stand-ins for his father, and all men will try to steal his genitals unless he first steals theirs. We see this neurosis play out again and again throughout the film. Unless he is the dominant male in every circumstance, then he will die.

Any male can be a target, be that the coworker whose wife’s nudes McDonagh brazenly steals, or the pharmacy security guard who objects when he leaps over the counter to steal a bottle of Vicodin. This isn’t just him being a violent asshole (though he certainly is). There are very specific and familial sexual neuroses at play here, and I’m not just saying that because of the enormous revolver he always has sticking higgledy-piggledy directly down the front of his waistband.

Similarly, all female characters are stand-ins of his mother, who he hates almost as much as his father for “allowing” his father to emasculate her. McDonagh show extreme hostility to mother characters throughout the film. At one point, in order to extract information from a nursing-home caregiver, he pulls the oxygen tubes out of the nose of a woman the nurse is treating. On the verge of tears, he shoves a gun in both of their faces while choking out manic threats.

McDonagh: You ever think about your kids? About your grandkids? Sucking up their inheritance through that god damn oxygen tube? I hate you! I hate you both! I should f*cking kill you right now!

…cool.

The synthesis of his two parental complexes—his anger at the mother and need to dominate his father—is observed most purely in a scene about twenty minutes in. McDonagh stalks a young couple in his squad car after they exit a night club. As he follows them, we hear the couple exchange a few lines of flirty dialogue. However, the female voice heard is clearly not the same voice the woman has when he pulls the couple over a moment later.

Perhaps it’s the result of a sloppily recorded voiceover added in post-production. I doubt Werner Herzog would be that lazy, and the woman’s line delivery approaches Wilhelm Scream-levels of obvious falsity. I believe this, too, is a hallucination: a flashback to a memory of his mother making a flirtatious comment to his father, as perhaps she did earlier in the evening that young McDonagh interrupted their coitus. This triggers in McDonagh a desperate need to rewrite his past. What follows is from an objective standpoint a horrific rape scene, but it’s played, rather bafflingly, like a seduction.

McDonagh threatens to take them to jail after finding drugs and a crack pipe in their pockets. At first, the young woman tries to bribe him with a brooch worth $60k. In an affectedly sultry voice she says “You can give it to your girlfriend. If you don’t have a girlfriend…you can give it to your mother”.

Your mother…mother…give it to…your mother…

McDonagh and the woman smoke crack together, then he rapes her while holding the boyfriend at gunpoint. By assaulting the woman and humiliating the man, McDonagh is attempting to rewrite the history of his painful memory, this time with himself as the dominant figure, and his father as the frightened voyeur.

But not all masculine forces are as easily dominable as reedy, dehydrated club-goers. Cage soon learns that not all Dads are as easy to fight.

Son, You’re Grounded

Little by little the tables turn against McDonagh, and the various Dad-like forces New Orleans gather to enact their revenge. As the classic saying goes, “Psycho-sexual insecurities giveth and psycho-sexual insecurities taketh away”.

McDonagh gets in deep debt with his Bookie-Dad who threatens to send tougher, badder guys to break his legs. Meanwhile, some other Gangster-Dads have shown up to take revenge for one of McDonagh’s many petty robberies. The Cop-Dads, aka the higher-ups at the police department, start to catch on to the fact that their head homicide detective is a drug-addled rapist. Cage is forced to give up his service weapon to the Cop-Dads while bemoaning that “A man without a gun is not a man.” (something, something, guns and penises).

But the coup de grace, the absolute rock bottom comes when his Actual-Dad convinces McDonagh’s girlfriend to sober up and go with him to an AA meeting. This effectively “steals” her from McDonagh, as she relies on him heavily to support her addiction. With no need for drugs, she has no need for him. Alone and defeated, he slinks to the living room where the stepmother is watching…bullfighting?

Wait wait wait. Hold on. This is American TV she is watching. I’m having a hard time conceiving of a situation where this person, in this place, would be watching bullfighting.

This woman’s daily routine consists of sitting on the same moldy sofa switching between syndicated ’80s game shows and calling the hotlines for class-action lawsuits. Eventually an anti-smoking ad makes her feel personally attacked so she throws her beercan at the cable box and goes to sleep in protest. You’re telling me she watches f*cking bullfighting? Bum fights I would give you. Even dogfighting is more likely. Bullfighting is a metaphor. And if you don’t know what a “bull” is in a sexual context, I’m afraid I’ve been forbidden from linking you to any content directly, but I’d highly encourage you to take a second and look it up.

Sitting in silence next to his stepmom, Nic realizes that his father is the bull, and he is the bullfighter being penetrated with horns and rag-dolled around an arena for the world’s amusement. In his mind, he is being cuckolded by an entire world of paternal authority.

Frick You, Dads!

The redemption arc of a typical movie wouldn’t have the main character engage in so much overt racism and murder, but as you’ve probably gathered this is not a typical movie; This is the cinematic sublimation of taking a Buzzfeed “How Many Dads Can You Beat In A Fight?” quiz and trying to max out the score.

Question 1: When your father convinces your drug-addicted girlfriend to sober up and go to AA meetings, what do you do?

1. Follow suit for the sake of yourself and your relationship.
2. Support her, and begin to reconsider your own addiction.
3. Snort coke in the dimly lit living room of your childhood home and then (probably) have sex with your stepmom.

McDonagh circles “C” like he’s the son in The Ring and doesn’t stop until the movie is over. When the world f*cks Terence McDonagh, the only recourse he understands is to f*ck it right back, working his way up the food chain of power like a roid-raged salmon bullying its way upstream.

Having sex with his stepmom gives McDonagh the boost of masculine confidence he needs to accomplish his next task: settling the score with his Bookie-Dad. He still has money down on a college football game, so he tracks down the start running back of the team he bet against, plants weed on him, and threatens to ruin his life unless he throws the game. This football player is very large, and very muscular, so this act of domination has Nic feeling good.

With his confidence even higher, McDonagh sneaks into the police station evidence room to steal back his revolver—or, in his own words, his manhood—from the Cop-Dads. He jams it back into his beltline with a tad too much gusto, then takes off to slay his final foe.

Gangster-Dads: Large men with large guns who committed the beginning murder that so deeply affected McDonagh that it brought him back to the life-altering scene of his parents having sex. McD has had a hunch the whole movie about who the perp is but didn’t have enough evidence to make anything stick. The name of this elusive and powerful man, coincidentally, is Big Fate.

Cage convinces Fate that they can work together, that he can be Fate’s man on the inside. He takes Big Fate down by persuading him to take a hit off of McDonagh’s “lucky” and very phallic crack pipe. McDonagh plants the DNA-covered pipe at the original murder scene, then uses it as evidence to get a warrant and take Big Fate down. In the ultimate act of masculine sexual domination, he wins by getting “Fate” to suck his “dick”.

In Conclusion: Tilting At Phallic Windmills

By the end of the movie, he has ostensibly overcome every challenge facing him. He is financially secure, the crooked deadbeats are in prison, and he gets to make his father watch him get promoted to a rank he never achieved (eat this, dad!). And yet, he is just as much of a wreck as when the movie started. Despite all his successes, he still sneaks away from home to do drugs alone in cheap hotel rooms.

Terence McDonagh is broken. He has been broken since he was a child, and no one has ever had the time, the tools, or the patience to help him put himself back together. Even the victories feel empty, because when you are fighting an invisible foe you can never really win. He can’t magically make his parents get back together or undo humiliations from his childhood.

There will always be Banker-Dads at the loan office telling you that your Monster Truck Fitness class idea is commercially unviable. There will always be commanding Dad-Officers at the police department telling you that you need “probable cause” before unloading your service weapon into a poorly parked Toyota.

The film, ultimately, is pessimistic about McDonagh’s fate. The final scene shows him sitting in an aquarium, high as hell, while all manners of marine life floats around. His mind races with images of cloudy fins and clear beans.

“Do fish have dreams?” he asks.

Yes, Nic. They have dreams of fighting their dad.