Bringing Out The Dead (1999)

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1999)

Dir: Martin Scorsesse

My freshman year in college I stayed in the dorms on campus, like most students. I remember a TV station that was available only to students, almost a campus PBS. Every night, the station played a handful of movies. These movies weren’t chosen from the greatest of the last century of film, no, these films were picked as recent releases. So, for a few months during my first year at film school, every night I saw parts of Bringing Out The Dead. Scorcese’s last film of the 20th century now holds a high nostalgia factor because of this. There was a symbiosis that occurred within the film and my real life as a student. As Nicholas Cage drifted from one trauma to another, feeling the repetition of a Sisyphean existence and no reprieve of sleep, I too felt a similar rolling of the rock up a great hill.

Each night the same as the last. A living and breathing déjà vu that’s experienced in real time. There are long stretches of our lives that we cannot escape. These cycles of repetition leading us nowhere and leaving us unfeeling never seem to end. While critiques of Bringing Out The Dead speak of the spiritual connection between the New York of the late nineties to the grit of the city in Taxi Driver, it’s difficult to see past the mere cinematography connection. Travis Bickle is an unstable veteran who wants to rid the world the disgust he sees all around him. Sure, he drives a cab and has a first-hand account of New Yorkers, but his savior complex only extends to Jodie Foster’s Iris. Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) is good at his job as a paramedic, he was once referred to as a saint, but after his failure to save an asthmatic girl, his confidence is shaken. Frank is traumatized to the point where he sees the ghosts of those he could not save. If only he could find sleep without the nightmares of his past. If only he could get fired, maybe he could find peace. The atmosphere and cinematography are reminiscent of Taxi Driver, but our protagonists are lightyears apart.

Frank’s odyssey is a nightly dive into the underworld of human tragedy. My wife works in the hospital and gazes into the eyes of those that understand death as a reality and not as a far-off concept. There’s a strength healthcare workers have, that’s unseen anywhere else. Facing mortality and the fragility of the flesh on a daily basis changes you. You build a shell to it. The shell is composed of those notes to self that say, I am here to help. You are helping. This shell takes time to form and longer to maintain. Frank makes a bad call. He cannot place the tube correctly and due to the time and attempts at trying, a little girl dies on the sidewalk. His hands have harmed and his shell crumbles. From that event on, he feels every call he’s on will result in him killing someone. It isn’t until the conclusion of his journey, when Frank makes an unethical but moral choice to end someone’s life that he realize he still has it within him to save others.

Sidenote: Nicholas Cage would go long stretches without sleep for the character of Frank Pierce. I’m pretty sure that anytime we see Cage in this film, he looks like sh*t, and it’s not makeup.