32. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans w/ Keith Phipps

We head down to the Big Easy with Nicolas Cage scholar Keith Phipps (author of The Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career) to discuss Werner Herzog's hallucinatory tale of a bad cop trying to do the right thing, of addiction in the swamp, of nature's ever-encroaching wildness into our staid lives. We dive deep into Cage and Herzog both, exploring why they make a perfect pair and how their take on Bad Lieutenant differs so radically from Abel Ferrara's original. We consider the possibility of absolution in a godless world and whether we can ever really escape our animalistic impulses -- two themes that seem to perfectly encapsulate the careers of Cage and Herzog. Listen to the end for a breakdown of various scenes and some recommendations of Cage movies to check out next!