Bad Lieutenant

The brilliance of Abel’s cinematic ethos is telling stories where an individual’s behavior is viewed more a symptom of societal structures and actually represents outcomes that are already deeply encoded into systems rather than each person as a self contained vehicle of free will. I think this is one of the most important realizations a moral person must come to in order to escape caveman thinking where bad actions = bad people and bad people must be punished. Bad Lieutenant is more than a movie about a fucked up cop abusing his power. It forces us to reckon with the levels of depravity encoded into our society which go far beyond unchecked police power.