This and The Blackout are both criminally under rated/appreciated from Ferrara’s incredible run in the 90s.
Dangerous Game is particularly dense in its metatextual exploration of self destruction and exploitation within Hollywood structures. Ferrara is critiquing and questioning every single step of the process it takes to make a movie by practically inserting himself on screen à la Eddie Israel. And as extensively he touches upon these throughlines of narcissism, consumerism, and guilt, the camera stays intimately close, capturing a world of hazy, bleak, and claustrophobic, images -a place between places, the shadow from a blind caressing a cheek, a shimmering pupil engulfed by darkness. In a deeply personal manner, Ferrara blurs reality and performance until they begin to mirror each other, it’s so brutal it’s feels like it’s collapsing in on itself to the point of implosion.
Also, the fact a 1993 Madonna—possibly the biggest pop star in the world at the time—could star in and perform phenomenally in a film this powerful and forbidding is indicative of how hollowly culture currently stands. Could you imagine a Taylor Swift or Charli XCX engaging with, nevertheless elevating, a piece of art of this magnitude? It’s not even a knock on Swift, rather an example of how far out of reach critical and transgressive works have become for mainstream audiences.
This and The Blackout are both criminally under rated/appreciated from Ferrara’s incredible run in the 90s.
Dangerous Game is particularly dense in its metatextual exploration of self destruction and exploitation within Hollywood structures. Ferrara is critiquing and questioning every single step of the process it takes to make a movie by practically inserting himself on screen à la Eddie Israel. And as extensively he touches upon these throughlines of narcissism, consumerism, and guilt, the camera stays intimately close, capturing a world of hazy, bleak, and claustrophobic, images -a place between places, the shadow from a blind caressing a cheek, a shimmering pupil engulfed by darkness. In a deeply personal manner, Ferrara blurs reality and performance until they begin to mirror each other, it’s so brutal it’s feels like it’s collapsing in on itself to the point of implosion.
Also, the fact a 1993 Madonna—possibly the biggest pop star in the world at the time—could star in and perform phenomenally in a film this powerful and forbidding is indicative of how hollowly culture currently stands. Could you imagine a Taylor Swift or Charli XCX engaging with, nevertheless elevating, a piece of art of this magnitude? It’s not even a knock on Swift, rather an example of how far out of reach critical and transgressive works have become for mainstream audiences.
