Light Sleeper

It is oftentimes said that writers spend their entire lives writing the same book over and over again and of course the same has also been said of filmmakers, especially of the auteur oriented sort like Federico Fellini and Alexander Kluge, but also seemingly autistic Hollywood blockbuster whores like Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. Undoubtedly, if any American auteur provides great evidence to this theory, it is screenwriter turned filmmaker Paul Schrader (Cat People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters), who first came to fame for penning Taxi Driver (1976) and would go on to direct a number of cinematic works that feel like reworkings of the screenplay for that film. Indeed, if Hardcore (1979) is a sort of ‘Calvinist Taxi Driver’ and Affliction (1997) is a ‘redneck Taxi Driver,’ Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992) is a ‘bourgeois Taxi Driver,’ albeit with a tad bit of American Gigolo (1980) thrown in for good measure (additionally, The Walker (2007) would be Schrader's ‘dick-sucking Southern dandy American Gigolo’ and the Scorsese/Schrader collaboration Bringing Out the Dead (1999) is like ‘Taxi Driver as an EMT’). Of course, in the sense that it is about a reasonably intelligent ex-drug addict who is suffering a midlife crisis, one could argue that it is the most autobiographical of Schrader’s Bressonian ‘a man and his room’ films. In fact, as the auteur stated himself in the book Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (1990) in regard to Light Sleeper and its relation to his other works, “Well, that form of the script is the same as the format of TAXI DRIVER, in that it uses pseudo-chapters rather than scene numbers, but the deeper connection comes from the fact that this is a character that I have felt comfortable with in the past and hadn’t written about in some time. As to the specific moments – well, you don’t want to be too self-referential, but if it works, it works, and if you’re ploughing the same row ten or fifteen years on, you’re going to end up with the same roots being dug up. The character of John LeTour is, in my mind, another installment of the characters of Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER and Julian Kay in AMERICIAN GIGOLO. These characters are really not so much people as souls, they drift around and things happen to them, they watch and they are acted upon. I don’t really see this group of films as a trilogy, I just think that as I get older my views about this character and these themes change. So that when the character and myself were in our twenties, he was very hostile and paranoid and felt oppressed by the world, and was a cab driver. When he was in his thirties he was very narcissistic and self-involved, and he was a gigolo. Now he’s forty and he’s anxious and uncertain, and he delivers drugs. He hasn’t made anything of his life, and he doesn’t know what will become of him.”  Needless to say, Light Sleeper does not feature a grungy porno-obsessed prole weirdo who becomes murderously obsessed with saving a hopelessly naive teenage prostitute from a white pimp like in Taxi Driver, but it does feature a devastating portrait of self-destructive inwardness that explodes into a poetic transcendental bloodbath.

 I might be a good decade shy of suffering a midlife crisis and I have never sold drugs as a career, but I certainly could somewhat empathize with the loner protagonist of Schrader’s film, even if I found him to be somewhat of a passive bitch in many respects. Indeed, I could identify with the titular insomniac in the sense that the protagonist feels like he is trapped in a sort of perpetual soul-draining personal pandemonium where he hates his job and life and feels like he has no other options and has run out of what he describes as “luck” (notably, the protagonist and his friends believe in New Age bullshit and love chatting about numerology, among other hopelessly banal esoteric things).  Undoubtedly, the increasingly mentally perturbed protagonist is like a forlorn phantom who passively drifts through life and does only the bare minimum to survive in his insufferably sterile and stagnant world of white collar dope dealing, though a seeming case of hypergraphia compels him to write in journals that he disposes of soon after he finishes filling them up with writing, as if he is ashamed of what he has written and considers it to be more or less a disposable waste that is the putrid result of his brain defecating.  A film about a man with no life who, due to his trade, is constantly wandering in and out of other people's lives, it is not surprisingly probably the only flick where a drug dealer is used as a midlife crisis metaphor.  While an extremely personal cinematic work, the protagonist is actually based on a real-life drug dealer that Schrader knew and naturally decided to reconnect with when he was assembling the project.  Interestingly, Schrader has also compared Light Sleeper to Taxi Driver in the sense that he wrote the script very fast as if he was being compelled by some unseen force, or as he stated himself, “It came to me pretty much as a piece; I saw it all, and I always knew what was going to come next. What happened was that I had a dream about this character sometime in September 1990, somebody I had know years before. I woke up at about four in the morning, and I knew from that moment that he wanted me to write about him. By six I also knew I was definitely going to do just that. I hadn’t written about this type of character in almost ten years. I’d been looking around for a personal, original piece to write and it hadn’t been coming, so I had given up, and then it just came. So I set off to track down this man I had known.”  It should also be noted that Schrader has himself described Light Sleeper as an ‘inverse Taxi Driver,’ as the autobiographical lead was transformed from an active man that symbolically drove the cab to a passive man that sits in the back (in fact, Willem Dafoe spends almost as much as time in a taxi as De Niro's did in the Scorsese flick).

 Not surprisingly, Schrader has described Light Sleep as his most personal film, with the prole ex-GI Travis Bickle being replaced with a character that the auteur could more relate to as a spiritually-oriented ex-drug addict who has suffered much personal failure, especially in relation to love and romance. During the film, the protagonist is reunited with his great love—a woman he has not seen in a longtime who he had a very toxic relationship with that involved lots of drugs and self-destruction—by happenstance and makes a predictable attempt to get back with her, only to lose her in the most violent and tragic of ways, thereupon leading him to take serious action for possibly the first time in his entire life.  An emotionally turbulent flick with a somewhat ironical ending about a man who is only able to get free from his personal purgatory by finally accepting he is imprisoned, Light Sleeper is a tale of personal redemption that most people will find totally inexplicable because the morose protagonist ultimately loses his personal freedom at the conclusion yet develops a hopeful and optimistic mindset as a result. In other words, Schrader’s film is a somewhat arcane cinematic work that probably can only been truly understood and/or appreciated by people that have experienced some form personal despair or alienation. Indeed, Light Sleeper might be about bourgeois coke peddlers and features some sex and nudity and a couple of violent deaths, but it is probably not going to appeal to someone that sees the guido gangsters of Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) as cool cats that are worthy of emulation.  In that sense, Schrader's film is one of only a handful of cinematic works that makes drug dealing seem about as glamorous as working as a technician at a Wal-Mart pharmacy.

 As seemingly perennially dejected dope dealing protagonist John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) narrates at the very beginning of the film while riding in the back of a taxi, “Labor Day weekend. Some time for a garbage strike. Everybody crazy to stock up. They want to score at the last minute and they want it now. Never fails. The faces look alike. You gotta use memory tricks: each has some peculiarity. It keeps your sharp. A D.D. told me, when a drug dealer starts writing a diary, it’s time to quit. I started writing after that. Not every night. Now and then. Fill up one book, throw it out, start another.”  Indeed, not unlike with the summer heat that makes the wops and negroes in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) become all the more irritable and destructive, the sight and stench of piles upon piles of trash that are crowding the streets of NYC as a result of the garbage strike seems to be only compounding LeTour’s unending personal misery, which reaches its peak in the film and is ultimately released in the form of murder. A reformed drug addict that has ironically spent over the last decade peddling cocaine to a rich and largely Wall Street connected clientele that is willing to pay a highly inflated price so they don’t have to endanger their lives by attempting to procure dubious product from dubious darkies on the literally and figuratively dark side of town, LeTour is a born loner-cum-loser that is forced to regularly socialize with various individuals that he seems to be quite apathetic towards as a result of his trade, including a ‘Theological Cokehead’ (David Spade) who states to the protagonist whilst sitting in his whitey tighties in between snorting a line of blow, “…so if there’s no God, then how can we conceive of him? I mean, the idea of God presupposes the existence of God. That is the Ontological Argument. That’s Anselm. That’s 1200 or 1400.” The protagonist works for a hot yet vulgar fire-crotched fag hag named Ann (Susan Sarandon) and her mustached best fag friend Robert (David Clennon), who looks like the typical AIDS-ridden homo agitator featured in Rosa von Praunheim’s aberrosexual agitprop docs Silence = Death (1990) and Positive (1990). As LeTour describes, Ann “made” him the d.d. bitch-boy he is today, as he found her glamorous and wanted to become a part of her supposedly exciting life, but a lot of things have changed since the 1970s and crack has destroyed the supposed glamour that was once associated with the black market drug trade. While Ann and Robert plan to get out of the criminal underground and go legit by starting a super chic cosmetics company, LeTour does not know what he wants to do, though he is thinking about getting into music recording. Of course, as his various past failed life plans demonstrate, LeTour is an aimless and seemingly weak-willed fellow who cannot seem to commit to anything, including Ann, who is clearly a longtime romantic interest of his.  While Ann incessantly flirts with him to the point where she jokes about giving him blowjobs, LeTour just cannot seem to initiate a love affair with her, even though he is in her company all the time. Luckily, fate will force the protagonist to get a little bit of testicular fortitude and compel him to take serious action, even though he does not want to. 

 As a result of a “yuppie murder” involving a “19-year-old Barnard co-ed bitch” whose corpse was found with a large amount of cocaine in the middle of a public park, the police have become interested in high-class drug dealers of LeTour’s ostensibly cultivated caliber. As a man that does not own a TV and does not read newspapers, LeTour learns about the homicide from a dopey ghetto wigger dope dealer named ‘Jealous’ (Sam Rockwell), who warns him to be on the lookout for pesky cops.  Jealous also complains that, “19 gram shit is a drag” in regard to the size of their dope transaction, but the protagonist is not about to get charged with dealing because he is carrying a couple extra grams of the rich man's candy (as LeTour explains regarding the law, “19 is carrying, 20 is dealing” when it comes to cocaine).  Not surprisingly, LeTour does not think much of his buyers or their drug-addled pseudo-philosophical rants as demonstrated by his remark, “Everybody wants to talk. It’s like a compulsion. My philosophy is: You got nothing to say? Don’t say it. They figure, you can tell a D.D. anything. Things they’d never tell anyone else. Of course they’re stoned to start.” Despite his antisocial attitude, LeTour cares enough about clients to not let them kill themselves with the drugs that he sells them. Indeed, when a fairly Jew-y junky Wall Street type of the exceedingly effeminate sort named Eddie (Paul Jabara)—a fellow whose drug addiction apparently ruined his marriage and a number of jobs—demands more drugs than the protagonist is willing to sell them, LeTour refuses to give in and later calls his client’s brother when he suffers a sort of violently deranged dope psychosis. Undoubtedly, LeTour’s most prestigious client is a suave yet slimy Swiss prick named Tis (Hebrew Victor Garber doing his best ‘evil Aryan aristocrat’ caricature) who has the protagonist deliver him some Valium (aka diazepam) at a hospital as a result of getting exceedingly stressed that he had to bring an underage teenage girl to the emergency room after she overdosed on coke. Although he has no clue at the beginning of the film, Tis will ultimately become LeTour’s arch nemesis. 

 While LeTour has nothing to live for at the beginning of the film, that somewhat changes during a dreary rainy night when he spots his ex-girlfriend Marianne Jost (Dana Delany) standing outside in the rain while riding in a taxi. LeTour has not seen or talked to Marianne in many years and she is not exactly happy to see him because they had a considerably corrosive drug-fueled relationship that concluded in a nasty fashion.  Apparently, LeTour has made numerous attempts to reconnect with his ex-flame, but she has routinely ignored him as she fears reigniting the passionate and exciting yet mutually destructive cocaine-driven romance that they once had. While Marianne reluctantly agrees to get in the taxi, she soon gets out after LeTour lies to her by telling her that he is completely straight and has quit dealing (somewhat humorously, LeTour's beeper gives him away immediately after he tells Marianne in a seemingly sincere fashion that his powder-peddling days are over). Luckily for the protagonist, he later bumps into Marianne and her much nicer sister Randi (Jane Adams) while delivering drugs to Tis at the hospital. The Jost sisters are at the hospital because their mother is dying of cancer, so it is a somewhat awkward time for LeTour to attempt to weasel his way back into Marianne's life. While her mother apparently loves him, Marianne refuses to allow LeTour to see her, though she agrees to follow him to the hospital cafeteria where she unloads her many justifiable grievances and complaints in regard to the seemingly nightmarish nature of their terribly failed romance.  Somewhat ridiculously, Marianne more or less blames LeTour for ruining her entire life. Indeed, when LeTour dares to happily state to her in regard to their past relationship, “We were happy,” she somewhat aggressively replies, “We were miserable. We were either scoring or coming down. Mostly coming down.” Naturally, when the protagonist states, “Out on the streets dancing with friends. . .We were magical,” Marianne begs to differ and replies, “You took off for 3 months without telling me and called once. That’s how magical we were. You were an encyclopedia of suicidal fantasies. I heard every one. I mean, nobody could clear a room like you, John. And the friends, you may have noticed, turned out to be mine, not yours. I envy you. A convenient memory is a gift from God. In rehab it’s called ‘Euphoric Recall.’ You only remember the highs, never the lows.” Of course, Marianne's unwavering negatively and hostility does not stop LeTour from attempting to get her back, as he then brags to her about being clean from drugs for two years and states, “If I could do that, I could do anything. We could do anything. We could start all over again.” Somewhat annoyed that he is attempting to drag her back into a relationship that she assumes will be catastrophic for her life, Marianne abruptly decides to leave, though the viewer suspects that she still loves the protagonist and that she is fighting as hard as she can to not give into her deep-seated emotional and lustful longings. That night, instead of thinking about Marianne when he gets home, LeTour writes in regard to his sassy fag hag boss, “I can always find another way to make a living. I never planned this in the first place. Not like Ann. She came up to sell, have parties, make contacts. She was glamorous. I just wanted to be around her. She’d sit up listening to coke stories. Now it’s me and Robert. The whole crowd was the same age then. Everybody’s younger now. She made me.” Of course, LeTour’s desire to reignite his romance with Marianne does not end there. 

 When he has a lunch ‘date’ with Ann the next day, LeTour asks his beauteous boss, “What are the odds of meeting someone that you haven’t seen in years twice in 2 days?” and she reveals her affinity for metaphysical mumbo jumbo by replying, “If it’s indicated in your house of relationships, it’s pretty high. You should have Robert do your chart.” Indeed, aside from playing films directed by Crowleyite auteur Kenneth Anger at her apartment (indeed, during a scene at the beginning of the film, Scorpio Rising (1964) can be seen playing on a TV in Ann's apartment), Ann is into numerology and Madame Blavatsky, among other things that demonstrate that she is a superstitious chick who lives life according to ‘emotions’ and ‘senses’ as opposed to reason. While LeTour and Ann both seem like they want to declare their romantic affection for one another, it seems like they have too many emotional and psychological hang-ups to say what they really mean. When Ann asks him if he will still keep in contact with her after they close their underground stardust operation, LeTour holds Ann’s hand and passionately declares in an unintentionally goofy fashion, “Ann, you want me, just call. Write a letter, tell a wino, I’ll be there.” Naturally, Ann is somewhat taken aback by LeTour’s response and does not know how to react. While LeTour’s conversation with Ann does not lead to anywhere romantic, he does finally rekindle his long awaited lurid love affair with his ex-flame Marianne later that night. Indeed, while she does accuse the protagonist of wasting a decade of her life, Marianne cannot help but kiss him in the hospital hallway and then take him back to her inordinately stylishly decorated apartment where they make passionate love. Notably, it is apparently the first time the two have fucked when they were both sober. While staring at LeTour’s purple-headed love truncheon, Marianne remarks while practically drooling, “That’s quite an erection!” and he replies, “I never had anything like it stoned.” In fact, Marianne is so hopelessly horny that she gleefully confesses to the protagonist in regard to her aroused main vein, “I’m dripping.” While the two have seemingly otherworldly sex and subsequently fall asleep while embracing one another in a loving fashion, LeTour later awakes to find Marianne getting dressed and preparing to sneak out of the apartment, thus underscoring the female character's annoyingly emotionally schizophrenic behavior.  When LeTour questions her about what she is doing, Marianne states in an exceedingly bitchy fashion, “This is the end. It was wonderful and I’m glad it happened this way. It will never happen again. You will not call me. You will not see me again. I’m happy for you. I wish you the best. I’m leaving. I shouldn’t have left the hospital, but I don’t regret it. Please get dressed and leave as soon as you can. I have a key. Bye.”  Needless to say, LeTour refuses to accept his ladylove's rather callous final farewell, though, as the film soon demonstrates, both he and she would have been better off if he had.

 On top of the fact that Marianne has dropped out of his life again and refuses to return his calls, LeTour finds himself being hassled by a short angry guido cop with the rather fitting name Bill Guidone (Robert Cicchini) who threatens to bust him if he does not give him any leads regarding the death of the rich 19-year-old “co-ed bitch” that was found with dope on her, stating in a stereotypically bombastic wop-ish fashion, “Tell me something I don’t already know. It’s either that, leave town, or get your ass busted day in, day out.” When LeTour discovers that Marianne’s mother has finally died, he makes the major mistake of randomly showing up at the funeral where he is predictably immediately verbally reamed by his morbidly depressed (ex)lover. Indeed, as soon as she sees the protagonist walk into the funeral home, Marianne causes a scene by smacking and pushing him while screaming in his face like a demented banshee bitch on crack, “Every time you come into my life something terrible happens. I thought I was rid of you. What are you . . . ? How did you . . . ? I don’t want you here! I don’t want you around! I don’t want you around my mother! Damn you! Just get out! Get the fuck out of my life! Get out! Get out of here!” As LeTour soon discovers, Marianne’s mother died when they were fucking, hence her hateful irrational hostility towards him, as if their lovemaking session resulted in her mommy's long overdue death. Later that night when LeTour goes to deliver some drugs to Swiss twit Tis at his luxury sky rise apartment, he is horrified to find Marianne there totally stoned out of her mind.  Needless to say, Marianne is quite embarrassed and refrains from saying anything to LeTour. When a visibly highly dejected LeTour exits the apartment building, he soon hears a woman scream and receives the heartbreaking shock of a lifetime when he sees Marianne’s corpse lying on the sidewalk pavement.  Naturally, LeTour refuses to believe that Marianne would commit suicide by jumping out of a building. While the police, media, and even her family conclude that Marianne committed self-slaughter since she was morbidly depressed as a result of both her's mother death and the fact that she had completely ruined her life and had nothing to live for, LeTour immediately realizes that Tis killed both the 19-year-old teen and his lady love and thus seeks to take revenge against the super smug Swiss neo-preppie prick. 

 After calling guido cop Guidone and telling him that Marianne was murdered and hinting that Tis was the killer, LeTour decides that he must protect himself and buys a handgun from a sleazy Latino and his sub-literate Afro-Hispanic homeboy. When Ann demands that the protagonist deliver some drugs to Tis, he attempts to refuse and complains, “I don’t want to go. I have a bad vibe.” Ultimately, LeTour eventually reluctantly agrees to deliver dope to Tis when Ann volunteers to accompany him, though he demands that they make a detour stop at his apartment so that he can grab his supposed “lucky sweater” (aka his gun). When the two cultivated coke dealers finally arrive at Tis’ place, they are shocked to see two armed bodyguards at the door. In fact, the bodyguards piss Ann off so much that she grabs one of their guns, tosses it onto the ground, and yells, “I told you greasy fucks, no guns! When I see a fucking gun, I walk! How fucking dare you?!” Of course, Ann does not stop there, as she goes up to the other body guard—a small and swarthy mestizo—and hits him in the testicles while screaming, “And I don’t know who you are, you little beaner, but kiss my fat ass!” When Tis finally comes out, he apologizes for the weapons and says they are merely for “emphasis.” While Ann somewhat calms down, she knows something is suspicious when Tis tells her to leave so that he can talk to LeTour about police matters. Undoubtedly a smart little bitch that does not take shit from anyone, Ann follows Tis' demand by exiting the apartment but then proceeds to start screaming “fire” while knocking on various apartment doors, thus assuring the police will soon be there. As soon as Ann begins screaming like a harpy, a somewhat anticlimatic gun fight breaks out that ends with Tis running to a back bedroom while LeTour shoots and kills his two bodyguards, though the protagonist is shot in both the arm and leg in the process. Clearly in great pain as a result of his wounds, LeTour wobbles into the back bedroom where he shoots LeTour in the middle of the forehead while he less than inconspicuously attempts to grab a gun that he has hidden inside a duffle bag. Naturally, LeTour is subsequently imprisoned for murdering Tis and the two body guards, though he is in inordinately high spirits for a man that will probably spend the next half of a decade locked inside a cage located inside a maximum security prison full of psychopathic negro rapists, Latino gang members, and goombah gangsters, among other forms of human rabble. In the final scene of the film, which is an obvious homage to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Ann visits LeTour in jail and the two expression their desire begin a lurid love affair. Indeed, after describing how he will probably spend no more than 5-7 years in prison, LeTour reveals that he is in high hopes and tells Ann, “It hasn’t been so bad. It’s a relief in a way. So far. I’ve been writing. . .And reading.”  LeTour also decides to ask Ann, “Did we ever fuck?,” even though he already knows the answer.  In regard to their future plan to finally fuck, LeTour states to Anne, “It’s one of the things I think about. One of the things I look forward to. I’ve been looking forward,” to which she replies, “Me, too. Strange how things work.” In the end, LeTour kisses Ann’s hand as a sort of gesture of love and devotion to her, even if it is doubtful that any woman would wait so many years for a man, especially a man whose member she never even got to sample. 

 Undoubtedly, the great borderline infuriating irony of Light Sleeper is that the hapless protagonist only becomes ‘free’ when he is imprisoned, as if he was so perennially stubborn in his fatalistically forlorn mindset that it took becoming a murderous criminal to realize what was right in front of his face all along, especially in terms of love, but of course one should not expect anything less from a Schrader flick where the whole Bressonian redemption motif is taken to almost absurdist extremes that border on the (pseudo)Biblical. Another great irony of the film is that, although it is hopelessly late-1980s/early-1990s in terms of overall aesthetic and largely soulless characters and was made at a time where auteurist cinema was practically completely dead, it is more auteur oriented and non-commercial in its essence than the most personal and idiosyncratic works of the New Hollywood era.  Somewhat inexplicably, even the rather outmoded score by Michael Been (who incidentally played the apostle John in the Schrader penned Scorsese flick The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)) still manages to perfectly compliment the film (notably, Schrader originally planned to use some Bob Dylan songs, but luckily he decided otherwise). It should also be noted that the film was shot by American cinematographer Edward Lachman who got his start acting as an assistant director and cameraman on Werner Herzog’s masterpiece Stroszek (1977) and would go on to shoot important cinematic works ranging from Larry Clark’s quasi-pornographic skater melodrama Ken Park (2002) to Ulrich Seidl’s no less pornographic anti-globalization drama Import/Export (2007) to Todd Solondz’s pedo piece Life During Wartime (2009). While it is quite obvious that Lachman at least partly modeled his cinematography after Taxi Driver, especially the many scenes where the protagonist is riding in a taxi, Schrader had the cinematographer watch a couple early Michelangelo Antonioni films to give him an idea of the look he wanted (notably, as the auteur once stated in regard to the film's look, “Antonioni is always good to look at because he loves to define situations by architecture”). Of course, the NYC architecture featured in the film is as dreary and emotionally oppressive as the protagonist’s forsaken soul, thus making it all the more fitting that it concludes in a brightly lit white prison after the protagonist has figuratively ‘seen the light.’ 

 While Light Sleeper is surely not my favorite Schrader flick, it is arguably the director's most immaculate cinematic work to date. Indeed, aside from the dubiousness of the somewhat abrupt murderous climax (personally, I could not imagine a passive pussy like the protagonist killing anyone, let alone three men in a couple minutes) and glaring recycling of the Bressonian ending of American Gigolo, there is not much to criticize (indeed, I even found Susan Sarandon, who I usually cannot stand, quite fuckable, even when I was hoping someone would shove their cock in her mouth so that she would shut up). In its depiction of swarthy Wall Street types high on dope and a scene where Sarandon repugnantly flirts with a young Hasidic Hebrew that she regularly does ‘business’ with, Schrader’s film also has a vague and wholly unintentional Der Stürmer-esque quality.  Considering the film's decidedly dispiriting tone and grim and gloomy aesthetic essence, I think it is only fitting that it features a Hasidic Jew, as they subscribe to a religion that worships death and they have a physical appearance that I personally find to be more insufferably grotesque than that of a semi-rotten bloated corpse, but I digress.  While Light Sleeper has what might be described as a happy ending, it is still a decided downer that sometimes makes Taxi Driver seem like a dark romantic-comedy by comparison, even if it is nowhere near as violent or sleazy (in fact, Schrader should be commended for his understated approach to such subversive material).  After all, there is not many films were a terribly troubled loner finds solace after killing three guys and being imprisoned, but such is the uniquely unhinged vision of a (once) suicidal lapsed Calvinist that was a member of a supposedly hip cocaine-fueled cocksucker party scene during the 1970s despite being heterosexual.  A bizarrely optimistic ‘feel-bad’ flick that concludes in an almost absurdly yet somehow fittingly utopian way, Light Sleeper is a film that demonstrates to the viewer in a sensitively nuanced fashion that, no matter how miserable and unendurable existence gets, there will always be another exciting chapter in your life, even if your great love is thrown out of a building by a rather dapper Swiss psychopath.  

-Ty E