My “Theology & Film” students are currently writing a paper on Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999). While admired by many critics, Scorsese’s drama about a melancholic New York City paramedic bombed at the box office. Released towards the end of the rollicking Clinton era—roughly a year before the hotly disputed “Bush v Gore” election and two years before 9/11—Bringing Out the Dead was better suited for an era preoccupied with the questions about pain, death, and healing. With this in mind, it is not surprising that the film has received renewed attention in recent years amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Its scenes about crowded emergency rooms, burned-out medical personnel, and the lure of pharmacological “deliverance” are all too relevant in 2022.
Still, at bottom, Bringing Out the Dead is not a film about politics or society. As one of my students observed, the movie does not really have a plot. Rather, it is an attempt to cinematically represent how people experience and cope with suffering. The movie’s protagonist is Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a veteran paramedic who treats his job as a sacred calling to help others. Indeed, as he explains, to save a life is to feel as if “God has passed through you,” as if “God was you.” The only problem is that Frank hasn’t saved anyone in a long time. He can’t sleep, and his sense of divine mission has abandoned him:
To be sure, not all of Frank’s fellow paramedics feel the way he does. His regular partner Larry (John Goodman) is mostly worried about where to eat on the graveyard shift. Detached from the existential questions surrounding him, Larry exemplifies what Martin Heidegger calls “idle talk” (Gerede). On the other end of the spectrum is Tom (Tom Sizemore), a military veteran who resents the drug addicts and petty criminals who consume his time and the public’s resources. Drawn to rather than repelled by violence, Tom views the night shift as an opportunity for retribution:
Finally, there is Marcus (Ving Rhames), whose good-natured humor and evangelical piety seemingly ward off demons and ghosts:
Yet, for all of his charm, Marcus does not truly empathize with his patients. For him, being a paramedic is almost fun—a night on the town, during which he can flirt with women, have a few laughs, and go home knowing he’s not as badly off as those he serves. He does not identify with the suffering of others, but floats above it, protected by a kind of “prosperity gospel.”
Frank isn’t so lucky. He literally cannot escape his patients’ sorrows. He has frequent visions of a teenage girl who died from an overdose. In one key scene, he follows Mary (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of one recent heart-attack victim, to a drug den hosted by a genial but exploitative dealer named Cy (Cliff Curtis). Cy calls his place “The Oasis,” describing it as a “refuge from the world out there,” a “stress-free factory.” With reggae classics such as Burning Spear’s “Slavery Days” and The Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon” playing in the background, Cy gives Frank a tour of his “inn.” There are people asleep in chairs and passed out on mattresses. Momentarily persuaded, Frank swallows a few pills. Yet, rather than drift off to sleep, Frank instead experiences what Cy terms a “paradoxical reaction”: he has a nightmare, wakes up in a rage, and carries Mary out of The Oasis. As Franks gets in the elevator, Cy hollers, “You owe me ten dollars!”
Indeed, such is Frank’s lot that, when he finally is able to save someone, it is none other than Cy himself, who has been severely wounded in a robbery. Brought to The Oasis after a 911 call, Frank notices that the apartment’s various aquariums have been shattered by gunfire. A host of colorful tropical fish rhythmically but tragically flop on the wet apartment floor—a scene that Scorsese memorably accompanies with UB40’s cover of “Red Red Wine.”
Later, as Cy thanks Frank for saving his life, Frank must confront the uncomfortable fact that he does not get to choose whom he saves. People die who ostensibly should live; people live who ostensibly should die. “For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). Adding to the conundrum is modern technology, which, in a running subplot, allows people to “live” on machines when, in fact, their bodies are ready to die. In time, Frank abandons his desire to deify himself by saving others; it is through a Christlike compassio that he learns to help. As David Hammond and Beverly Smith write:
Frank finally comes to understand that, sometimes, compassion for a fellow sufferer requires that medical technology be removed to allow for natural death. Near the end of the film, Frank goes to Mr. Burke’s bed, disconnects the machinery keeping him alive, and reconnects it to himself. In an effective image of inverted resuscitation, Frank frees Mr. Burke by removing the life-supports that, in this case, have become a prison. The image is a transgression of the modern “technological imperative”—the often unacknowledged assumption that if some technological fix for the body can be made, it should be made. Mr. Burke coaxes Frank, through something like mental telepathy, to let him go. At this stage, Frank has accepted mortality as a part of life; he does not view the dying Mr. Burke as simply lost. As the ventilator pumps air into Frank, we recognize the necessity of a religiously motivated and contextualized medicine.
It is hardly an accident, then, that Bringing Out the Dead concludes with a recreation of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
As Gerard Loughlin puts it, “The pity expressed in Mary’s arms is the pity—the compassion, the mercy—that [Frank] gives himself, that he allows himself to receive.” At long last, the would-be savior lets himself be saved. For a film that begins on Thursday and ends on Sunday morning, Bringing Out the Dead is nothing less than a descent into hell, followed, mercifully, by a luminous resurrection.