Disposability, Criminality and Lawlessness in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Beasts of the Southern Wild and When the Levees Broke—A Requiem in Four Acts

Abstract

This chapter, which concludes the book, examines the specific visions of anarchy and American life on the margins presented in Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). It examines the different ways these films allegorically deal with those specific aspects of the Katrina crisis while simultaneously exploring the wider context of the post-9/11 state of exception and what Henry A. Giroux identifies as a new era of human “disposability” under President G. W. Bush. Though very different, I argue that both films—which are, in their own ways, cinematic oddities—respond specifically to the Katrina crisis and to this broader context. I then compare these films to Spike Lee’s four-part documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) which approaches the same themes through a very different cinematic mode. I argue that moments of trauma—and particularly the images of bodies littering the flood-wracked streets of New Orleans, unsettle Lee’s tight structure and carefully constructed arguments about systemic racism and structural malaise. In this sense, viewers must negotiate and consider the overlaps between trauma and the systemic violence and racism Lee clearly presents.