Dionysian Acts, Apollonian Pacts: The Anti-Nietzschean Cinema of Abel Ferrara

This chapter explores the cinematic universe of Abel Ferrara through the philosophical lens of Friedrich Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Challenging interpretations that position Ferrara as a Nietzschean artist reveling in chaos and excess, the author argues that Ferrara's protagonists, while initially driven by Dionysian impulses—violence, addiction, and sensuality—ultimately seek transcendence through Apollonian order and Christian redemption. Drawing on close readings of films such as The Driller Killer, Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, and The Addiction, the chapter demonstrates how Ferrara consistently aligns his characters with metaphysical frameworks rooted in Catholicism. Their journeys lead not toward Nietzsche’s celebration of eternal recurrence or nihilistic liberation, but to a reconciliatory vision anchored in spiritual salvation. The argument culminates in the claim that Ferrara’s work constitutes an anti-Nietzschean cinema: one in which Dionysian excess is subsumed and resolved within an Apollonian-Christian structure of redemption, offering a radically individualistic, yet theologically infused, vision of grace.