Light Sleeper (dir. Paul Schrader, 1992)
John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) is forty years old, which for a man in his profession as a ‘D.D.’—a drug dealer and courier for upscale Manhattan clients—is well into middle age. A former addict, he works for Ann (Susan Sarandon) and Robert (David Clennon), who themselves are on the verge of leaving the life for legitimate work in cosmetics, and as such, leaving John on his own. The tension between him and his employers and a chance encounter with his ex Marianne (Dana Delaney) lead John to much changed circumstances by the film’s end.
Paul Schrader calls Light Sleeper one of his ‘a man and his room’ stories. Previous examples include Taxi Driver, for which he wrote the screenplay, and America Gigolo, as well as later works like The Walker and his most recent film First Reformed. All involve lonely men possessing engaging in varying degrees of introspection as they face dissolution in their lives. Most are rooted in the crime genre—with the exception of First Reformed, which even then is a sort of eco-thriller—but all are in their way reworkings of the European art house cinema that Schrader so admires, with Robert Bresson looming over everything.
Light Sleeper is a strikingly melancholy portrait of its protagonist and maybe the most sensitive performance I’ve seen from Dafoe. John spends most nights after completing his deliveries alone in bare loft. “A D.D. told me when a drug dealer starts writing a diary it’s time to quit. I started writing after that,” John informs us in narration. “Not every night—now and then. Just to burn off the night. Fill up one book, throw it out, start another.” He plays Nick Carraway to his clientele. “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 would never tell anyone else. He understands. Of course they’re stoned to start.” There’s a romanticism to John, who has already taken acting classes for one abandoned career change and now has vague hopes for transitioning to music production. His past is filled with regrets, but he prefers to remember the good moments. As Marianne puts it: “A convenient memory is a gift from god.”
Light Sleeper is classified frequently as a neo-noir, but were it not for the backdrop of drug dealing and a subplot involving a series of drug-related deaths, it would be a straightforward drama with some moody lighting. But it is also a look at a New York now lost to us aside from memory or celluloid. The early nineties from our current vantage seems like one of the last times the city was livable for someone like John or the vast majority of us. Nostalgia is a disease and looking back fondly on an era with a higher crime rate is such a skewed perspective, but at the same time, working class people could live in an only partially gentrified Manhattan. A 2019 version of the film wouldn’t even work, because John would have been priced out of the city long before and replaced by some poor bastard with a mobile phone navigating luxury buildings full of unoccupied apartments. There’s nothing soulful in that—just the reality of a business.
oliveresque 