Nights of Horror: Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

I’ve been using this season to spend time mulling on themes rather than get right to documenting my immediate takes on the movies I’ve been watching. The theme this week was medical trauma, and possibly as a result of my own life circumstances, I ended up laser focusing on caregiver burnout.

Caregiver burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that can happen when you dedicate time and energy to manage the health and safety of someone else. In post-plague 2023, it’s hard to meet anyone who hasn’t experienced it to some degree. Extreme versions of this are exemplified in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead (1999).

Bringing Out the Dead is an episodic, chaotic, and impressionistic take on marginalized early 1990s New York City as seen through the eyes of Frank Pierce, a paramedic on the verge of collapse. It is a vivid portrayal of addiction, and more specifically the addiction to the feeling of having saved a life, which Frank hasn’t experienced in a very long time.

“A Grief Mop”

This film, based on a semi-autobiographical book by former NYC paramedic Joe Connelly, takes place over the course of three nights beginning with Frank stabilizing a man who has just had a massive heart attack. He connects with the man’s estranged daughter, Mary, who accompanies them to the ER.

This chaotic, anxiety-inducing, over-run triage center and its hostile workforce of burned out caregivers is the stuff of nightmares, in that this is the stuff I have taken home from work with me and dreamed about. It put me in the same State of Urgency headspace that I’ve had as a line cook and as a mortician over the years. You haven’t lived til you’ve had six people yell at you about ten different things, and then manage to deliver everything with acute precision in about 80 seconds and be told it’s never going to be enough without taking it personally. (And people wonder why we hide behind the dumpsters and chain smoke.) It is high energy, high stress, and high instances of displays of extreme empathy and extreme apathy, and they’re all mixing into a disorienting and frenzied mélange of wanting to help and being unable to. There is no room at the inn, there are no empty beds, people are writhing on floors, the doctors and nurses are pulled in every direction because there are simply too many sick and injured people to treat. It reminds me of the leper scene in Jesus Christ Superstar.  

“I just needed a few slow nights, followed by a couple days off.”

Frank is a man haunted by the ghosts of everyone he wasn’t able to save, and this movie is a spiritual journey to self-forgiveness. The screenplay was adapted by Paul Schrader (which makes sense since Act One feels like First Reformed on uppers), and it’s probably the most cohesive collaboration between Schrader and Scorsese where both creators feel represented. It’s also edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, who worked with them on both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It’s a character study of someone on a losing streak at work filled with biblical imagery, which is very Scorsese, but what I felt most watching it is how all of these people who mean well are bound by systems that were great ideas in theory, but damning in execution. These characters are all looped in an exhausting cycle of acting without thinking, making life-altering decisions without thinking, grinding away with barely functioning parts, self-medication, emotional explosions and an environmental desperation so thick that it’s impossible for an individual to suffer a consequence because they’re too preoccupied with whatever else they were already suffering from. It’s easy to just let the disorienting vibe wash over you and apply pressure to the wound, cling to that microscopic illusion of stillness til the next horrifying emergency occurs, which will be- oh there it is, 3… 2… 1. Another atrocity to witness, tortured souls bearing witness to tortured souls. Like a junkie himself, Frank is always trying to quit. He self-sabotages trying to get fired, his boss promises to fire him next time, he physically quits, he walks away, he cannot stay away, and it continues.

“The first step is love. The second is mercy.”

Without giving away everything, because there is a LOT I haven’t mentioned, I will recommend this movie to anyone who has ever worked in a caregiving or high-stress serving field. While seemingly plotless, the end is satisfying and cathartic, and I left it dazed and stunned. It might be my favorite Scorsese movie. Picture. He says “Picture,” doesn’t he?

Either way the stories are harrowing, the performances are beautiful, the camera work is incredible, the vibe is as unhinged as it is heartbreaking, and while this may not be considered a “horror film,” I would absolutely classify it as “horror-adjacent.”   

Sidebar if there was an emergency and John Goodman showed up as my paramedic I would feel so safe, not his character Larry, but John Goodman proper. I’d trust him to pick me up like I was nothing and get me somewhere safe and patch me up. Maybe I just want John Goodman to come take me away from all this….. and if Tom Sizemore showed up literally anywhere anytime, I would feel so UNSAFE and just the prospect of either of those things happening is why I’d probably die before I ever called 911. And it’s probably because I’d been getting choked by Tom Sizemore cause I’m a moth to the flame. Ving Rhames, take a shot of bourbon and pray for me.

Paramedic Side Character Fuck Marry Kill!

Larry, played by John Goodman

Marcus, played by Ving Rhames

Tom, played by Tom Sizemore

Frank is not on this list and neither is Nic Cage. He’s off-limits. And so is Patricia Arquette. And so is Cliff Curtis.