YOU'VE GOT ME CONFUSED by Nick Newman (New Rose Hotel, 1998, Cinématographe)

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I propose a challenge: should we ever meet, tell me the exact sequence of events in Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel without stumbling or doubling-back or confusing any people, places, or entities, and do so to such an extent that I am completely certain what happens in this film I have gladly seen four times. Manage this and you will forever live in my mind as a genius (and I'll throw in a drink of your choice).

It's embarrassing to admit you can't follow the plot. Though some movies thrive on confusion—recall the story of Raymond Chandler being confronted about a gap in his script for Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, consistently ranked among the greatest films noir, only to admit he didn't have an answer—many others are just badly told, or simply not interesting enough to earn full-tilt attention. All valid excuses to tune out. But actually admitting to another person that, no, I don't know why she's betraying her friends, or (cards on the table) I missed the mention of a "DNA synthesizer" that's suddenly so important: that's a vulnerability the refined cineaste rarely lets show. I wouldn't call New Rose Hotel badly told, and I would certainly never say it deserves neglect; I accordingly pass no judgment on my better half who told me, well into her first time seeing the film, that she had no fucking idea what was going on.

Let this anecdote be nothing but encouragement for the brave consumer who's never encountered Abel Ferrara's sci-fi opus, or those who've waited long enough to forget everything past its on-the-cheap futurism, intoxicating video textures, and intense sexual chemistry. Or, for that matter, those who imagine their recall to be steady. Watching New Rose Hotel again (as I did twice inside of one week to prepare this essay) is simply nothing like the standard revisit. It is instead—per a film that returns to sequences from new angles, what was once only heard now finally seen, or things that were already seen now reseen via different takes or punch-ins—closer to rejoining events with someone who was also present and finding they have a slightly different vantage, their memory introducing tell-tale signs (flicks of the eyes, suppressions of a smile) that begin forming a different account altogether. This is a movie that not only contains worlds but seems a world unto itself, and with the constant threat to multiply; I swear that if I put it on right now, 24 hours after my second viewing in seven days, a wholly new character or plot will appear.

My friend Bilge Ebiri has written about "earworm cinema," or films that less get stuck in your head for the fullness of their vision than for lacking some otherwise-necessary element. As he elucidated:

"They could be missing anything, really: A plot, a central character, an emotional resolution, a key piece of backstory... a certain conventional element, perhaps, that the filmmaker decided to do without, or maybe even inadvertently wound up without. Of course, this can describe a lot of bad movies, too. An earworm movie has to be beautiful in all sorts of ways in order to be absent in others; in a way, it's that gap between beauty and completeness that makes the film so compelling. (As you might have guessed, with earworm cinema, watching the film from beginning to end is rarely a solution; often, it's the key symptom.)"

"A plot, a central character, an emotional resolution, a key piece of backstory"—check, check, check, and check. New Rose Hotel ostensibly follows two men, Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe), who plan to ensnare a scientist, Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), in a honeypot scheme that will yield great financial gain. The girl who will help them is Sandii (Asia Argento), with whom X encourages Fox to play-act a kind of falling-in-love routine to gin up her chances at wooing the married scientist; X and Sandii go too far with this, physical and emotional needs become entangled with the operation, major complications ensue.

What's missing is just about everything that characteristically shapes a movie. Most of the characters are nameless. Events happen offscreen and are later conveyed through the utterance of proper nouns we either haven't heard or can't be expected to internalize. Resolution does come, but too late for our protagonist and, judging by many reactions to the film since 1998, a typical audience. Yet nothing is absent. Ferrara and Christ Zois's adaptation of William Gibson's source is really quite faithful; the film suggests someone trying to remember that short story, or that the short story itself, in retrospect, almost reads like a tightly coiled recollection of this film. (I feel compelled to quickly note that Zois's full name is Christopher. Is it absolutely wild to call yourself Christ or strange that more people haven't done this? Take your pick.) Walken, Dafoe, and Argento give what the dormant mind could recognize as Good Performances; they embody and embolden these ciphers, lending New Rose Hotel's dark turns the necessary gravity. But understanding—certainly describing—it all is like writing in water.

To wit: could you confidently tell me where New Rose Hotel is set? There are heavy intimations of Japan (exterior shots with Japanese writing, Sandii being called "a Shinjuku girl," a certain concentration of Asian actors) and dialogue can implicitly put us in Berlin, while Marrakech is directly identified. All of these places also look like New York in the late '90s. Or perhaps a slightly homogenized European town. It could even be Kansas City, Missouri, where the eponymous service was invented (patent pending). That New Rose Hotel's lead actress is daughter to one of the, say, 10 most famous Italian directors who has ever lived might throw us off a tad when Sandii tells X her father is French. What are we to do when she then tells him, "My father was Italian. My mother was Dutch"? In so deep he doesn't know which way is up, X has one grinning response: "You got me confused. It's okay. It's okay." (It will not be.)

"We never went above 14th St," Abel Ferrara told a stunned audience when New Rose Hotel played at the Museum of Modern Art in 2019. Watching this film without any context for its production, that reaction is earned. There are regular views of Japanese skylines and streets—at least some of which, Ferrara claims, were initially shot for Ridley Scott's Black Rain (now repurposed almost a decade later to imagine the future) and given to him at a discount, while actors confidently state (or insinuate) they are in Japan, Germany, or Morocco. With the curtain pulled back, however, it is almost comically obvious that Ferrara's production did not travel far: on at least two occasions X enters what is (judging from stray dialogue) meant to be a Berlin bar that, I now realize, is the most downtown-Manhattan-looking pub ever committed to film; the Marrakech section suggests a sitcom for using some back alley while dressing the Puerto Rican actor Victor Argo in local garb to play a Portuguese businessman; and if the hotel in which Fox and X meet Ryuichi Sakamoto (!) appears to be the exact same one where they initially rendezvous with Sandii, I suspect that's because it simply is.

Whether you scoff at or embrace all of this separates the men from the boys. I will take New Rose Hotel's alternately dreamlike and nightmarish play on globalization—that system which allows you to see the same businesses on the streets of Brooklyn and Paris, the one which forces everybody to speak English on a spectrum from fluent to broken—over some exhaustive, exhausting, verisimilitude-driven spin every day of the week and twice on Sunday. New Rose Hotel's world exists between drab reality and hyper-specificity, Ken Kelsch's inimitable video textures—somewhere between futuristic, present-tense, and (looking back from the mid-2020s) antiquated—traveling the porous layers between construction and chaos that, in both thesis and effect, beat many major artists to the punch by as much as a decade. Come to think of it: what are Fox, X, and Sandii looking at during this film's version of an exposition dump? Certainly we're seeing compressed video footage of Hiroshi and his wife (Gretchen Mol) that Fox narrates with delightfully Walken-esque attitude. But there's no television or screen in the room. What—really, I'm asking, I want to know—are they looking at? Why isn't it there?

While some great films make it look easy, others make clear that getting to this point was a task which drove everybody beyond their limits. There are creative tensions that divide old friends; there are affairs between director and star that raise on- and off-set tensions to untenable levels; there's the distended editorial process that makes finding the thing (as if shooting it wasn't enough!) a Herculean task. (It's quite another thing to invest in the completion of a project whose plot effectively stops around the 65-minute mark, sparking fears its script literally wasn't long enough to constitute a feature.) New Rose Hotel bore the burden of each, and every last struggle became essential to the film's allure, its ineffability, its obsession-inducement, its endurance, its—putting this in plainest possible terms—greatness. One can dream of the longtime collaborator, Nicholas St. John, who was finally and forever driven away during pre-production; one might imagine the score that would've been composed by mainstay Joe Delia; it's hard not to picture what Chloë Sevigny or Virginie Ledoyen could've done in the role of Sandii. Yet these neither would've supplanted the film that emerged nor bred better stories than those Ferrara told decades later in his own memoir, Scene, which—part and parcel of New Rose Hotel's ability to metastasize outside its 93-minute shape—are like a parallel narrative to onscreen events.

The New Rose Hotel that emerged from this strife is incontestably impossible without Ferrara and Zois's super-circuitous telling or Schoolly D's music (has a soundtrack ever summarized a film better than this one's aggressive-hypnotic repetition of "what more can I say"?) or Asia Argento cutting a shape around which everything else had to work. Maybe because this same movie seems equally impossible while you're watching it for the first time or the fourth and left to reflect on it days, months, years after the fact.

Where a film winds up and what gets canonized or when they receive something like just desserts and who decides and why all of this even happens—it's probably 50% chance, 40% nature's course, 10% something else that, if we could figure it out, wouldn't allow films so fearless and frightening, ecstatic and enervating, sharp and shapeless as New Rose Hotel to emerge. Which perhaps accounts for why I've spent a good portion of this essay writing about the fact that I don't know how to write about New Rose Hotel. More than the fact that I can't crack it, I don't want to, not for me, not for you.

I will instead end with a question: What exactly makes Sandii smile in the seconds before Ferrara cuts to black? It's as haunting a parting note as he's ever managed, balancing emotional precarity between what we've seen and what we'll try to infer. While I accept that New Rose Hotel's secret could be unlocked with an answer, I also think one won't come—that every return to Ferrara's globalized dystopia will just yield another vantage, another potential, another chance to get it all wrong.

Nick Newman is a journalist, film-programmer, and Managing Editor of The Film Stage.