Vague Visages’ Lodge Kerrigan essay contains spoilers for Clean, Shaven (1993), Claire Dolan (1998) and Keane (2004). Check out VV’s film essays section for more movie coverage.

In 2010, Lodge Kerrigan’s fourth feature, Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs), received acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival but failed to gain a general release. It was a dispiriting turn of events for a director whose previous three films appeared to form the bedrock of a formidable oeuvre. But it was not to be, and like so many purveyors of small-scale, thought-provoking cinema, Kerrigan retreated into TV — he co-created the Starz series based on Seven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2009), and has worked on shows like Homeland (2011-20), Bates Motel (2023-17) and The Americans (2013-18). Kerrigan’s fate is emblematic of a shrinking horizon for independent filmmakers in the 2000s and beyond, with shifting market conditions reducing budding auteurs to journeymen. In the era of narrowcasting, the shameless bravado and aggressive populism of the Weinstein hustle has given way to a carefully tailored boutique mentality, a rarefied domain in which wealthy patrons champion a select handful of creators who align with their brand identity. There was a moment when it seemed as though Kerrigan would establish himself as one of this elite, producing a string of features which offered startling access to the internal lives of his characters; people trapped in the throes of dislocation, desperation and compulsion.

Kerrigan’s debut, Clean, Shaven (1993), is a minor masterpiece, one of the most overwhelming pieces of 90s indie cinema. It tells the story of Peter Winter (Peter Greene), a man suffering from schizophrenia who has recently been released from a mental institution. Peter sets off in search of his daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), but is plagued by the pitch of life on the outside, which for him is turned up to an unbearable volume. Kerrigan begins with shots of turbulent, churning waters and harsh winds; it is a statement of intent — an illustration of the terrain through which he will guide viewers. The filmmaker forces his audience to see the world from a neglected perspective, dragging viewers into his lead character’s subjectivity — this is achieved in large part through the superlative sound design and Hahn Rowe’s foreboding score. Peter contends with an internal cacophony as competing messages harass him with threats and imprecations, howls of rage dehumanized by the medium, rising above the battery of static but sacrificing something fundamental in the process. In the face of this barrage, Peter seeks self-erasure, covering up all the reflective surfaces on his car, eschewing the veneration of the external self. But Peter is always cognizant of the unforgiving concrete on the other side of the jumbled newsprint that keeps the light at bay; he no longer requires such external verification of identity. All that exists for Peter now are the ill-fated tracks along which he is progressing toward an ineluctable fate.

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In Clean, Shaven, Kerrigan contends that the landscape he captures is steeped in violence; there is a splinter that cannot be extricated from the body, something is lodged that defies the comforting banalities of foundation and settlement; blood bubbles just below the surface of reality. Kerrigan offers a kind of twisted Americana, a de-familiarized portrait of a failed frontier; the old symbols have taken an unsettling turn, no longer animating but threatening, at once heightened and hampered. Peter feels the sting of the blade that abrades at the same time as it clears; he is acutely attuned to the latent violence of modern existence, and so is his daughter — Nicole’s adoptive parents observe that she has become a “quiet child.” In the wreckage of American life, shutting down becomes an act of resistance. The noise requires strategies of curtailment; the infernal collage of the sound design draws viewers into the secret war being waged, an ongoing posture of aggression against a phantom adversary, fortified by the milk carton kids who are a necessary sacrifice to a world in which “the dead help the living.” The gift — and the curse — that Peter and Nicole possess is the ability to hear the inaudible wails of suffering, to see a bloody heritage rise from expanses of pacified land, to witness the Tower of Babel that stands invisible yet resolute along every highway, to receive the hidden signal that reifies the body. What appears shorn of all meaning and drained of all blood to most eyes and ears binds them in their isolation. When Peter is killed by McNally (Robert Albert), the detective tasked with tracking him down, Nicole reaches into the ether for a fatherly emanation.

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Claire Dolan (1998) is a no less forbidding piece, but its effect is one of detachment from, rather than immersion in, the internal life of its central character. Claire (Katrin Cartlidge) works as a call girl, paying off a family debt to her pimp, Roland Cain (Colm Meaney), who directs her to high paying clients in New York City. When Claire’s mother dies in a nursing home being paid for by Roland, her rationale for maintaining the version of herself she thrusts into upscale hotels and corporate offices begins to disintegrate. Claire flees to Newark, reinventing herself as a beautician and beginning a relationship with cab driver Elton Garrett (Vincent D’Onofrio), but the ghosts of her past track her down and she is cast once again into the restrictive role of the high-class sex worker. In contrast to the roiling waters that open Clean, Shaven, viewers are introduced to Claire’s world with shots of austere, imposing commercial exteriors. This is exactly what Claire has constructed for herself – she walks the streets of New York City in an oversized coat that functions as a suit of armor, only to be slipped off at the most advantageous moment; she trades in confected slivers of intimacy, trying on identities and casting scenarios for her clients, telling them, “I’m here for you” and assuring them “You’re not like the other men.” Claire strives to keep the realities of her family’s predicament at bay, never allowing the versions of herself to intersect. Sex becomes an act of self-erasure, like the newspaper Peter uses in Clean, Shaven to block out the light from his car. Claire wills her essential self into invisibility, using excessive amounts of alcohol to accelerate the descent into fleeting feeling.

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Claire is another isolated figure; her attempts to reach out to the world on a more personal level are met with bemusement — she declares, “I buried my mother today” to a stranger on the street, who cautiously backs away from her. The protagonist’s flight to Newark offers a glimpse into the stable suburban life of her cousin, Mary (Maryann Plunkett), the possibility of a reprieve from Roland’s bondage. But this attempt is a brief interlude in the performance that defines her; Roland enjoins her to “make yourself up,” to slip back into the skin she had temporarily shed. Claire is urged by a friend of Cain’s (John Doman) to “push it away and seal it off,” to thicken the walls of the edifice in which she has interred herself. Her world once again becomes fragile and narrow, held together by her preoccupations and the necessity of the persona. Like Peter, Claire is searching to retrieve something that has been lost, but it is less clear what that thing is; the destination is a vague outline of an abandoned horizon. Equally, she believes that parenthood is the path to redemption, an unbreakable bond to the world, a way out of the self’s limitations. Elton tries to gain access to the New York version of the woman he got to know in Newark; he scours Claire’s apartment, but his only guide is a box containing old photos and driver’s licenses with different names; his attempt to unearth the real woman yields only further subterfuges. Claire conceives a child with Elton and pays off her debt to Roland, yet she confounds the expected outcome by choosing to take up a new role in a new town, living in Chicago as a single parent and looking for work in childcare. Heavily pregnant, Claire encounters a former client, and tells him with all the resolve she can muster, “You have the wrong person.” She is doomed to never be content, to exist forever on the precipice of the next flight to “another life,” as Roland describes it when he bumps into Elton with his pregnant wife, the knowledge of their complicity in Claire’s metamorphoses straining their affected conviviality.

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In Keane (2004), William Keane (Damian Lewis) stalks the Port Authority Bus Terminal like it is his own personal purgatory — this was the location where his daughter went missing, believed to have been abducted, and he has been returning to the site of his failure ever since, hoping to land upon a moment of revelation, a vital clue that will direct him to his daughter’s location, or jog the memories of indifferent travelers who keep him at a distance. After another day of fruitless investigation, William returns to the motel where he is staying. In the lobby, he encounters Lynn Bedik (Amy Ryan) and her seven-year-old daughter, Kira (Abigail Breslin), who are struggling to pay for their room. Lynn becomes the new focus of William’s attention; he insinuates himself into her life, developing into a surrogate father when Lynn’s work commitments require him to take care of Kira. But there is always a sense in Keane that William operates beyond a familiar schema of motivation — there is a logic to what he is doing that is known only to him. Like Peter, he is at odds with a world that fails to offer up its darkest secrets, and he must decode the portents that are embedded in the fabric of the daily life he grazes up against. The strain often becomes too much, and William lapses into bouts of heavy drinking and substance abuse, trying to obliterate the consciousness that holds him captive, a repository for the hostile chorus that reprimands him for his moment of self-negating negligence. Like Claire, William has a debt to clear, and his body will bear the burden of rectifying this deficit.

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Just as the conspicuous sound in Clean, Shaven and the strict neutrality of Claire Dolan were designed to elicit a particular feeling of estrangement, the camerawork in Keane adopts an oppressive proximity to Willam. The world shrinks to his tortured visage, drawing viewers into the man’s logic… co-conspirators in his hopeless quest. William’s actions serve as an explicatory canvas for his loss and guilt — an abiding, labyrinthine belief structure that seeks to unearth a hidden malevolence which dictates personal outcomes. Like the bus travelers, viewers might want to look away, to keep William at a distance, but audiences are pulled in by the choices that Kerrigan makes. There is little attempt to soften William, to endow him with a protagonist’s transparency; he is just another stranded soul looking for a way out of his pain, and what transpires only serves to intensify viewers’ unease. William appears to have no stable sense of self, as every scene reveals a new facet to his character, leaving the audience to speculate as to how he will respond in any given moment. For William, every action offers the possibility for a new narrative to cement itself, but he has to fight through layers of darkness to locate something concrete that will tether him to the world again. The clock stopped at the moment when his daughter disappeared, and no amount of arcane deduction can break the cycle of eternal recurrence. The circumstances are everything, and it is only when William can accept this that his life will restart. Kerrigan leaves viewers in suspension, with William on the cusp of a decision that will once again throw everything into disarray for those closest to him. In Lodge Kerrigan’s first three features, he asks audiences to consider those left in the wake of his central characters — those immersed in the world as it is commonly beheld, those who witness the demise and endure the obsession that befalls sons, daughters, fathers and lovers.

D.M. Palmer (@MrDMPalmer) is a writer based in Sheffield, UK. He has contributed to sites like HeyUGuys, The Shiznit, Sabotage Times, Roobla, Column F, The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry. He has a propensity to wax lyrical about Film Noir on the slightest provocation, which makes him a hit at parties. The detritus of his creative outpourings can be found at waxbarricades.wordpress.com.

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