Pubdate: Thu, 25 Jan 2001
Source: Economist, The (UK)
Copyright: 2001 The Economist Newspaper Limited
Contact:  111 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019 (US office)
Fax: (212) 541 9378
Website: http://www.economist.com/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/traffic.htm (Traffic)

A LONG AND WINDING TRIP

Hollywood, for good or ill, acts as educator as well as entertainer. It has 
never worked out a clear message on drugs

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, who understood Hollywood's appetite for happy endings, 
once remarked that there were nevertheless two plot-lines that it would not 
tolerate. One was the marriage of an inter-racial couple who live happily 
ever after. The other was the story of a confirmed atheist who dies 
painlessly in his bed at the age of 102 after a full and fruitful life, 
surrounded by children and grandchildren. The great writer could easily 
have added a third Hollywood taboo: the gainfully employed drug taker who 
does so because he likes to, and isn't either cured of his habit or 
punished for it by prison, disgrace or ill-health.

Nabokov, it has to be said, was talking 40 years ago, and there are signs 
that Tinseltown is changing, at least in regard to the supply-side of 
drugs. A much-talked about new film, "Traffic" (see article), continues to 
present users as foolish or doomed. But it depicts America's paramilitary 
campaign against narcotics as wasteful, if not lost. The police and the 
Drug Enforcement Agency are seen fighting at moral and material cost to 
protect values to which many Americans, it is suggested, no longer subscribe.

 From the silent era, when few police adventures were complete without a 
chase through a Chinatown opium den, Hollywood has treated drugs with an 
unstable mixture of fear and fascination, moralism and concern. In 1930 
came outright denial in the form of a self-censorship code which, among 
other strictures, forbade depiction of drug takers or makers in any light 
whatsoever. Film producers almost all complied. Even in Sherlock Holmes 
films you had to be a detective yourself to intuit that the demon sleuth 
liked cocaine.

"Narcotic" (1933), made outside the studio system by Dwain Esper, is one of 
two 1930s pictures that blatantly flouted the production code, masking 
exploitation with a veneer of social concern. The film made the startling 
claim that America had 1m known addicts, at a time when drugs were hard to 
come by. Purportedly the biopic of an opium-crazed snake-oil salesman, 
"Narcotic" was really an excuse to depict a dope party, where addicts 
snort, inject, flash their knickers and are reduced to helpless giggles. 
Similarly in "Reefer Madness" (1936) smoking marijuana leads to such 
well-known consequences as uncontrollable twitching and eye-rolling sexual 
rapacity.

Tosh of this kind is a natural by-product of censorship. When, in the 
mid-1950s, a few film makers decided to break the code, ignorance showed. 
For all its apparent courage-and justly famous credit titles by Saul Bass 
(see picture)-Otto Preminger's "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1955) 
sensationalised its subject. Frank Sinatra plays a junkie musician who 
undergoes a cold-turkey detox. The film was also careful to observe 
Hollywood's broader moral conventions: Sinatra is punished (he has to 
settle for work as a poker dealer) yet the film ends happily (he is cured). 
Commercially speaking, the film was a gamble. Preminger calculated, 
correctly, that a hot subject and the presence of Sinatra, whose career was 
on a rise again after an Oscar in "From Here to Eternity", would oblige 
exhibitors to disregard the production code and book the film regardless. 
(The code limped on until 1968, when it was replaced with ratings.)

Nor was it just with narcotics that Hollywood often found itself working in 
the dark. Experimental medicines, the subject of Nicholas Ray's "Bigger 
than Life" (1956), were feared and misunderstood: when James Mason is 
prescribed a course of cortisone, he becomes a homicidal maniac with 
murderous designs on his son.

For all their weaknesses, films of this kind introduced the thought that 
drugs might be more a medical than a criminal issue. "Monkey on My Back" 
(1957) was about a boxer-addict and war veteran who had been given morphine 
for malaria on Guadalcanal. Vietnam war films such as "Apocalypse Now" 
(1979) pursue the idea of drugs as a normal response to the abnormal. In 
"Platoon" (1986) soldiers get stoned to make the war endurable.

By contrast, Hollywood resisted portraying drugs as a diversion from daily 
life. In Shirley Clarke's "The Connection" (1961), from a Jack Gelber play 
complete with jazz accompaniment, drugs are part of the hipsters' lives. 
But not everyone would have thought of those lives as ordinary, and the 
film, besides, was not a Hollywood product. Roger Corman's "The Trip" 
(1967), which was made for Hollywood, did attempt to convey the psychedelic 
experiences of an LSD tripper. Perhaps "Easy Rider" (1969) came closest to 
normalising everyday drug taking. Such films from the late 1960s and early 
1970s were testing how far they could go. Even so, there was usually a 
homily of some kind at the end.

Not all Hollywood films, of course, are message pictures. Drugs are a great 
plot device. The Oscar-winning film "The French Connection" (1971), about a 
dogged drugs sleuth, could really have been about anything (diluted 
penicillin, weapons-grade plutonium?) so long as the smugglers could be 
safely presented as dangerous and dispensable. (A cop who is hooked is a 
still more interesting character, and in "French Connection II" (1975), 
Popeye Doyle, played again by Gene Hackman, has turned junkie.)

Tinseltown has not yet gone down the road of Britain's "Trainspotting" 
(1995). In its opening scene, Ewan McGregor, fleeing the law, delivers a 
straight-to-camera monologue on the run, rubbishing everything about 
society from earning a living to banning drugs. With the addict's fix 
celebrated as life's greatest experience, "Trainspotting" was one of the 
most unsettling and subversive films of the 1990s.

On the other hand, doubts about the drugs war, which were murmured in 
"Midnight Express" (1978), were clearly voiced in "Brokedown Palace" 
(1999). In each film, a tourist caught drug-smuggling in foreign parts gets 
a long prison term. In "Brokedown Palace" the accused is framed. But both 
stories treat the prisoner as guiltless and put the criminalisation of 
drugs in the dock.

Against this shift in attitudes, conventional drugs thrillers no longer 
work. When Spike Lee made "Clockers" (1995), a narcotics adventure, he 
showed a Brooklyn police force all but overwhelmed. "Traffic" amplifies 
this theme, implying with filmic exaggeration that society is being 
engulfed by smugglers and anti-drug warriors alike. No Hollywood film has 
yet called for the legalisation even of soft drugs and the "Trainspotting" 
figure of the happy addict (itself a fantasy?) is as far from American 
films as it ever was. But if "Traffic" is any sign of where Hollywood is 
headed in its winding trip with drugs, more films may soon be saying that 
the cure is now worse than the disease.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D