8. 8
An Intoxicated Screen
Reflections on Film and Drugs
Maurizio Viano
Dedicated to the memory of Pierre Bourdieu.
A time to rend, and a time to sew, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. What gain has the worker from his toil?
— Ecclesiastes III, 7–9
INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO USE
There is a drug war out there that, like all wars, has its deaths and innocent victims, atrocities, and destruction. There has been a war for some time, "America's longest war" some call it, and I am for peace. Ironically, however, in order to ensure peace I have to Wght, because if I do not Wght I will not contribute to the creation of a counterforce capable of opposing those who want to keep us in a state of war. Thus my writing, here, is also a form of Wghting: I will Wght by writing about Wlm and drugs in a certain way.
What follows is a mixture of information and provocation, scholarship and militancy, Wlm history and theory. I have taken many liberties with academic discourse. In fact, if you have never felt dissatisfied with academic writing and reading, if you have never dreamed of a greater usefulness for our profession and labor, if you have never wished that academic writings could become more like the media and effectively negotiate the images and representations of reality, if you have never felt pangs of Sartrean nausea at the thought of the ghetto we inhabit, then this essay is not for you. If, on the contrary, you have had such feelings, and you would like to probe and grope with me in search of a use-value for our labor, then be patient with my writing: it is searching for a route to flee the academic citadel. In graduate school and the years before tenure, my writing was forced into an addiction to academic rules, and addictions are hard to break. As argued by several theorists on the Left (for example, Eagleton), academic writing may be constitutionally unable to be the vector of a struggle, precisely
This chapter is about the representation of drugs in the cinema: "the intoxicated screen" (to be defined later). I write about the cinematic screen (although the television and computer screens are just as precious as sources of information) because cinema is my academic specialty and is the oldest of the public screens. I am intrigued by the fact that, chronologically speaking, the inception of the "drug problem" roughly coincides with the birth of cinema, and I am convinced that an investigation of the latter can yield a better, archaeological understanding of the former. To be sure, in the late nineteenth and in the Wrst half of the twentieth century, motion pictures did not have as fundamental a role in shaping the public perception of drugs and addicts as the press did, but things have changed in the course of time. In addition, the movies’ impact on the public sphere was/is magnified by cinema's capacity to create the by now (in)famous "impression of reality." And the more or less endemic presence of drugs in the Wlm world, though not quite as determinant as in music, no doubt enhances cinema's unique role in the creation of the signs "drugs" and "addict."
This chapter has two sections. In the Wrst, I attempt a historical reconstruction of the Weld under scrutiny. In the second, I formulate some theoretical reflections from the borders of the intoxicated screen. To anticipate my thesis in its unoriginal simplicity: the lack of realism and compassion that undergirds the war effort is largely a question of representation, or, to put it in a no longer fashionable "semiospeech," a question of signs: it is what drugs and addicts signify to the majority of people that creates the context for "Zero Tolerance." The representation of drugs in various Wlms has intersected sociohistorical reality in ways that imperiously demand our attention. At once "reflecting" and fabricating reality, these Wlms have occasionally expressed dissent, but, for the most part, have been responsible— together with the other media—for the uncanny consensus that keeps the war churning. Indeed, this thesis is not much compared with what we will Wnd along the way, the questions I shall be forced to ask, the answers you will be pushed to envision. As in most cases, getting there is what counts: exploring and exposing the tangents that make this topic not only fascinating but also imperative.
"Imperiously" … "uncanny" … "imperative": to legitimize the sense of emergency of this beginning, I will alternate the chapter's two main sections with three communiqués. Conceived as some kind of unpleasant tours of the war zones (this is after all a wartime essay), these communiqués aim to drag into the picture a few harsh realities. Fragments of a reformer's discourse, they will convey some of the facts and arguments that circulate in antiprohibitionist circles and are surprisingly ignored by most of us. In the context of my essay, the information relayed by these communiqués will be
COMMUNIQUé N. 1
As happens in several other states, California's legislature does not allow needle exchange programs. There are, however, loopholes. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, for example, the city health officials periodically declare a state of emergency and are thus able to distribute sterile syringes. Elsewhere in the state, activists run semiclandestine programs with the unofficial tolerance of the police. On occasion, however, (as recently happened in Santa Cruz) these activists get busted, only to be later released (meanwhile taxpayers’ money and court time have been wasted) and return to the streets to face more harassment. Now, they get busted because they are giving addicts clean syringes so that AIDS will not spread. Let me repeat that, to let the enormity of this reality resonate through to the end of this essay. People get arrested because they give addicts clean syringes so that AIDS will not spread. How can one take seriously politicians who fret about AIDS and health care, while letting the United States be the only Western country in which clean syringes are not available (and are thus sold on the black market). How many lives could be saved if we made the sale of syringes without prescription legal overnight? You don't know? Neither do I, but I am sure it's many—even one would be many. Clearly, something is wrong. What kind of images of drug addicts have the American people been fed over the decades, for them to acquiesce in a policy that is tantamount to saying, "These people should die anyway, so let AIDS take them?" And if someone who does not use drugs gets infected, too bad for her/him. What was s/he doing with drug users anyway?
THE INTOXICATED SCREEN
With the general and provocative title "intoxicated screen" I intend to delineate and set aside, demarcate and designate, an area of cinematography that, I hope, will become a frequent topic of investigation in the near future. I have, in other words, the ambition of earmarking a body of Wlms and authors, thus creating something that has the self-legitimizing authority of a genre or a style. Just as we have political cinema, black cinema, Wlm noir, and so on, I suggest that we have a "Cinema of Intoxication and Addiction" (hereafter referred to as C.I.A.—a playful reminder of the dark side of American politics so often linked with the maintenance of the drug problem). I think that we, academics in Wlm studies, can make our small
Naturally, an investigation of the C.I.A. should include the screen representation of legal drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, food and love addictions, and, ultimately, obsessive behaviors of all kinds. The global picture would thus acquire monumentally vast proportions. Here, I restrict myself to the "intoxicated screen": Wlms that somehow intersect the problematic imaging of substances that are currently illegal and, though different in history, effects, and chemical compositions, are, perhaps irresponsibly, grouped under the umbrella term "drugs." It would be interesting to start with a semantic de(con)struction of the term drugs, but I do not have enough space. I encourage readers to complement what follows with a Derridean reflection on the ambiguity of the term "drugs," an ambiguity all the more relevant since sweeping legal and cultural decisions are made as if we knew for sure what drugs are and do.
To analyze the intoxicated screen does not mean stopping at the verification of the drugs’ presence in a Wlm, but rather using such presence as a point of departure for an investigation of cultural, pharmako-aesthetic, and political reflections. From a taxonomic point of view, the Weld under examination begins with the literal, that is with Wlms that have drugs in them. This category in turn should be further divided on the basis of whether a Wlm portrays drugs as its main topic (for example, Trainspotting) or in the background (for example, Pulp Fiction). Then there are those (Wlms made by) directors who have made a point of reminding critics and the media that they took drugs: Jean Cocteau is the best example of such a subcategory. Finally, there are those individual Wlms of which everyone in the Weld knows that drugs were somehow involved. The most blatant example that comes to mind is Scorsese's Taxi Driver. According to its producer, Julia Phillips, everyone on the set was doing cocaine—especially its director and main actor—and references to "dope" appear in Scorsese's interviews about this Wlm. In fact, several of the Italian American director's Wlms wait to be analyzed from the standpoint of intoxication and addiction, his use of "drug music" (most notably the Rolling Stones), and the presence of narrative paradigms that are typical of the C.I.A. (for example, the problematic expression and containment of a bodily excess that, in Scorsese's Wlms, is usually personified by Robert De Niro and is given a spiritual dimension by a gnosticlike reversal of values).
The most useful taxonomy, however, is perhaps the historical, one that interrogates Wlms as cultural documents produced in a specific time and place. The history of the intoxicated screen has already been exhaustively and painstakingly documented by Michael Starks's Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness, a 1982 book that lists virtually every Wlm having any reference to
Under the title of "Lessons from the Past," chapter 5 of their remarkable book provides its readers with a sketchy but dense overview of drug prohibition. Arguing that "most Americans operate as though drug prohibition were an immutable law"when, in fact, we have had it for a little more than eighty years—the authors thus propose the following demarcation: the pre-Prohibition epoch (the dawn of history to 1914); the pre-cold-war period (1914 to 1945); the Pax Luciano (1945 to 1964); the Age of Aquarius (1964 to 1978); and the Age of Narco Glitz (1978 to the present).[2]
It should be noted that Gross and Duke themselves pay an indirect tribute to cinema's hegemonic influence by entitling two of this chapter's subsections after two famous Wlms, respectively, Reefer Madness (the section that reconstructs the emergence of the 1937 cannabis prohibition) and The French Connection (the section that explains how the Italian Mafia "entered into an arrangement with Corsican syndicates in Marseilles"). Moreover, in describing the Age of Aquarius period, the authors suggest that "among intellectuals and artists, a favorable attitude toward drugs was pronounced, and the consequence was an upsurge in pro-drug propaganda" (America's Longest War, 100). The list of "artists" who developed "a favorable attitude" would certainly include Wlmmakers and actors, just as "the pro-drug propaganda" would include numerous Wlms. Finally, "Narco Glitz" cannot but refer to the glorification of antidrug police units and operations that has infested our large and small screens. As they put it, since "the late 1970s, the topic of drug smuggling and interdiction has been a staple of low-brow motion-picture and television entertainment and a sure ratings-getter for the nightly news and documentaries" (America's Longest War, 101). If I were to outline a historical demarcation with cinema in mind, I would perhaps distinguish only four periods and introduce, of course, the Hays Code as one of the turning points. The overall result, however, would be strikingly in
I will now proceed to sketch a brief history of the intoxicated screen. Assuming the reader's greater familiarity with the last two periods, I give the former two a little more attention. Alternating fragments of Wlm history with fragments of history proper, I hope to identify some of the most problematic areas while providing the reader with a sense of what can be achieved by an investigation of the C.I.A.
The representation of drugs was one of the Wrst objectives that early Wlmmakers pursued with cinema in its prelinguistic infancy. Entitled Chinese Opium Den, the Wrst-known kinetograph was made in the mid-1890s, lasted half a minute, and could be watched by dropping a coin in one of the newly installed kinetoscopes. The representation of drugs is thus coextensive with the history of cinema. It is likely that the visions supposedly afforded by the drug experience well suited the intention of Meliés-like Wlmmakers desirous to test cinema's potential for visionary images. (Meliés is regarded as the numinous forefather of special effects and fantasy, at the opposite pole of the Lumière brothers’ realistic impulse.) It was not until 1912 that a major cautionary Wlm was made, inspired by the recent vicissitudes of Coca Cola— in the wake of the 1906 Pure Food Act, the soon-to-be-giant corporation had been accused of misbranding its product and denying the presence of cocaine in it. Made by no less than D. W. Griffiths, For His Son narrated the story of a young man who becomes the hopeless victim of an addiction provoked by a soft drink containing cocaine. The Wrst in a series of Wlms depicting drugs along lines similar to those of the temperance-inspired Wlms (the alcohol prohibition movement was gaining momentum), For His Son was rapidly followed by such "drug scare" Wlms as Slaves of Morphine, The Drug Terror, and The Drug Traffic. In addition to suggesting their box office appeal, the sheer number of drug Wlms made between 1912 and 1914 constitutes the Wrst example of Hollywood's "collaboration" with Washington, for these were the years in which momentous sociohistorical changes were taking place.
In 1912, the Foster Bill, the Wrst federal attempt at legislating the commerce, sale, and use of opiates and cocaine was defeated in Congress. But two years later, in 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Act, commonly regarded as the beginning of drug prohibition. In fact, the act's wording was ambiguous and doctors retained the power of freely prescribing drugs and thus maintaining their addict patients. It was not until 1919 that the Supreme Court made two historic decisions (Doremus v. United States; Webb v. United States) that gave more power to the federal government and prohibited the maintenance of addiction by doctors and clinics.[3] Drug addicts found themselves in the impossible situation of needing an illegal substance
Meanwhile cinema seemed preoccupied with glamorizing the danger that drugs represented for innocent women (these were also the years of the white-slave hysteria) and the representation of drugs was not in synch with these sociohistorical shifts. According to Kevin Brownlow, the author of the most authoritative study of the C.I.A. in the silent era, most of the major Wlms of the time continued depicting middle- and upper-middle-class addicts (for example, The Dividend, 1916). Although their descent into a narcotic hell was often shown as caused by either unscrupulous doctors or Wendish friends, compassion for their plight was becoming rare (especially after the "Red Scare" linked drugs with subversion), soon to be replaced by disgust, contempt, and fear. A lot more research, however, is needed to illuminate the Weld of forces at play in these Wrst years of prohibition, monitor the progression from compassion to contempt, and achieve a better understanding of the relationship among class, historical changes, and cinema. One should also keep in mind that the Wlm world was, in reality and in popular imagination, infested with forbidden powders and therefore part of the very problem that antinarcotic laws wanted to Wx. Quite a few drug scandals involving actors and actresses took the public opinion by storm.[6] Concomitantly, there were also Wlms that took the topic of drugs lightly, and ironically, with an eye perhaps on the massive drug use within the Hollywood community. In addition to the so-called coke comedies, an extant, if silly, gem of the period is The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, in which a Sherlock Holmes-wannabee injects cocaine gleefully in a way that would be unthinkable in the 1980s, and perhaps even today.
Then, as happened with the representation of alcohol and sex, violence, and other bad habits, the Hays Code set in. At Wrst, drugs could appear only in morality plays (Human Wreckage [1923], inspired by the death of star Wallace Reid); then they all but disappeared from the screen. The Pace that Kills (1928) was the last "intoxicated" Wlm. For almost three decades, cinema broke its relationship with reality. Only a few hints at drugs surfaced here and there, the most famous of which was to be found in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (in jail, the tramp unknowingly administers himself
Reefer Madness, for example, harbored a series of discursive and representational gestures (images, dialogues, an appeal to parental concern, editing associations) that are still the staple of antidrug Wlms today. More important, it was one of those priceless faux pas, made by hegemonic representation, a piece of unadulterated ideology that showed just how ignorant the decision-makers were (misrepresentation, in the media as in the government, is often not a matter of conspiracy, but of plain, old ignorance). Reefer Madness constituted perhaps the most telling example of the synchronicity existing between Washington and large sections of the press and the cinematographic establishment. What actually happened exemplifies Gramsci's notion of hegemonic block at work and deserves mentioning, however briefly, here. Harry Aslinger, the Wrst federal drug czar and the most viciously repressive and intolerant Wghter of the drug war's initial stages, wanted to make sure that the marijuana bill would pass smoothly in Washington. The Hearst papers, which had vested interest against hemp as a cash crop and had been rallying against it for more than twenty years, intensified their attacks against marijuana's violence-inducing properties.[8] And cinema made Anslinger and Hearst a gift in the form of a short Wlm that unhesitatingly depicted cannabis as worse than cocaine and heroin.
According to official Wgures, drug addiction reached a historical low in the period of WWII. It is more likely, however, that the social researchers’ attention was aimed elsewhere and overlooked the trends in drug use, at least for drugs like cannabis. Consumption of opiates may indeed have gone down since America depended on foreign countries for its supply. The postwar period is called the "Pax Luciano" by Gross and Duke, in reference to the ease with which heroin reached the United States under the aegis of Mafia boss Salvatore Luciano, aka Lucky Luciano. Virtually nobody outside the Weld of drug studies knows that it was the American government that indirectly facilitated the massive comeback of heroin after the war; similarly, many people ignore that heroin became a drug used predominantly by African Americans because the Mafia decided that it should be sold only in their neighborhoods.[9] One should credit mainstream cinema for depicting, albeit with a twenty-Wve- to thirty-year delay, this complex situation in two Wlms, both made in the early 1970s (the most "enlightened" period with
An Italian Wlm by Francesco Rosi, Lucky Luciano showed how the boss, who had been tracked down, convicted, and jailed by the FBI in the late 1930s, was mysteriously released after the war on account of his collaboration from inside his golden prison—Luciano had used his clout to get the Sicilian Mafia to cooperate with the Allies during their invasion of Sicily. Exiled from the United States, Luciano set up shop in Italy, buying heroin from the Turin-based pharmaceutical company Schiapparelli and sending it to the United States via Marseilles. Rosi's Wlm, which American audiences were never able to see in the director's cut version, contains one scene in which U.S. officials blame Italians for allowing legally manufactured heroin to slip into Luciano's hands, while Italians blame Americans for reinstating numerous mafiosi into power in Sicily in return of services rendered during the war (America's Longest War, 99–100).
Made by the Italian American director Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather followed the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo to the letter and thus contained, tucked away in the folds of its epic grandeur, the priceless sequence of the godfather's acceptance of the drug trade. During the top bosses’ meeting in a New York high-rise, the don from Detroit lays out the strategy with which the old-guard mafiosi defused the guilt, if any, associated with the drug trade: "In my city I would try to keep the traffic to the dark people, the colored. They are the best customers, the least troublesome, and they are animals anyway." Interestingly, it was yet another Wlm made in this period, The French Connection (1973) that depicted Luciano's successors, the Marseilles gang. What this Hollywood, mainstream Wlm forgot to mention was that the French and Corsican mafias had up until then operated with the implicit blessing of the American government because, as in Sicily during the war, the mafia provided help, this time against the communist unions (America's Longest War, 99–100). The French Connection incidentally, is a good example of how in cop Wlms, a large subgenre of the intoxicated screen, the evil of drugs is taken for granted: the spectacle of violent police activities, in which the law is broken repeatedly by the enforcers themselves, are offered to spectators without any explanation because, in fact, none is needed. The evil of drugs is supposedly so self-evident that Popeye Doyle's brutality against derelict users in Harlem needed no softening, no explanation, in the same way that John Wayne's ruthless killing of Native Americans in the 1940s and 1950s could go unquestioned: Bloodthirsty savages were the Indians, hopeless and dangerous psychopaths are the addicts, no questions asked.
Returning to the postwar period, we should notice that alcohol, after being equally cast out of the screen by the Hays Code, made its powerful comeback with a string of "social problem" classics (from Lost Weekend [1945] to Days of Wine and Roses [1954]), Wlms in which the Alcoholics
In the 1950s, drugs too began resurfacing in the mainstream cinema with Otto Preminger's courageous The Man with a Golden Arm (1954). Although its hopelessly Hollywoodesque treatment all but destroyed Nelson Algren's novel, this Wlm humanized a heroin addict and opened the way to more accurate, though less commercially successful, efforts (for example, Shirley Clarke's The Connection [1960]). Orson Welles's haunting tale of madness and corruption on the Mexican border also was made in the 1950s. Although a great Wlm, indeed one of his best, A Touch of Evil (1958) may, in fact, have irresponsibly contributed to the public perception of cannabis as a menacing weed from hell, for it showed a group of Mexican youths under the influence of a smoked product threatening the hero's wife with rape. Not only did the Wlm reinforce the lie that associated cannabis with violence (as Reefer Madness and Anslinger's "scientific" arguments had done twenty years before), but, most importantly, it continued the racist association of the drug with Mexicans.
The racist and xenophobic aspect of the drug war, and of the intoxicated screen, is perhaps the area that most needs exploration and exposure. It is as if the evil of drugs could not be accepted as American and thus had to be portrayed as foreign or black. Just as opium use was associated with the Chinese, cocaine became the subject of hysterical fears in the South because of the superhuman powers it allegedly bestowed on "negroes." Needless to say, the threat of sexual assault and miscegenation always lurked behind the scenes. Finally, cannabis hemp was associated with "lazy" Mexicans laborers (and, of course, with black musicians, as happened with heroin). Think of the subtle ideological effects achieved by the introduction of the word "marijuana" into the English language. By hammering a slang Mexican word into the heads of Americans in the 1930s (when, as we have seen, the American public at large found out about it), Anslinger and the media at once forced a subliminal association of the "drug" with Mexicans and severed any connection with hemp, a plant that had been a prized cash crop for more than two centuries. This fantasy of drugs as a virus coming from outside to corrupt an otherwise healthy body seems to be a universal ideological practice. During World War I, France blamed Germany, whose pharmaceutical companies were unrivaled in the production and dissemination of cocaine and morphine/heroin, for corrupting the French youth and army. Today the United States blames Colombia and Mexico (again), just like India, for example, blames Pakistan for the flow of "brown sugar" in its cities.
Cinematography is of extreme help in this case, allowing a close examination of the iconography of traffickers, dealers, and other evil influences. Let me bring to your attention, at this point, the one Wlm that Michael
Open City set up a rigid good/evil binary opposition that contained a revealing pharmacological dimension: whereas drugs are evil and used by the Germans to corrupt the Italians, wine, which Italy copiously produces, consumes, and resists considering a drug, is depicted as having the redeeming quality of inducing truth: in vino veritas. One night, a drunken Nazi officer launches himself into a tirade against the German army, saying the truth about himself and his country. The following day, sobered up, he reverts to being a ruthless assassin by killing a priest whom an Italian Wring squad had refused to shoot. Indeed, the analysis of Open City, a Wlm everyone in Wlm studies and in Italy knows, from the standpoint of drugs is but one example of the work that needs to be done: looking into the crevices and folds of Wlms that are not about drugs and have been watched by millions of people.
The period that Gross and Duke call the "Age of Aquarius""The Great Illusion" in my demarcation—is characterized by the dissolution of the Hays Code and by the exponential growth of the number of Wlms depicting drugs, more or less prominently. Rather than flooding readers with titles (we are entering the territory that most readers’ knowledge and memory can cover), I prefer to make a few points that bear relevance to my investigation.
- Drugs like cannabis acquired a political status (Abbie Hoffman's "Every time I smoke a joint is a revolutionary act"), and it was not uncommon for Wlms to portray its use in very different terms than before (for example, Easy Rider [1969]).
- LSD and the psychedelic movement entered the scene, engendering not only Wlms about it (for example, The Trip [1967]) but a whole aesthetics that spilled over into many Wlms that have nothing to do with drugs.
- Drug-abuse Wlms multiplied and became a vast subgenre with political, cultural, and (non)aesthetic traits.
- Cocaine acquired a new cult status that differentiated it from heroin. Whereas the latter saw its image as the devil incarnate solidified (typically, the big dealers of the cop Wlms of this period are heroin dealers) cocaine's image softened (for example, Superfly [1972] by African
― 145 ―American director Gordon Parks, contains a quickly edited sequence in which the powder emerges as something desirable).
- Drugs became a staple of exploitation Wlms, in concoctions of sex, drugs, and violence. And "blaxploitation" all too eagerly Wlled the screen with users and pushers (for example, The Disco Godfather [1979])
- Closely related with the rise of subgenre Wlms about drug abuse was the phenomenon of avant-garde and underground Wlmmakers (for example, Kenneth Anger and Jordan Belson) whose drug, and/or drugged Wlms often are "personal, honest, free, and unpredictable to a degree rarely attained in the commercial cinema."[10]
- Last but not least, drug use began to appear in many Wlms as a background activity of characters of all races, creed, and social status, an activity among others, thereby prompting the conclusion that drugs were being somehow assimilated by our culture.
On the sociocultural front, we could, for brevity's sake, summarize the turmoil of these two decades with Wve names/symbols:
- Timothy Leary (the puncturing of the American Dream through the "turn on, tune in, drop out" mythology and "the politics of ecstasy");
- William Burroughs (a different sort of puncturing the American Dream, "the algebra of need" instead of psychedelic illumination, heroin instead of LSD);
- Vietnam (main catalyst in the formation of a countercultural ethos, it brought to national attention the unsettling news of American soldiers hooked on Golden Triangle "smack," the Wrst time in which the government truly worried about heroin addicts);
- Richard Nixon (the president who declared the War on Drugs and used it as a political weapon); and
- Jimmy Carter (the ultimate symbol of an epoch of mistakes, distractions, the ultimate failure to evaluate the conservative backlash that was waiting just around the corner).
The "Great Illusion," the dream of harnessing (some) drugs on a collective change of consciousness, faded, as violence and all sorts of contradictions began to surface. Hippie mythologies shattered. Drug use reached epidemic proportions, or, to put it more cynically, it reached the white, suburban communities, because certain drugs had been present in the black areas for a long time without stirring the "epidemic" panic. And just when Western culture needed a more honest and unbiased dialogue, a neither-pro-nor-against assessment of drugs, the debate was cut off, and the
If we exclude a few independent productions of the early 1980s (for example, Liquid Sky [1982]), the cinematic depiction of drugs deteriorated. Narco Glitz made its entrance, with its endless celebration of the police and its transformation of the drug world into a criminal underworld. The Wlms made in this period tended to associate drugs with death, violence, and a whole range of socially dysfunctional behavior. Old stereotypes were reproposed again, with the seeming acquiescence of a public that had grown tired of drugs and regarded them as a thing of the 1960s. Few mainstream Wlms in the entire decade can be said to have avoided the traps of the period, as did Joseph Ruben's True Believer (1985), in which an efficient lawyer is shown smoking cannabis as a choice that does not impair his functioning.
Consider Clean and Sober, 1988, one of the decade's "best" C.I.A. Wlms. It set total sobriety as the only possible goal, regarded alcohol on the same level as cocaine (whose status had plummeted), and proposed the Narcotics/Alcoholics Anonymous disease model as the only way out: one is born an addict and doomed to either say forever no or perish, in a sort of biochemical replay of Calvinism. It also made a woman die in a car accident soon after (which is to say because) she had snorted a pinch of cocaine. Most important, Clean and Sober marked a return to the uncanny synchronicity between Hollywood and Washington. First, it focused on a yuppie coke user, Darryl Poynter, when, in March of the same year, Ed Meese, sensitive to charges that the War on Drugs was turning into a war on blacks and the poor, "sent a memo to all of his U.S. attorneys encouraging selective prosecution of middle and upper class users."[11] Second, in one scene, the father of a girl who had died a coke-related death in Darryl's condo posts on the latter's door a sheet accusing him of murder. This shot was virtually a cinematic translation of an image used by Nancy Reagan that same year: during a White House drug conference, she claimed that "the casual user may think when he takes a line of cocaine or smokes a joint in the privacy of his nice condo … that he's somehow not bothering anyone." In fact, Reagan continued, "There is a trail of death and destruction that leads directly to your door" and "if you are a casual drug user you are an accomplice to murder."[12]
By the early 1990s, however, there was a slow upsurge of drug Wlms and a concomitant intensification of sequences with drugs in all sort of movies. Something was changing. To be sure, Narco Glitz continued—and continues. But next to the justifiably angry depictions of drugs-as-symptoms-of-inner-city-decay by some black Wlmmakers (Spike Lee, Bill Duke, Mario Van Peebles), a different type of Wlm hit the screen with drug representations unthinkable in the previous decade. This new wave was initiated by Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, which portrayed the adventures of four junkies in the 1970s in an ironic, nonjudgmental manner and contained an understandably
Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future rightwingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.
In the context of this "new wave," Abel Ferrara's drug tetralogy (King of New York, Dangerous Game, Bad Lieutenant, and The Addiction) bears scrutiny, as do many small productions such as Perry Farrell's The Gift and Tupac Shakur's last Wlm, Gridlock'd, the nationwide success of the youth Wlm Dazed and Confused, and the Australian documentary The Hemp Revolution, which extols the virtues of the hemp movement. One cannot help the impression that someone, somewhere, is Wghting back, that the blanket pulled over the screen by the drug warriors has been lifted in spite of the Clinton administration's insistence on the war efforts. We still have to see a Wlm that shows the horrors of the drug war from the other side. We still have to see Wlms that incorporate the reformers’ struggle toward a Harm Reduction policy.[13] In other words, we still have to see Wlms that somehow point in the direction of a drugpeace, Wlms that can be called postwar in their representation and conceptual framework. But such Wlms are perhaps impossible under the present epistemological regime.
COMMUNIQUé N. 2
Take a trip to the Pacific Northwest, drive through the redwood forests and enjoy the magic of the sunbeams dashing through the trees—those cones and shards of light that are employed by the movies to suggest a visitation by the gods. Especially if you live in the crowded East, or in the flat Midwest, you will Wnd it hard to resist the charm of these densely forested area. Regardless of your political beliefs and environmental awareness, you will not be able to ignore the sight of the many trucks that carry from three to Wve huge trunks on their trailers: Yes, deforestation is on its way. Personally, I felt pangs of sadness and anger; you might feel something else, but you will agree with me that it is not a comforting sight. Each truck reminds you of some tall standing redwood trees that have been felled. It is not hard to imagine a future in which entire areas, once cathedrals of green light and auburn beauty, will be transformed into bald, stump-ridden, sad-looking slopes. For what? Why are we destroying so many trees? Well, lumber has many uses. In North America, for instance, houses and public buildings go natural and use up a lot of wood. Furniture is another important sector in which wood is employed to get that organic feeling. Lumber has so many
Let me ask a few questions. Are we sure that there are no other sources for paper? Do we know the history of the paper industry? What if there were an alternative way to make paper, what if our technology exerted its amazing skills to perfect the methods of paper making from other sources? Wouldn't that be a dream? Wouldn't that make your drive through the redwoods more pleasant, less guilt-ridden? Wouldn't you be less ashamed to belong to the race of warriors that not only subjugated the world into one "new world order" but also disfigured the planet in preoccupying ways?
You can imagine how I felt when I discovered a 1916 U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletin that reported that one acre of hemp in annual rotation during a twenty-year period would produce as much pulp for paper as 4.1 acres of trees being cut down over the same period.[14] Unfortunately, the bulletin explained, this alternative method could not be implemented until the invention of decorticating and harvesting machinery allowed for its economical utilization. But in February 1938, the journals Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering both proudly announced that the decorticating technology was Wnally available and predicted a bonanza for hemp farmers. The problem was that only a few months before the Marijuana Tax Act had been passed, and Anslinger's agents were getting ready to travel to the forty-eight states to uproot the ubiquitous weed. According to some, it was not a mere coincidence. Once again the synchronicity of events was so astounding that it deserves one more paragraph.
When mechanical hemp Wber-stripping machines and machines to conserve hemp's high-cellulose pulp Wnally became state-of-the-art, available, and affordable in the mid-1930s, the enormous timber acreage and business of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, Kimberly Clark (USA)ª, St. Regisªand virtually all other timber, paper, and large newspaper holding companies—stood to lose billions of dollars.[15] Moreover, Lammot Du Pont, the chief munitions maker for the U.S. federal government, patented, in 1937 (!), the synthetic Wber nylon and a polluting, wood-pulp paper sulfide process. Needless to say, he had all the interest in effacing the competition that hemp, one of the easiest and most environment-friendly plants to grow, was about to pose. And, Du Pont's chief Wnancial backer was no less than Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh who, in his role as Hoover's secretary of the treasury, appointed as head of the newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, his future nephew-in-law: Harry Anslinger!
What other economic interests were/are at stake in the suppression of the information on what used to be the one of the most coveted crops in the
THE F(L)IGHT OF THEORY
And they were amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? How come, then, that each of us hears in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphilia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cirene, and visitors from Rome, both Judeans and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them talking about mighty works of God in our own tongues." And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others mocking said, "They are Wlled with new wine."
Acts of the Apostles, II 9–13
During a call-in radio program on a local Boston station, shortly before the 1993 gay march on/in Washington, the host expressed his disagreement with a caller who supported the march by exclaiming: "But … homosexuality is a private matter, you don't go around doing marches. What's gonna be next? Are we gonna have a heroin addicts’ march?" In his delirious wish that both gays and junkies do their thing without throwing their scandalous presence into the public's face, the radio host actually fueled an idea that I had been entertaining for a while, namely that the fate of drug users and sexual minorities had something in common. My work on the Italian homosexual Wlmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini had alerted me to the fact that in a repressive, Catholic, sociohistorical context, homosexuals can live (are likely to live) their sexual preference as a transgressive act. Inscribed in the homosexuals’ subject position is the potential, if not the likelihood, that they experience themselves as guilty users of forbidden pleasures. Furthermore, homosexuality has often been linked with drug use by homophobic representations equating same-sex relationships with vice and decadence. In the last Wfteen years, the AIDS crisis and the specter of death have continuously associated intravenous drug users and homosexuals. And, if we turn our gaze to the hidden, revelatory power of language, we cannot help noticing that "straight" designates both being not gay and not under the influence of drugs. [16]
Shortly thereafter I chanced upon the brilliant writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whom I shall quote at length to reintroduce a breath of academic
The two new taxonomies of the addict and the homosexual condense many of the same issues for late-nineteenth-century culture: the old antisodomitic opposition between something called nature and that which is contra naturam blends with a treacherous apparent seamlessness into a new opposition between substances that are natural (for example, "food") and those that are artificial (for example, "drugs"); and hence into the characteristic twentieth-century way of problematizing almost everything of will, dividing desires themselves between the natural, called "needs," and the artificial, called "addictions."
Furthermore, from being the subject of her own perceptual manipulations or indeed experimentations, [the addict] is installed as the proper object of compulsory institutional disciplines, legal and medical, that, without actually being able to "help" her, nonetheless presume to know her better than she can know herself—and indeed offer everyone in her culture who is not herself the opportunity of enjoying the same flattering presumption.[18]
I suggest that many Wlms of the intoxicated screen have done just that: they have offered to millions of spectators the flattering presumption of knowing more about addiction than addicts themselves. By the same token, spectators have also been offered the equally flattering exemption from having to heed the addicts’ voices. For, unlike what happens in all other cognitive domains, the discourse on drugs is regulated by this funny dynamic: experience makes one's voice suspect, and only those furthest removed from any experience with either drugs or drug users are entitled to legitimacy.
In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick confronts and explores the leading metaphor that has regulated the lives and discourse of homosexuals: the closet. She argues that the closet, and the binary oppositions that it intersects, are central to an understanding of twentieth-century culture. Her argument that the silence of not coming out has a performative value and therefore is not really a silence is particularly convincing. She also defends the gay specificity of the metaphor, wishing to distance it from the recent sociolinguistic trends that cause the expressions "being in/coming out of the closet" to be appropriated by the nongay. I would argue that, in the case of drug addicts, we can pretty much adopt the notion of closet without worrying too much: drug addicts are (perhaps) the last minority to be forced, legally, morally, and culturally, into the closet, without really having the option of coming out.
Not that they would necessarily want to. Many users would probably be wary of the inevitable identity attribution that accompanies the gesture of coming out, the de facto "I am out therefore I am" (an addict) that would ensue from their courageous self-positioning. Nor am I sure that our culture, fragmented as it is by identity politics, needs more identities, more "I am this and that, and you can't understand me." Or maybe it does. Undoubtedly, it is a thorny question, made thornier by the seemingly insurmountable stigma that brands drug addiction and prevents those who do not use drugs from taking interest in the addicts’ scandalous plight as modern scapegoats.[19] Some argue that the stigma will not be defused and defeated until respectable addicts acquire visibility, until the drug warriors are forced to face the existence of thousands of productive users. Some others feel that the whole notion of addiction needs overhauling, along the lines of Stanton Peele's work that, in many ways echoes Sedgwick's, albeit in a totally different framework and language. A psychiatrist devoted to research on addiction, Peele argues that the concept of addiction as it stands reifies people and substances, is pharmako-centric, and creates a cultural horizon that makes it nearly impossible to expect and pursue a break from addiction. Both Sedgwick and Peele seek to dodge the strictures of a binary system in favor of the multiplicity of paths and of identities.
However fascinated by this whole question, I must return to my cinematic concerns and verify the usefulness of the connection established between homosexuality and drug use/addiction. If drug users are a closeted minority, an analysis of the cinematic representation of drug use is then bound to turn into an examination of another "celluloid closet," to use the felicitous expression coined by Vito Russo to define the Wlms that have depicted homosexuality. To be sure, the drug celluloid closet is different (we have seen how drugs surfaced in Wlms from the beginning), but it is a closet nonetheless. Although no generalizations can be made about the enormous number of Wlms depicting drugs, I propose to look at them as various manifestations of a celluloid closet of sorts.
Unlike what happened in the representation of homosexuality, there have been no periods of invisibility in the drug celluloid closet—except during the years of the Hays Code. Quite the contrary, drugs have tended to be seen so much and in such a light that they have been worse than if invisible. Their hypervisibility has made spectators feel that they have seen all that can be seen, and thus need no new vision(s). Too much visibility has bred invisibility. Moreover, in the dim, distorted light of the closet, a whole series of narrative (for example, a Jekyll and Hyde dialectic) and iconographic (for example, the xenophobic and racist images of the bad guys) gestures has coalesced and crystallized. To a certain degree, some stereotyping is inevitable in any genre, but the frequency of intoxication and addiction representations in a celluloid closet mode has turned stereotyping into stigmatizing.
The drug celluloid closet does not reward the researcher with a sense of teleology. The story of the homosexual celluloid closet as outlined by Vito Russo presents some kind of linearity, from silence and the mask to misrepresentation to gay cinema. Indeed, if we consider the emergence of a queer cinema, or even mainstream concessions like Philadelphia (Demme, 1994), one cannot help feeling that there is some progress at work. Compared with its homosexual counterpart, the history of the drug celluloid closet is far less linear and more schizophrenic. No doubt this is a reflection of a historical reality, that is, of the way things turned out after the 1960s popular struggles. Whereas gays’ rights successfully resisted the conservative backlash of the 1980s, the drug users’ rights, which were never actually established, and were only selectively granted to some users (middle class, white) in some places and for some drugs, have disappeared pretty much everywhere. In the United States, drugs have had the doubtful honor of bearing the cross of the official scapegoat, formerly the privilege of communism. The pipe and needle have replaced the hammer and sickle. Thus, at a time when the gay celluloid closet started opening up, the representation of drugs saw the repressive tendencies of the closet radicalized by the escalation of the War on Drugs and thus entered the wartime phase that continues to this day. Because of the war, users and addicts are not the only ones to suffocate in the closet. The latter's long shadow has enshrouded even those (Wlmmakers/critics/producers of knowledge) who might want to represent drugs and addicts as other than demons.
All cultural production (including, therefore, cinema and writing about it) is straitjacketed by what I call a "wartime epistemology," where by epistemology I intend the often unconscious and theoretical grounds for knowledge and signification. A wartime epistemology only tolerates an either/or regime of signification and brings the binary tendencies of our culture to a rigid extreme. Out of all the possible questions that the knowing subject can ask of the object, wartime epistemology foregrounds only those that aim to verify the object's relationship to the war effort. Can this be a weapon? Is this an enemy? When Chief Darryl Gates of the Los Angeles Police Department remarked that drug users should be taken out and shot (!) because they are like traitors undermining their country at war, he was operating under a wartime epistemology. By repeatedly asking the same question and bringing out only one side of the object, the knowledge thus produced conjures up
In the case of illegal drugs, however, what kind of knowledge and representations can one produce, if one cannot bring the necessary subjective dimension to the topic (lest s/he be singled out as a war enemy)? An embarrassment in the eyes of posterity, wartime epistemology forces both the knowledge and the representation of drugs into a false position, at odds with the requirements of the postmodern epistemology that otherwise regulates all the other cognitive domains today. People have neither the ease to experiment with drugs, nor the freedom of creating a public sphere that might enhance their understanding of their experimentations. As a matter of fact, there can be no public sphere on the topic, no social architecture designed to host and facilitate a collective conversation on the issue's myriad ramifications. Merely raising the topic with any attitude other than condemnation is itself bound to create problems. Talking/writing about drugs, in academia, as well as in any other situation where a job, a career, a reputation, are at stake, is no easy task. And although the world of cinema lives in relative autonomy and is seemingly unaffected by "drug scandals," Wlmic representation does, in the last instance, depend on the dominant, wartime epistemology: both those who make Wlms and those who talk/write about them are locked in a closet of sorts by wartime epistemology.
If producers of cinematic knowledge and representations are restricted in their movements by the wartime epistemology, on the other end of the spectrum, consumers of images are given representations that at best distort, at worst fabricate, a false reality. Let me pause here and direct your attention to the irony of a wartime celluloid closet that so distorts reality and vision as to become itself intoxicating (when not poisonous). Differently put, the wartime celluloid closet brings about those very effects against
- Cinema is a purveyor of visions—so much so that many Wlms use(d) the drug theme as an excuse to explore the visionary potential of cinematography;
- Cinema is a form of escape, just like drugs are said to be;
- Films take their spectators on a trip, a voyage of the body and the mind, in the shadowy area of what I would call, borrowing the term from a recently formed branch of medicine, "the psychosomatic";
- Television, which Pasolini regarded as an "audio-visual technique" similar to cinematography, is in all seriousness spoken of as addictive; and
- Finally, if intoxication, as defined by Avital Ronell, "names a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear," cinema, indeed, does make phantoms appear, phantoms that are larger than life.[20]
With their "narcotic" potential intensified by the wartime/closet epistemology, Wlms about drugs have acted like the worst of psychoactive substances, instantly addictive and highly intoxicating. In the dim, distorted light of the closet, the C.I.A. has caused certain phantoms to appear time after time, thereby setting the notorious "truth-by-repetition" phenomenon in motion: show an image often enough, and it will be taken for real, the norm, the truth. It is for this reason that I decided to call this investigation of the C.I.A. the "intoxicated screen"because in addition to representing intoxication, many Wlms also produce it. I know of people who changed their image of drugs considerably after witnessing some users’ ritual administration of dangerous drugs such as heroin. They were astonished by the extent to which the users’ behavior was a far cry from the image they previously held—an image that had largely, if not solely, been formed on the basis of movies. Mainstream cinema has intoxicated millions of spectators, people whose only visual exposure to actual addicts and drug use/abuse consists of a string of celluloid villains and heroes.
You may have been wondering all along if things are as bleak as I portray them. After all, you remember seeing some honest Wlms, and there were/are directors out of the drug closet. Film history does contain a substantial body of Wlms that lie outside the mainstream and have portrayed drug use differently. Differently? That is the question. I would argue that most of the "different" Wlms (and I do not mean those that irresponsibly exploit(ed) the glamour of drug use, but those that attempt "a certain realism")
It is hard to imagine what the discourse on drugs would be like if it had not been subjected to the dialectic of transgression, and my anger is aimed precisely at those institutions that keep such a dialectic in place and thus delay our culture's apprenticeship in the use of drugs. Western culture has found a way of dealing with alcohol that, though not perfect, does not threaten the fabric of our societies. Most people know how to drink wine; we have dealt with it for millennia. Our ability to deal with alcohol is not something innate, nor is it some benign characteristic of the substance itself. We learned.
MacAndrew and Edgerton's 1969 pathbreaking study, Drunken Comportment, shows that "over the course of socialization, people learn about drunkenness what their society knows about drunkenness; and accepting and acting upon, the understandings thus imparted to them, they become the living confirmation of their society's teachings."[21] Drunkenness is thus partly learned. Several studies of drugged comportment have reached similar conclusions. Already in 1947 A. Lindesmith signaled the existence of powerful cognitive elements in heroin addiction.[22] Howard Becker's 1963 classic on deviant behavior, The Outsiders, suggested that pot smoking is no mere biochemical reaction to the plant's active principles, but a moment in which historically situated subjects act out what they know about and expect from the administration of the drug.[23] Most influential of all, however, is the work of the late Harvard psychiatry professor N. E. Zinberg who has encapsulated drug intoxication's cultural and cognitive components in the memorable "set and setting" formula, where "set" refers to the psychological, personal situation of the individual and "setting" to the context in which the experience takes place.[24]
If intoxication and addiction depend in part on what the individual has learned about them, what are the sources of such learning? In the essay "On Alcohol and the Mystique of Media Effects," Andrew Tudor has tried to define the extent to which the media (Wlms) have represented and influenced the reality of alcohol consumption. Suggesting that learning about drunkenness is a complex process, Tudor argues that "our images of drunkenness have more than one source, but it is surely inevitable that the media play an important part in this process of collective articulation."[25] The exact same argument could be made about drugs, with the important difference that drugs are a recent acquisition in Western culture, and cinema has played a larger role in their cultural articulation than it has with alcohol. We
Perhaps we should go back to a pretransgressive period, when drug taking was not subjected to the good/evil binary. But is going back ever possible? Or we should perhaps revisit, with a postcolonial eye, those non-Western cultures (and, when possible, their cinematographies) that have a far longer history of coping with drug use, the Andeans who have for centuries chewed coca leaves or the Indians who have used hemp cannabis for millennia. A heartwarming, cinematographic example comes from the making of Satyajit Ray's masterpiece Pather Panchali (1956). The character of Indir Thakrun, the old toothless woman whose performance gave the Wlm much of its timeless, touching beauty, was played by Chunibala Devi, an eighty-year-old retired actress who, apart from a small salary, demanded and obtained that she be provided with her daily dose of opium. Ray recounts the episode without any implication that Chunibala was immoral or sick. She just had that habit, much like you, reader, may have the habit of using caffeine to get going in the morning. But it is enough to see the damage we have done in these very countries, Wrst exporting transgressive myths and new ways of drug administration, and then forcing a drug war agenda on their governments, to lose the hope that even they can go back to pretransgressive days. Satyajit Ray's last Wlm, The Visitor (1992), depicts an old man who returns to India after a life spent in the developed West. Critical of India's Westernization, he recounts the horror of a world in which "there are millions of young people injecting poison in their blood."
So, dear reader, things are bad. And the drug war makes them worse. I did not come this far in the chapter to suggest a solution. As I announced in the preface, my thesis was merely a call to arms, an invitation to start
COMMUNIQUé N. 3
It has been calculated that the number of people in the United States who are currently either incarcerated, on parole, on probation, or under some form of court supervision approximates 5.2 percent. Five point two percent! The United States is currently the Western country with the highest number of people in jail per capita (you knew that). Needless to say, drug offenses make up almost 50 percent of the prisoners, and a staggering proportion of these belongs to the category of nonviolent drug offenders, or victimless crimes. Recently—and I could come up with dozens of similar examples— a Vermont man was arrested for growing six marijuana plants. The man was given a suspended sentence by the state court, but under U.S. federal law, his family lost the 49-acre farm. The forfeiture of property for drug violations has become a lucrative business, and so has prison building.
The Web informs me that Will Foster, a medical marijuana user suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, was recently sentenced by the state of Oklahoma to ninety-three (yes, you read well, ninety-three) years of prison for growing the forbidden medicine in a 5-foot-square room in his basement. He is currently being held in a Texas jail and, since his sentencing on February 27, 1997, has been denied access not only to his medication of choice but also to medicine prescribed to him by his family doctor, Voltarin and Napersyn, both anti-inflammatory medications, and Vicodin, a pain medication. Meg Foster, his wife, says that her husband's legs are swollen, discolored, and extremely painful and that her pleas that he be properly medicated have gone totally unheeded.
Clearly, once again, something is wrong. It is necessary to investigate what kind of images have been imprinted on the retinas and minds not only of the American people in general, but of the many professors in Wlm studies who celebrate strategies of subversion in Wlmmaking, defend minorities, and give voice to the subaltern, but hardly ever say a word about what is happening to the victims of the War on Drugs, right here, right now. I want to understand why the discourse on drugs and the war against them is not on the liberal intellectuals’ agenda. And yet drugs are quintessentially interdisciplinary and multicultural, the two buzzwords in academia these days. Drugs have enormous global (neocolonial), racial, and class ramifications. Is it fear? Is it puritanism? Is it the tacit assumption that Foster and the man in Vermont deserve their fate? Ninety-three years: Did a rapist ever get that