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.