DRUG BINGE

'Blow' Is Latest Film In Hollywood's Fascination With Addiction

During the past year, Hollywood seems to have taken more drugs than ever.

We're not talking about self-absorbed executives sauntering out of the
men's rooms of upscale Los Angeles restaurants, brushing errant specks of
cocaine from the lapels of Armani suits. We're talking content, a deep
fascination with the world of drugs as represented in a cluster of movies
that's on the verge of becoming a genre.

The trend continued Friday when Blow swept into theaters. This Ted
Demme-directed epic bases its story on real-life cocaine importer George
Jung, who became a U.S.-based salesman for the Colombian drug cartel during
the exuberant '80s.

To ardent filmgoers, it may seem as if Blow covers familiar turf. Two weeks
ago, Steven Soderbergh won an Oscar for Traffic, his stunningly
comprehensive look at the drug trade. Before that we'd seen Requiem for a
Dream, a startling tale about a heroin addict and his pill-popping mom.

There are more. Pungent clouds of marijuana smoke wafted through Wonder
Boys, the story of a dissolute college professor portrayed by Michael
Douglas. Almost Famous, about a teen-ager entering the rock scene, couldn't
ignore drugs. And the lesser-known Jesus' Son, adapted from a book of Denis
Johnson short stories, told the story of a drifter (Billy Crudup) who
wallowed in drugs before finding his share of redemption.

In all, we've traveled a long way from Up in Smoke, the 1978
Cheech-and-Chong comedy that blew pot smoke and laughs across a youth
culture that couldn't wait to inhale. We also seem to have abandoned the
time when cocaine was little more than a plot device inserted into
thrillers almost as frequently as car chases.

As if to synchronize with a mood of dot-com mania and soaring stock prices,
the movies began shifting attention from those who use drugs to those who
sell them. With their quick profits and heady rushes, drugs made a
convenient stand-in for a ravenous economy that only recently has begun to
experience the shocks of withdrawal.

The brief period of heroin chic (as reflected in magazine ads and in movies
such as Drugstore Cowboy, Pulp Fiction, The Basketball Diaries, High Art
and Trainspotting) also helped to change the tone. As the drugs got harder,
so did the movies. Alarms began to sound.

So, precisely why are movies so fascinated with drugs?

To begin with, there's a definite entertainment upside in the drug culture.
There's something liberating about illicit and illegal activity, at least
as portrayed on film. Some of this results from the fact that the drug
culture can take on the trappings of big-time entrepreneurship. One could
get rich without being Bill Gates.

Drugs offer an opportunity to put new spin on rags-to-riches stories. In
Requiem for a Dream, a young man wants to score big. Small matter that the
movie opens with his stealing his mother's television; he thinks he's bound
for financial glory.

But it's Blow that revels in the purest form of entrepreneurial giddiness.
In the early days of his California pot-dealing, Jung feels the excitement
of growing a business. He's an innovator, bypassing middlemen and hiring
pilots to travel directly to Mexico to buy drugs. Jung accumulated fabulous
wealth. In a sense, he reinvented himself -- or at least tried.

Additional drug allure revolves around this possibility for personal
reinvention, a theme in American culture since at least The Great Gatsby.
During Blow, Jung, brilliantly played by Johnny Depp, talks to his father.
A once-shiftless young man, Jung now parks a row of luxury cars outside his
mansion.

Though wary about his son's method of amassing wealth, Dad (Ray Liotta)
delivers a telling message: Avoid winding up with nothing more than a
pension and a plateful of dreams; become a new man.

In a culture still tethered to rudimentary notions of crime and punishment,
unbridled liberation can go only so far. Jung was finally busted. He's in a
New York prison, serving a sentence that runs until 2015.

Blow director Demme, who's 37, says part of the current interest in drugs
springs from suddenly mature artists' trying to put their youths into
perspective.

"I'm good friends with Steven Soderbergh," Demme said in a phone
conversation last week. "We both grew up in the '70s at a time when a big
revolution was going on. ...

"I also think America has been and still is very much in denial about our
drug and treatment problems. I wouldn't have thought of making this movie
until I met George in prison. We talked in a room full of 20 year olds,
predominantly black kids who on visiting day had their 1-year-old babies
with them. What do you think that cycle's going to be like?"

That's a clue; in the new drug movies, American mythology mingles with
realism and conviction. Traffic, for example, alerts us to the widespread
corruption spawned by the drug trade while attempting to shift our focus
from criminality to health. In one of the movie's last scenes, Soderbergh
shows us a father, mother and daughter at a rehab session. The drama of
punishment gives way to the anticlimactic tremors of reconciliation and
personal growth.

The appeal of the drug movie also has something to do with the metaphoric
possibilities in addiction. In Requiem, director Darren Aronofsky
understood the intent of Hubert Sebly Jr.'s novel: to show the lengths to
which we'll go to avoid reality. Ellen Burstyn plays a mother who fears age
and obscurity. She dreams of making an appearance on a TV show. She gets
hooked on diet pills in hopes of fitting into a red dress she wore as a
young woman.

In keeping with such dream-feuled mania, addiction provides a way to an
excess-prone society, to spin yarns that alert us to the consequences of
our apparently insatiable desire for escape -- while simultaneously
providing a dose of escapism.

I'm not sure the current crop of drug movies succeeds in speaking about the
entire culture. I can't agree with those who compare Traffic to a more
telling epic, The Godfather. But there's no question the subject has
animated talented filmmakers, many of whom are riding a Hollywood high.