THE STONED SCREEN

From Easy Rider To Blow, The Drug Movie Has Become An Addiction All Its Own

Director Martin Scorsese once said that movies are "really a kind of dream
state, like taking dope." But a lot of movies these days are not just like
taking dope; they're about taking dope. Just look at some of the recent
Oscar nominees. In Traffic, a 16-year-old white girl lying in bed -- an
odalisque with baby fat -- watches in a stoned reverie as a naked black man
shoots heroin into her ankle. In Requiem for a Dream, a junkie Adonis
probes for a vein in a black-and-blue forearm, while his mother is strung
out on diet pills and TV game shows. In Almost Famous, a rocker on acid
proclaims he's God and jumps off a roof into a pool. And now comes Blow, a
drug-culture version of the American Dream -- starring Johnny Depp as
George Jung, the entrepreneur who unleashed cocaine on North America in the
1970s.

Depp is adorable. Who else could make a big-time drug dealer seem so
sweetly naive? He comes across as the Johnny Appleseed of cocaine. But
Blow's nostalgia trip through the drug culture's coming of age -- from the
innocence of weed to the corruption of coke -- follows a familiar arc. And
by the end of it, the kicks have been cut with so much baby-powder
sentiment, it makes you wonder if the Drug Movie, once at the experimental
edge of cinema, is now being peddled as just another recreational formula.

The genre has been with us for a while, at least since 1969's Easy Rider.
And let's be specific. By Drug Movie, we don't mean crime flicks like The
French Connection that focus on catching drug dealers. Or rehab movies like
Clean and Sober that are about getting off drugs. The Drug Movie is about
getting off, period. Which is not to say the euphoria goes unpunished.
Those who get off rarely get off scot-free: the high is usually followed by
a sobering crash.

In fact, the Drug Movie has a hyperbolic sense of morality that's at once
biblical and burlesque. From the martyred bikers of Easy Rider to the
tortured souls of Requiem for a Dream, its heroes are typically outlaw
pilgrims on a quest for altered consciousness. And the drug itself is an
ingestible Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It's taboo crystallized, the
ultimate fetish commodity. Cocaine is powdered greed; heroin is the slow
ink of the devil; hallucinogens are a ticket to madness. Only marijuana
gets off lightly, blowing smoke in the face of banal rectitude, although
let's not forget that in American Beauty the suburban dad who develops a
taste for killer weed ends up dead. Not from the weed, of course, but from
the marine next door -- not unlike the redneck shotgun blast that blew away
Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda at the end of Easy Rider.

More often than not, the Drug Movie is a doomed romance, the last stand of
the stoned against the system. But it has also been synonymous with a
revolution in filmmaking, a desire to disrupt straight narrative with
visual delirium. It's no coincidence that Easy Rider, which erupted from
the counterculture and served as its eulogy, became the first independent
film of the American New Wave to challenge Hollywood. As amateurish as it
was, it ushered in the idea of the movie-as-drug-trip. (Of course, some
might argue that the previous year's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first
trip flick, even if the only drugs involved were those ingested by the
audience.)

Over the past three decades, the Drug Movie, like the drug trade, has
expanded its arsenal. Attempts to synthesize mind-altering experience
on-screen have become more authentic and non-judgmental. Gus Van Sant
captured the snowy cocoon of pharmaceuticals in Drugstore Cowboy -- the
unrepentant memoir of a jailed dope fiend who describes the rush "as a warm
itch that surged along until the brain consumed it in a general explosion."
Oliver Stone (The Doors) and Canada's Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo) have
both scaled the Everest of drug re-enactment: the acid trip. Trainspotting
rolled back new frontiers of junkie heaven, and hell, by plunging the
camera into the eye of the needle, and down the toilet. And you can almost
hear the brain cells popping in Human Traffic, an exhilarating ode to
ecstasy: a movie that wants to be a drug.

Simulating substance abuse has become a kind of pornography. And in the
repertoire of drug porn, shooting up is still the most cinematic fetish --
the equivalent to the money shot in a sex scene. David Cronenberg once told
me that needles are the one thing that makes him squeamish in movies. Well,
he must have squirmed like a creature from Shivers when he saw Pulp
Fiction's scene of an overdosed Uma Thurman being stabbed in the heart with
a giant syringe of adrenaline. Like addicts constantly upping their dose,
filmmakers keep devising ever more graphic fix scenes. Melanie Griffith
jams a needle into her neck in Another Day in Paradise, as does Ben Stiller
in Permanent Midnight. Requiem for a Dream takes drug porn to new heights
with a techno-pulse montage of microscopic close-ups: smack bubbling under
a flame, a needle snorkelling it up, a pupil dilating like a spring-loaded
parasol.

Shoving cocaine up your nose, on the other hand, is not very sexy to watch.
While heroin in movies has come to signify bohemian squalor -- and tragic
wisdom -- cocaine almost always represents corruption and the wrong kind of
wealth. It's the New Money drug. That was its role in Scorsese's
Goodfellas, about a New Jersey kid who makes it as a gangster, then gets
lost in a blizzard of coke. P. T. Anderson took a similar tack with Boogie
Nights, about a porn star whose career nose-dives.

Both are stories of Seventies excess, about the rise and fall of
blue-collar boys who make it in the underworld. And so is Blow, a movie
transparently modelled on Goodfellas. Like the Scorsese film, it's based on
the biography of a man behind bars (Blow, Bruce Porter's compelling 1993
biography of George Jung). Director Ted Demme mimics the Goodfellas style
of voice-over narration. And to drive home the homage, he even casts
Goodfellas star Ray Liotta as George's father.

The movie starts well, with Can't You Hear Me Knocking by the Rolling
Stones scorching through a fast-cut odyssey of cocaine production, from a
vat of paste in the Colombian jungle to bundles of white bricks on a
California airstrip. Then we flash back to a blue-collar household near
Boston, where George is being raised by a broken-down father (Ray Liotta)
and a mean-spirited mother (Rachel Griffiths). With a friend, George drives
out to California in 1965, and ends up in Manhattan Beach, where the
streets are paved with Acapulco gold and the girl next door is a stewardess
in a bikini.

Our hero hooks up with a pot-dealing hairdresser (a flaming Paul Reubens),
and before long George is flying in bales of marijuana from Mexico. When he
gets caught with 660 lb. of the stuff, he tells the court that he just
"crossed an imaginary line with a bunch of plants." In jail, George meets
the high-level Colombian contact who guides him to the next level. Prison,
says George, "was a crime school -- I went in with a bachelor of marijuana
and graduated with a doctorate of cocaine."

All this is heady stuff, and as George brazenly sets himself up as the
American point man for Pablo Escobar's Medellin cocaine cartel, the film
skips along with the energy of a good success story. But as George's world
unravels, the movie stalls, like a drug wearing off. Penelope Cruz shows up
in a shallow role as his Colombian wife, Mirtha, who turns into a fiery
nag. (Between his wife and mother, George is beset by shrewish women.) The
chemistry between Cruz and Depp never materializes. And as the movie drifts
to a melancholy fade -- George bonding with his dad and missing his
daughter -- you're really starting to miss the cocaine.

Blow lacks the intricate detail and propulsive rhythm that made Goodfellas
so satisfying. It's a substance-abuse flick that lacks substance. But it
does touch on quite a phenomenon. As George observes: "Cocaine exploded on
American culture like an atomic bomb. It started in Hollywood and spread."
Once it was accepted by actors and musicians, he adds, everyone else followed.

Show business has always been the motor force of the drug culture. And drug
movies are a form of Hollywood self-portraiture. Depp, who played gonzo
acidhead Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has his own
history of heavy drug use. As for Demme (nephew of director Jonathan), in a
phone interview from New York City last week, he declined to talk about his
personal habits. "But obviously being in the entertainment biz, you see a
lot," he said. "I've been around people who have been in the game. And
recently, I've run into a few people who have been affected pretty badly by
the game. And that has affected my life." Demme, 36, certainly knows that
any drug movie, pro or con, has to provide a vicarious high. "A lot of
people will tell you that drugs are really fun," he says, "particularly
people who were partying a lot in the '70s. If the whole movie is no, no,
no, then who would want to go to that party?"

Even Steven Soderbergh, whose Traffic paints a dark picture of drugs,
appreciates the importance of making them seductive. The drug-taking scenes
are the movie's most erotic moments -- its only erotic moments. Over lunch
in Toronto last year, Soderbergh said that when he shot the scene of
teenagers cooking up free-base cocaine, he had no shortage of volunteers
from the crew offering to demonstrate exactly how it was done. But then,
Hollywood has a firsthand appreciation of the art of getting high, and the
price of coming down. It is, after all, in the business of trafficking dreams.

Cool Movies on Drugs: A User's Guide

REEFER MADNESS 1936 The anti-pot propaganda film (aka Tell Your Children)
is reborn as a high-camp comedy for the children of the Sixties.

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS 1967 Showbiz melodrama, with Patty Duke as an actress
on uppers ("Sure I take dolls! I got to get up at five in the morning and
sparkle, sparkle, sparkle!")

EASY RIDER 1969 A movie about the stoned, by the stoned, for the stoned.
The screen's first "you had to be there" acid trip is improvised in a New
Orleans cemetery. Far out.

GIMME SHELTER 1970 The Rolling Stones and the Hells Angels bring music,
drugs and murder to Altamont, Calif. A gloriously bad trip.

PERFORMANCE 1970 Mick Jagger does some bisexual shape-shifting with a
gangster, two girls and some psychedelics in a London flat.

THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK 1971 Junk verite, with Al Pacino cruising
Manhattan's mean streets: when an extra shoots up, it looks very unsimulated.

UP IN SMOKE 1978 Cheech and Chong target an audience highly prone to laughter.

ALTERED STATES 1980 William Hurt looks for enlightenment in LSD and sensory
deprivation tanks. Problem is, he keeps having religious hallucinations
during sex.

SID & NANCY 1986 As junkie Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, Gary Oldman is a human
train wreck.

BLUE VELVET 1986 Dennis Hopper, who has tried everything, plays a psycho
sucking on nitrous oxide.

DEAD RINGERS 1988 David Cronenberg directs Jeremy Irons as self-medicating
twin gynecologists.

DRUGSTORE COWBOY 1989 As a defrocked junkie priest, William Burroughs gives
Matt Dillon his Beat blessing. Director Gus Van Sant's finest hour.

GOODFELLAS 1990 The ultimate cocaine jag: Ray Liotta races around like a
man on fire, trying to deal coke, and fix his life, while making tomato sauce.

NAKED LUNCH 1991 A writer cuts "the black meat of the giant aquatic
Brazilian centipede" with insecticide ("It's a Kafka high. You feel like a
bug").

RUSH 1991 Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh are narcs who get hooked on
hard evidence.

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES 1995 A pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio rolls up his
sleeves to play junkie poet Jim Carroll.

HARD CORE LOGO 1996 Canada's Bruce McDonald whips up a goat's head soup of
an acid trip.

TRAINSPOTTING 1996 Heroin, pro and con. Pro: "Take the best orgasm you've
ever had and multiply it by a thousand." Con: a mother ignores her dead
baby to look for another fix.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS 1998 Slapstick psychedelia. Johnny Depp
dresses up as Hunter S. Thompson, for whom ether is the drug of last
resort. A movie that must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

GO 1999 Sarah Polley deals ecstasy. Look for the stoned subtitled
conversation with a cat.

GRASS 1999 Ron Mann compiles the greatest hits of pot prohibition. Woody
Harrelson narrates.

HUMAN TRAFFIC 1999 Trainspotting without the violence or the hassle. A
bunch of kids from Cardiff, Wales, go to a rave and live to tell about it.

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM 2000 Hair-raising drug porn, making the equation
between legal and illegal addictions.

TRAFFIC 2000 It covers all the bases: gangsters, cops, pimps, kids,
parents. Its mantra: the war on drugs can't be won; let the healing begin.