A LONG AND WINDING TRIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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