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.