TRIPS ARE AS VARIED AS THE PEOPLE WHO TAKE THEM

It's Not Harmful To Share A Hit Of Drugs On Film, And Everyone Is Doing It

Is film the most potent art for relaying drug experiences? Its
hypnotic, fluid, unprecedented fusion of sound, image, movement and
forced perspective certainly feels aligned to some essence of the
stream of consciousness, even to dreaming. But where drugs are
concerned, I have to wonder if movies don't get closer to the heart
of the matter when they show restraint in how they use their
multiform tools and effects.

Once you begin to survey movies that deal in drugs, it becomes clear
that the medium's generally most forceful when it evokes rather than
illustrates. When filmmakers attempt to recreate hallucinations, the
results are often malnourished or silly. But there are plenty of
movies that approach drug states-of mind, body and soul-in
thoughtful, inventive or insightful ways. For some reason most of
them are American.

Is drug use a distinctly American movie theme? The numbers would have
us think so. And there are certain American faces that keep
reappearing in drug movies (or at least doing drugs in regular
movies): Dennis Hopper, Max Perlich, Chloe Sevigny, Dean Stockwell,
Roy Scheider, Keanu Reeves, Peter Fonda, Johnny Depp, William Hurt.
Why these actors? Is it something written on their faces, something
suspicious etched in their crooked smiles or glassy eyes? I wonder.

It's these faces, captured in a moment of transition from relative
sobriety to relative inebriation, that prompt my richest memories of
delving into cinema's drug state: Scheider's Joe Gideon in All That
Jazz snorting a line to trigger "Showtime," Hopper's Frank Booth in
Blue Velvet inhaling some unnamed gas before changing into the
scariest babbling stoner in the history of movies. Just thinking
about these moments gives me a chill and a thrill.

Movies make a pretty good drug in themselves. The duration changes
from film to film, but you can always split if you start tripping
out. They can take a while to come down from, but generally cause no
hangover. They are, however, potentially addictive, and encompass an
impressive variety of experiences and perspectives.

Freaking Out

Some guy on acid attacking a pony-tailed Jack Nicholson with power
tools in Psych-Out (1968), Rudy Ray Moore flipping out on angel dust
at the loopy finale of Avenging Disco Godfather (1980), Al Pacino
wielding machine guns in Scarface (1980), Richard E Grant turning his
eyeballs into bulgy little rocks and definitely not staying cool in
Withnail & I (1987), William Hurt turning into a goddamned
goat-eating monkey in Altered States (1980): there' s no end to what
the movies can tell us about bad trips. Such scenes smear together in
my foggy memories of drug movies, but the films as a whole don't
necessarily propose any particular take on the role of drugs in our
lives. To do that, it might be best to ease into things, to start
with something mellow before digging into the heavy stuff.

Feeling Groovy

If pot is arguably the least harmful of illegal substances, the
movies have, over a long period of diminishing hysteria, responded
with stories that neither overtly praise nor condemn a pot-smoking
lifestyle but rather use it for inspired comedic fodder. In this
regard, while it's not much of a movie overall, How High (2001) has
given us one of the most brilliant pot-based premises, with Redman
and Method Man smoking their dead friend's ashes in order to summon
up his ghost, who then materializes to help them to ace their
entrance exams for Harvard.

A far more esteemed if equally hazy ballad for blunt-smokers is, of
course, The Big Lebowski (1998). What lazy bliss is conjured up in
the tumbling of tumbleweeds, the gliding of bowling balls, and Bob
Dylan's "The Man in Me," where rock's most revered wordsmith is never
so pleasing as when he just sings "la-la-la-la,
la-da-da-da-da-da-da." No one would mistake Jeff Bridges ' Dude-a guy
who lights candles in the bath and splays out in the floor to listen
to tapes of old bowling matches-for a go-getter protagonist, yet how
much more satisfying that his clumsy apathy actually aids instead of
inhibits him in his playing detective.

The Mark Inside Things get weird fast in drug movies, but they can
also prove to resonate as metaphors. In The Addiction (1995), the
drug is already inside you: it's blood. Shot in a black and white
that seems to saturate the urban grime, Abel Ferrara's NYC vampire
film is a thinly veiled allegory of junkie agony, treating addiction
itself like a contagious virus. Everybody in this movie spouts
existentialist philosophy: it's terrifically pretentious, highly body
conscious and surprisingly unnerving. Lily Taylor writhes on the
floor a long time before pushing the limits of consent in her
desperate search for a bloody fix. Christopher Walken, a veteran
bloodsucker, shows up to advise her on coming to terms with being
undead. He's in the William S Burroughs role of the wise old junkie
- -he even cites Naked Lunch.

In fact, the shadow of Burroughs looms over a number of drug films,
but none so much as David Cronenberg's wildly inventive
interpretation of Burroughs's most famous novel. Naked Lunch (1991)
hasn't a single recognizable drug in it, but, drawing upon
Burroughs's biography as liberally as from his fiction, it conveys
the most complex and harrowing closed circuit of addiction and
eternal return in movies. Peter Weller is trapped is a cycle of
sexual repression, schizophrenic disassociation, murder and
dependency. The sense of unreality is beautifully heightened by the
use of soundstages and the refusal to give any physical object a
fixed appearance. And as the eloquently staged, chilling final
sequence makes clear, the whole thing's really about the birth of an
artist and the devastating price to be paid for one's muse.

The Palace of Wisdom

Life after drugs is rarely glamorous. Drugstore Cowboy (1989) gives
us a nice primer right in its opening moments: Matt Dillon, resigned
to a new life with no woman and no dope, working in a machine shop,
his beatific face calmly recalling how he found himself in the back
of this ambulance, while Abbie Lincoln sings "For All We Know" in her
strange, staggered cadence and Super 8 reminiscences flicker
melancholically on screen. The tone is elegant, eccentric and bittersweet.

Is it any surprise that Burroughs eventually turns up here, too?
Seeing the man in the flesh gives Drugstore Cowboy that extra tinge
of authority, the slow steady way Burroughs turns in his seat to
recognize Dillon, those small but lucid eyes that never seem to
change in expression, that insect-like body. Walking with Dillon in
the overcast daylight of Portland, Burroughs is an unforgettable
presence, and it's as though Gus Van Sant was suddenly making a documentary.

The Big Picture

Evocatively ungrounded in its floaty animation, A Scanner Darkly
(2006) is inspired by that other great voice of authority on dope in
American letters. Paranoid and somewhat dysfunctional, Philip K Dick
was very likely schizophrenic, yet his troubled mind was still
organized and intelligent enough to work as a virtual conduit for a
larger phenomenon of collective psychic malaise. Like Cronenberg did
with Burroughs, and like Terry Gilliam did with Hunter S Thompson in
the supremely drug-addled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Richard
Linklater channeled Dick's spirit as much as he did the source novel
in bringing shape and sharpness to A Scanner Darkly, which proposes
to reveal the US as a vast drug-pushing machine, thrusting Keanu
Reeve's narc into a maddening house of mirrors, assigned to spy on
himself before the drugs in his system finally reach critical mass.

Where movies can take us with regards to drugs now is ambiguous. The
subject has been explored from an impressive variety of angles in the
last few decades, yet there are as many drug experiences as there are
drug-takers, and those who take drugs, whether for transcendence or
escape, don't seem to be diminishing in number. No doubt there will
be new stories to tell, new revelations to share, and with any luck,
some of them will still sound good after the high has worn off.