Intoxicating Class: Cocaine at the Multiplex

September 19, 2013 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 12, Number 1, September 2001

David Banash

Department of English
University of Iowa
david-banash@uiowa.edu

 

Review of: Traffic. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid. USA Films, 2000. Blow.Dir. Ted Demme. Perf. Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta. New Line Cinema, 2001.

 

Just as the intoxicating sensations of different drugs are incommensurable with one another, so films about different drugs tend to have radically different themes and effects. In American popular culture perhaps the illegal drug with the longest cinema history is marijuana. From propaganda films of the ’30s to Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, or the more recent revisions such as Half-Baked, these films are, or have become, comedies. Further, almost all of them celebrate the subversively humorous effect of the drug for the preterite working classes. Even anti-marijuana propaganda films have become comedies as new generations receive them as pure camp. While films about marijuana are comedies, films about heroin are almost always tragedies, focusing on the way in which the drug is both a protest against an inhumane world and the immediate means of the hero’s self-destruction. While marijuana films revel in satire, heroin films explore the complexities of self and self-destruction. Distinct from both are films about cocaine, which are almost always evocations of and reflections on the American dream itself, that is to say, on politics in the most practical and quotidian sense of the word. Both Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Ted Demme’s Blow explore cocaine and its relationship to politics in the American imaginary. However, the reception of both these films is troubling. Traffic is lauded as the first honest look at the failure of the drug war, while Blow is either hailed or dismissed as yet another compelling but nonetheless vacuous celebration of the decadence of the ’70s and early ’80s. The almost universal mainstream acclaim for Traffic indicates just how much the worst kinds of conservative ideologies continue to inform even purportedly liberal attitudes toward drugs, while the dismissal of Blow as anything more than a decadent fantasy or simplistic cautionary tale misses its much more accurate indictment of the American idealization of capitalist conquest.

 

That cocaine is the drug of the ruling class in America is undoubtedly more than a function of its high price in comparison to other drugs. After all, the effect of cocaine is much closer to the effects of the most popular of the legal drugs of choice: caffeine and nicotine. (Not surprisingly, caffeine and cocaine were once combined in Coca-Cola.) Like these other speedy substances, cocaine heightens the senses and gives the user a great deal of energy. However, unlike other forms of speed, cocaine also gives its user the sensation of mastery and invulnerability. Rather than the ego death of heroin or LSD, cocaine legitimates the preferred modality of capitalist subjectivity–radical and inviolate individuality. If there were any doubt about the relationship of cocaine to capitalism, the case is eloquently made by Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983). Much like the original version of the film (1932), De Palma’s Scarface explores the ways in which the gangster is the ultimate representative of capitalism itself. However, in De Palma’s revision the connections between capitalism and cocaine are much more overt. In one of the strongest speeches of the film, the drug lord confronts the WASP establishment in an exclusive restaurant: “You’re not good. You just know how to hide,” he screams at them. In short, there is no difference between legal capitalism and the drug trade; both are exploitative and destructive. Quite clearly, in Scarface the villain is neither Cuba nor cocaine, but the multitude of injustices and contradictions that function as the conditions of possibility for capitalism itself, and its hero is punished in a grisly final scene only insofar as his drugs are themselves the worst kind of exploitative and alienated capital. The association of cocaine with the problems and politics of the ruling classes is also found in such films as Boost, Bright Lights Big City, and Less Than Zero, all ’80s films that indict the decadence of the era. One might even go back to Easy Rider, for while the heroes of that film explore the psychedelic revolution through the use of pot and LSD, they also support themselves as capitalists through the sale of cocaine.

 

The most surprising aspect of Traffic is that it is being presented as a revolutionary approach to representing the war on drugs. In a feature-length review of Traffic, the usually more savvy Salon contributor Jeff Stark argues that “there’s never been a single mainstream movie that’s been big enough, ambitious enough to go after the drug war itself.” According to Stark, if other films about drugs have been “self-contained units that dissect or examine one facet of drug use or the war on drugs, ‘Traffic’ is the solar system.” Stark’s unmitigated celebration of the film is typical of both right- and left-leaning publications, as critics of every stripe seem to be seduced by Soderbergh’s Balzacian aspirations. Indeed, Traffic is a large film, made in the best of Hollywood’s epic tradition. It deftly interweaves three complex stories. Michael Douglas plays the newly appointed Drug Czar, who, while dealing with the problems of his transition, learns that his own daughter is a drug addict. Benicio Del Toro gives the best performance of the film as Rodriguez, a Mexican cop caught between two rival drug cartels. Finally, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the society wife of an indicted American drug smuggler. As these stories develop, they also connect to one another, with minor characters from one plot turning up in the next. In addition to the epic reach of the film, its style works overtime to convince us that it is indeed after a virtually unmediated presentation of truth. Much of the camera work is hand-held and shaky, and Soderbergh shot much of it himself under the name Peter Andrews. The effect is very much like that of a documentary or news feature. However, in an almost inexplicable and schizophrenic way, the film also calls attention to itself by color coding each aspect of the story: all the action set in the East is tinged in dingy blue, California is shot in bright, exceedingly vivid colors, and Mexico is given a consistent sepia tint by the use of tobacco filters. While often visually stunning, the heavy-handed use of such techniques seems to suggest that Traffic is a didactic film, in which the director goes out of his way to make things as clear as possible lest the audience be confused. For a film that hopes to represent the complexities of the drug war, such reductionism is counter-productive.

 

The film is reductive in other ways, too, which tend to undermine its grand ambitions. To begin with, it is almost exclusively about cocaine, with a supporting role for heroin and less than walk-on cameos for the vast array of schedule-one drugs to which Nancy Reagan told us to just say no. Beyond this, Traffic claims its universal scope while investigating only the U.S.-Mexico drug trade and ignoring the multitude of other nations that engage in all aspects of the business. Finally, though the film is praised for its realism because Soderbergh was able to get walk-on appearances from both Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassly, neither of these politicians is about to propose any kind of radical reforms to the war on drugs. The presence of these politicians is of a piece with Soderbergh’s claim that the 56 million dollar film is in fact an “absolutely” independent production (Dargis). Traffic self-consciously attempts to mark the hypocrisy of the war on drugs by dramatizing the liberal use of alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco by the very people who make official drug policy. At the homes and cocktail parties of the lawmakers, the camera focuses incessantly on glasses of scotch and the bright ends of cigars. Frighteningly, Soderbergh seems to suggest that all drugs are simply pernicious and destructive. In the only real investigation of drug use in the film, we closely follow the Drug Czar’s daughter Caroline through a handful of scenes in which she apparently moves from being a recreational user of cocaine and heroin with other alienated, suburban youth to a raving crack-whore in less than a week. The sequence is the worst in the film, reminding one of nothing so much as the campy drug hysteria that informed the deadpan antics of Sgt. Friday on Dragnet. However, it is perhaps the final resolution to Rodriguez’s story that is the most distasteful. Caught in the midst of a noir triple-cross between two rival drug cartels and the U.S. narcs, Rodriguez plays for his life and a reward. And what does our hero ask for? He demands that the narcs provide lights for the Tijuana baseball diamonds so there can be night play. In fact, the film ends on a shot of his smiling face in the stands under the glare. In the end, the film seems to suggest, isn’t baseball better than drugs? What politician wouldn’t vote for that? Unable to represent the complexities or challenge the dominant narratives of drugs and the drug war, Traffic tries to sell its audience the panacea of baseball.

 

Both Traffic and Blow are adaptations. While Traffic was boiled down from Traffik, a BBC mini-series, Blow emerged from the pages of Bruce Porter’s biography of George Jung. Of course Porter’s original title was a bit more telling: Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. The narrative implied by the title is precisely what the film delivers as it chronicles Jung’s life from his days as a small-time dope pusher to his role as a major player in cocaine wholesaling and his inevitable bust. Unlike Traffic, Demme’s film of Blow suggests something closer to Scarface‘s much more pointed critique of capitalism, but you wouldn’t know it to read the reviews. As A. O. Scott put it in the New York Times:

 

The recent trend in movies about drugs–exemplified by “Traffic” and “Requiem for a Dream”–is toward a solemn reckoning of their social and psychological costs. “Blow,” with its jaunty visual style, short-attention-span editing, and outlaw-entrepreneur story line, takes a considerably lighter view. If the earnest, ambiguous “Traffic” worried about the insatiable American hunger for illegal pleasures, the breezily nonjudgmental “Blow” celebrates this appetite and makes those who exploit it into hip folk heroes. (Scott)

 

To call Blow either breezy or nonjudgmental is to miss the seriousness of much of the film, as well as its rank sentimentality. Unlike many cocaine films, Blow is short on glamorized scenes of hip, well-dressed people consuming the powder to the appropriate sound track. Instead, the film revolves around Jung’s troubled relationship to his working-class roots in Boston. Caught between his mother’s manic desire for a better life and his bankrupt father’s inability to provide, the film suggests that Jung’s approach to his business was more an attempt to please his parents than a rebellious pursuit of glamour and decadence for their own sake. Growing up in the shadow of wealth and power, the film has the child Jung announce, “I never want to be poor,” and the film moves on from there. What is at stake for Jung is never the kind of counter-cultural idealism associated with pot and LSD that suggests that turning on might make a revolution. Rather, Jung speaks about his time like a corporate stringer. In the film he says he was sent to prison with a “bachelors in pot and came out with a masters in cocaine.” Or, as he even more cynically puts it in Porter’s book, “being in the drug business was like being an executive in any business” (55). What the film tries to argue, at times quite convincingly, is that Jung’s problems have much more to do with class insecurities and the claustrophobia of an Oedipalized family than with the cocaine itself. For this alone, the film is certainly a cut above a paranoid, reactive fantasy like Traffic. As Jung says at another point during his sentencing on a marijuana charge, “all I did was cross an imaginary line with some plants.” However, this is not to say that Blow is any more honest than Traffic about many other issues.

 

Perhaps the most curious aspects of Blow are the revisions of Porter’s book, both necessary and gratuitous. David Edelstein of Slate has already noted the ways in which the film functions as “an unfathomable piece of whitewashing” for making Jung far more sympathetic to his girlfriend, wife, and daughter than the opportunistic misogynist Porter’s book suggests that he is. However, even this doesn’t go far enough. Some characters, such as Jung’s actual California connection Richard Barile, have disappeared altogether, replaced in this case by Paul Reubens’ composite of fictional and actual people. Further, there is no mention of the fact that Jung was eventually released from prison in 1993 after he testified (with the sanction of Pablo Escobar himself) against Carlos Lehder Rivas (the film’s Diego Delgado) in a federal court, nor that Jung’s current 22-year prison term was a result of a 1994 bust for a marijuana-smuggling operation. In fact, while the film version of Jung’s life revolves around his struggle to come to terms with his family, the book focuses almost exclusively on Jung’s troubled and complex relationship to Carlos Lehder and his attempts to become an accepted and trusted member of the Columbian cartel. Finally, there is no mention of Jung’s taste for S&M and cross-dressing, aside from a brief and unexplained moment in which a customs agent is perplexed by Jung’s suitcases full of women’s underwear. In fact, this moment is so inexplicable in the film that one critic was led to interpret it as Depp giving “a small tribute to Ed Wood” (Carr). Such omissions seem strange, and they suggest that Demme and screenwriters David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes wanted to avoid the most interesting complications that informed Jung’s life. In the film, Jung is presented as someone who finally learns his father’s lesson that money “isn’t real,” but the real Jung risked and lost his freedom again in part, one can only assume, for just that. Then again, Jung was not simply a straight, white, working-class kid trying to make good in all the wrong ways–the narrative the film seems to endorse. Jung’s self-destructive and arguably pathological responses to authority (he was given to gratuitous acts such as a tactically suicidal speech to a judge sentencing him for marijuana smuggling in which he claimed that he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong) are certainly more complex, especially in light of his marginal sexual identity, for in some ways Jung’s life was an exploration of sexual and political social control in many different spheres. Had Demme and his screenwriters had more guts, they might have been able to capture some of the fascinating and fundamentally more challenging aspects of Jung’s life that emerge in Porter’s book.

 

To claim, as so many critics do, that Traffic is about drugs and the drug war as a whole while Blow is a typical gangster pic only incidentally about cocaine is to miss the ways in which both films are responding to our contemporary moment. After all, it is not as if we were in the midst of a wave of mainstream big-budget LSD or even ecstacy films. Traffic, ostensibly about the drug war as a whole, focuses only on cocaine, and Blow and Traffic are not the only recent films to highlight this as the drug of choice. Other recent examples include Studio 54, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as slightly older titles such as Where the Day Takes You. There are at least three factors that seem to explain why cocaine is so much at the heart of our current popular culture. First, many of these films are beginning to deal with the ’70s and ’80s as a distinct historical period, and are marking the decadence of that period through the presence of cocaine. Second, as I have argued throughout, cocaine has traditionally been a ruling-class drug, and as such it becomes a powerful device for developing political allegories about the problems of capitalism; there is much to suggest that Blow is following closely in the wake of films like Scarface in using cocaine for just such ends. However, there is a third reason as well, which is perhaps best approached through one of the most frequent criticisms of Blow. For many critics the film fell flat when it didn’t spend enough time reveling in the decadence and excesses of cocaine and the world of the drug’s most privileged users. Clearly, though most mainstream film provides itself with the alibi of an unhappy ending for users, there is an insatiable appetite both to produce and consume representations of drug use. How else can we explain one critic’s comment that in Blow “as the fun goes out of substance abuse,” so does “any possibility of audience interest” (Turan). If such statements in themselves weren’t enough, hardly an interview of the cast or crew of any film involving cocaine is complete without a discussion of what substitute they employed for cocaine: powdered milk, sugar, baby formula, etc. And, then again, how else would it even be possible to make sense of Traffic‘s paranoid fantasy of drug use which lingers so lovingly on shot after shot of Caroline free-basing in one location after another? Filmic representations of essentially unrepresentable somatic experiences are always worth looking at a bit more closely. After all, it is something distinctly different from the voyeurism of pornography. To watch others engage in sex is actually to have something to watch (and, one might argue, even to participate in through masturbation), but the effects of a drug, be it cocaine or anything else, are often not apparent to anyone but the user, and certainly are not readily communicable. Might the loving detail with which the culture industry represents drug use be in part a kind of perversely simulated repressive desublimation? Rather than consuming the drugs themselves, the audience fulfills its desires by watching others simulate the consumption for them; of course, then the audience can also have the additional satisfaction of seeing the characters punished for such transgressions. Is the loving detail that contemporary films devote to the decadence of drug use in the ’60s and ’70s the only high left for a cultural mainstream still dreadfully afraid of actual drugs? Certainly this would explain why the lurid depictions of drugs in Traffic were far more persuasive to critics than those of the more sedate Blow. Sadly, in the end neither Traffic nor Blow is particularly revolutionary. Instead, each reveals how even ostensibly refreshing and progressive attitudes toward drugs can be mired in the commonest forms of repression and reaction.

 

Works Cited