I’m glad Steven Soderbergh got his Oscar for Traffic and that he kept his speech short and didn’t pontificate about drugs to his huge captive audience. Still, somewhere in the applause, you could sense Hollywood puffing up its collective chest and proudly thinking that here was a movie that would make a difference, that addressed the fate of the nation’s children.
Perhaps it did make a difference. Traffic’s marketing blitz took on some characteristics of a public-awareness campaign once the buzz- furnace had reached a sufficient temperature. It was discussed on the political chatshows, covered on the news pages as often as in the movie section, and generally treated as the serious-minded film it is. The marketing included great slabs of earnest prose extolling the film’s “courage” and “urgency”. Screenwriter Steve Gaghan came clean about his days on the needle and the cast members, in interviews, always looked very serious indeed, as if they’d mistakenly wandered from MTV into Meet the Press.
The fact that Traffic’s sensible, uncontroversial view of drugs was greeted in political circles as something novel, even daring, says something tragic and pathetic about the sterile, intellectual monoculture underpinning Washington’s war on drugs. This extends downwards from the national drug tsar through police and quasi-military forces into the workplace and schools via random drug- testing, through a judiciary loaded down with mandatory drug-sentencing guidelines, and into a penal system long bloated with non-violent drug offenders. Like prohibition, the solution may have depraved more people and institutions than the problem ever did.
Awareness and imagination work at a glacial pace throughout this huge bureaucracy, which needs nightmare scenarios about drugs – and evil, smelly foreigners importing them – in order to justify their continued existence and funding. (Can you imagine the DEA just disbanding itself quietly?) The mindset is fraught with fantasy and paranoia, with jingoistic scapegoating and displaced racial animosity, and the conduct of the war on drugs often exhibits the irrationality and rabid singlemindedness of a crusade.
At the very least, Traffic should be thanked for trying to shift the debate from the foreign to the domestic sphere, and suggesting that huge domestic demand is as big a problem as foreign suppliers.
While Traffic is making its serious contribution to the debate, Johnny Depp’s new movie Blow, directed by Ted Demme, makes the case for drugs as one of America’s favourite national pastimes, a proxy national dish for the questing, pioneering American head.
Like Traffic, it looks at the drug business from top to bottom, this time through the rise, one rung at a time, of George Jung, a trailblazing real-life drug smuggler of the 1960s and 70s. A smalltown boy from Massachusetts, Jung moved to southern California in the late 60s, developed a taste for marijuana, and through his stewardess girlfriend (Run Lola Run’s Franka Potente) started smuggling large quantities to the pot-starved east coast. After a while, he cuts out his middleman, finds a Mexican supplier and buys his own plane to take it across the border.
Like Howard Marks, Jung was in at the dawn of the modern drug trade, working with friends and without guns at a time when methods were comparatively primitive and sentences relatively light. Unlike Marks, he moved from benign marijuana to soul-stealing cocaine at a time when people simply didn’t yet know what would happen if you shoved it up your snout for years on end. The film manages to capture what it must have felt like to be young and successful in a business that, briefly, seemed more like a public service than a crime.
Hollywood’s more baroque stylists are powerfully drawn to drugs as a subject-matter; think of GoodFellas, Boogie Nights or the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society. Demme, hitherto a fairly restrained director, has here busted loose and done what half the male film-makers in the world wish they could do. He has made a movie that combines the excess of Boogie Nights with the energy of the “last day” sequence in GoodFellas, two movies without which Blow couldn’t exist.
He even hired Boogie Nights’ costume designer and his swaggering cinematic style is heavily indebted to Scorsese’s frenzied construction of that exhilarating finale. None of which detracts from Blow’s ability to entertain, but the scale of the debt undermines Demme’s achievement considerably. Thankfully, like most intelligent modern drug movies – from Drugstore Cowboy and Trainspotting to Jesus’ Son – the film doesn’t preach. The drugs are there: we have to make up our own minds about them. The war on drugs renta-mouths claim that this amounts to encouraging, even glamourising drugs. It doesn’t – it just means audiences are smarter than they think we are.