February 2001 Archives
Traffic
Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is a great film, there's no doubt,
especially when compared to most of the rest of the dross which came
out in the year 2000. I would be very happy if it won the best picture
Oscar it deserves, although I have a hunch it'll have to make do with
Best Director. But for all its excellence as a piece of cinema, I'm
upset at how it treats the world of drugs.
Traffic was adapted from Traffik, a 1989 Channel 4
miniseries. By necessity, a lot has been lost in the transition from
six hours to 147 minutes: never, for instance, do we see the cultivation
of drug crops or the effect of drugs on the local economies of poor
drug-producing nations. And because there isn't time to draw out the
individual strands of plot, the interstices between them are reduced
to grating shots where the hand-held camera will pan away from one
character and join another who is moving in the same place but a different
direction.
My main problem, however, is not with Soderbergh's direction, which
is generally first-rate. The overprivileged teenagers' drug-fuelled
party, for instance, is perfect. (There are gauche missteps, however,
such as the cop realising, too late, that his partner is about to
walk into a booby trap.) What I object to is the way in which a film
which is generally regarded as providing a pinkish "enlightened" attitude
to drugs in fact adheres much more closely to cinematic conventions
than it does to reality.
The prime example of this is the fact that none of the characters
is a street-level drug dealer. We see a few, in the LA ghetto, passing
crack through letterboxes in exchange for crumpled bills, but there's
no indication that these are real people, with thoughts and feelings
and motives just like the other characters in the film. The Catherine
Zeta-Jones character, for instance, remains sympathetic even as she
takes over her husband's drug-running operation, personally transports
cocaine across international borders, and even murders people. Yet
the dealers on the street are basically your stereotypical ghetto
blacks, sans even names.
Or look at the drug czar's daughter, the addict who is responsible
for him breaking off a White House press conference mid-speech and
flying off instead to be with his family. (Er, right. But hey, this
guy I guess is prone to improbable behaviour: the conservative jurist
decides to turn all vigilante on us halfway through, kicking down
doors and looking very mean in stubble and shades.)
Caroline Wakefield is a rich kid who falls so quickly into the quicksand
of drug addiction that within weeks she's turned to prostitution.
Now this just doesn't happen. Sure, the character Jennifer Connelley
played in Requiem for a Dream ended up in more or less the
same place, but only at the end of a very long road, and from much
less auspicious beginnings.
What does a rich drug addict do when she needs money? Sell to her
friends, of course. But that would turn Caroline Wakefield from victim
into Evil Scourge of Society. Selling her body harms only her; selling
cocaine is truly unforgivable.
And of course Caroline's rehabilitation is something out of a twelve-stepper's
PR dream. There's no horrible withdrawal (remember Trainspotting?),
no indication that recovering from heroin addiction is significantly
more traumatic than getting over a drinking problem. Why is this?
Maybe because the film wants to push its trite observation that the
War on Drugs is hypocritical because it would treat addicts like Caroline
much more harshly than drinkers like her father.
I don't want to overstate my case here. Better that Hollywood produce
films saying that the war on drugs is unwinnable than it inflict upon
us more screeds saying that AIDS sufferers are human (Philadelphia)
or that racism is bad (Dances with Wolves). The Academy, for
some reason, loves these films which make viewers feel saintly in
their preconceived opinions.
And that's really the saddest thing about Traffic: that it
won't change a single person's mind on the contentious issue of drug
policy. I don't know how many latter-day Nelson Rockefellers there
still are out there; whoever they are, they probably won't watch the
film, and if they do they'll consider it bleeding-heart claptrap.
Most other people will probably consider the film pretty realistic,
more or less.
The way I see it, films about contentious issues should be contentious.
They should attack received opinion, in Middle America certainly but
in liberal Hollywood as well. They should make people stop and think,
and maybe get angry. You want examples? Well, Warren Beatty's Bulworth
is the better film, but the movie I really have in mind here is James
Toback's Black and White. Now there's a film that would never
win an Oscar.
Posted by Felix at 2:08 EST | Comments (0)
Mucko's wish list
The internet is exciting and new, we all know that. And we also know that it can be used for nefarious purposes. But today I came across something I never really thought I'd see, although in retrospect it was obvious it would happen. Michael McDermott, the man who shot seven people dead in Boston, had a Wish List on Amazon.com, which anyone can look at.
Amazon's wish lists are a weird mixture of the public and the private:
they're not the sort of thing you expect complete strangers to parse,
as surely people across the country are doing now (and as I'm doing
here), yet at the same time they are public documents, reflecting
both your desires and how you might wish to be seen by your acquintances.
It seems unlikely that McDermott thought of himself as a person
likely to go postal, and there's really no evidence from his wish
list that he had any kind of psychopathic tendencies.
McDermott started his wishlist on March 14, with a request for a
VHS tape of Wizards, a very poorly-received animated feature
by cult cartoonist Ralph Bakshi
(Fritz the Cat). With its fantasy-world setting of post-apocalyptic
wizards and elves, it fits right in to the stereotype of what a lonely
nerd like McDermott would like, but in fact it's atypical of the other
films on his list.
For one thing, it's the only VHS film on the list: all the others
are DVDs. And for another, it's obscure. Nearly every other film on
McDermott's extensive list is a famous movie most cinema-literate
people will know.
The Wish List started getting much more mainstream with McDermott's
next two additions, on March 20 and 22: The Shawshank Redemption
and There's Something About Mary Ï which still hasn't been
released on DVD. Both films seem typical McDermott fare: the former
a well-received example of what Hollywood is capable of at its best,
the latter an equally well-received example of Hollywood pitching
itself squarely at the lowest common denominator.
After adding Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on July 3, McDermott
then went on something of a spree July 14, adding 17 new DVDs to his
list. Maybe he expected some friendly person would buy him the lot,
maybe he wanted to give people a large array of films they could choose
from, maybe he just wanted to keep a list of his favourite films.
Maybe he decided to upgrade his collection from VHS to DVD. We're
unlikely to know for a long time, if ever.
The real heart of the Wish List, however, was added on September
18, when McDermott added 43 new DVDs. There are no books on the list,
no CDs, and certainly no electronic gadgets or garden furniture. It's
just films.
It turns out that McDermott didn't have bad taste, really. He was
something of a completist: if he wanted Lethal Weapon or The
Naked Gun, he had to have all of the sequels as well. (Ace
Ventura: When Nature Calls was added on September 18.) But the
themes running through his choices are all perfectly respectable.
There are five Bill Murray films, three each with Kenneth Branagh
and Jack Nicholson, and no fewer than seven Mel Gibson flicks, thanks
to all the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon sequels.
McDermott liked classic comedy, with choices ranging from The
Jerk and A Fish Called Wanda to classics from Tim Burton
and Terry Gilliam. Most of all, however, he liked science fiction:
nothing particularly out of the ordinary there.
Of course, there's no reason why any of this should come as a surprise.
That Michael McDermott had decent taste in film is no less likely,
on the face of it, than if he'd turned out to have good taste in wine,
or in art. But the difference is that had McDermott's Wish List turned
out to be full of bloody slasher flicks, all manner of cultural conservatives
would be running out of the woodwork to denounce the way in which
Hollywood corrupts Americans.
But it'll be hard for anybody to start pointing to films like Total
Recall and Conan the Barbarian as morally dangerous, especially
when they share billing with The Princess Bride and Ferris
Bueller's Day Off.
Rather, what we have learned from Michael McDermott is that mass murderers aren't always hormone-addled teenagers, or illiterate gun freaks; that they can be funny guys who quote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on their answering machines and who get into trouble with the tax man. In other words, they can be a lot like the rest of us. Thank god for the big beard, eh: otherwise, McDermott might seem just a little bit too normal for comfort.
Posted by Felix at 2:16 EST | Comments (9)
RSS - All blog entriesFelix Salmon: Recent posts
Felix's del.icio.us links
Archives
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License