It is a long time since Al Pacino, directed by Brian De Palma, dropped his face into a mountain of cocaine, in Scarface, 1983. Films about the mafia have dealt with drugs, crime and dealing. “Gambling is an innocent vice and drugs are a dirty business”, said Marlon Brando in another Pacino film, The Godfather.
But Brian De Palma was not creating scandal, or going against censorship at the beginning of the 80s. Others became famous by facing censorship years before:
░ Marijuana against censorhip
SiSince 1930, almost at the same time that the machinery of the American cinema began, censorship began, supported by the Hays code, that prohibited the appearance of drugs in films
The directors responded with films, which dealt with sex, drugs and violence: a genre known as ‘exploitation’. So, in the mid 30s, one of the maximum exponents of the movement, Dwain Esper, showed Marihuana, the story of a young drug addict that ended up in prostitution.
Censorship was replaced by the contra propaganda of directors like Tim Dirks, author of Reefer Madness (1936), a false moralistic documentary that stated that marijuana was “The herb whose roots are in hell”.
░ The first idols: smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts
While the American puritans tried to hide the reality of drugs on film, it is significant to note that all of the idols of Hollywood’s Golden Age of Cinema smoked interminable cigarettes and drunk insatiable rounds of whisky and brandy.
Can anyone imagine Humphrey Bogart asking Sam to play it again without a cigarette (Casablanca, 1942)? Or James Bond changing his vodka Martini (“shaken, not stirred”) for a cup of tea?
Another American hero was probably the first drug addict on film in The man with the golden arm (1955), in which Frank Sinatra tried to give up heroin helped by Kim Novak.
‘Indio’ (Gian Maria Volonte) the villain in A fistful of dollars (1965), was surely the first protagonist who dared to use drugs in front of the cameras. However, never saying which type of tobacco ‘Indio’ smoked. And, let’s remember, no gunman lived long in the far west without a cigarette in his mouth.
░ Drugs to fight a war
The globalization of drugs was a huge phenomenon that took place in the mid 60s. A culture of writers, singers and filmmakers who took alternative routes and headed the hippie movement, against the government’s bellicosity, Vietnam and the Cold War, and a lifestyle: for example, Easy Rider, a generational film from 1969 in which two pushers (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda) decide to spend all their money on two Harley Davidson to cross the United States to New Orleans.
But pacifists, who faced the horror of Vietnam with LSD or cocaine, were not so far from their rivals as they believed. Vietnam was not the only war in which American soldiers got drunk or drugged to get over the horror, or as in Jacob’s ladder (by Adrian Lyne), where soldiers were subjected to the army’s plan to increase resistance and fierceness in combat (amphetamines and derivatives).
There is one film touched by the essence of this convulsive age, Apocalypse now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). The production confused the people and the characters they played for a 238-day shoot, in the Philippines, where crew members were involved in a collective experience, oppressive and anarchical, that pushed the professional limits of the project.
The consumption of drugs among the film crew in the Philippines was an open secret. The famous room sequence, when Captain Willard enters a critical state, is real: Martin Sheen was not acting at that moment, the camera continued rolling during the fit of delirium and the sequence ended with actor fracturing a finger against a mirror. On March 1st of 1977 Martin Sheen entered emergency after suffering a heart attack.
░ After the track of ‘X GENERATION’
Since the 80s, drugs have been a part of many scripts from every genre. An important mention must go to our cinema, radically different after the ‘Transition’: from Fernando Colomo’s (Going South, Shopping) light comedies, to the penetrating and disturbing cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (What have I done to deserve this!, All about my mother).
However, the drug scenes have been others: the urban centers of modern societies; high schools, pubs and bars. Also, hippie peace demonstrations of young activists have opened the door to secret groups of erratic and disillusioned adolescents:what is called ‘X Generation’.
Ewan McGregor established the bases of the manifesto, referring to drugs, as Mark Renton in the irresistible Trainspotting, by Danny Boyle (1996): “I chose not to choose life. I chose something else, and the reasons: There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?”
Another corrosive film is Requiem for a dream, by Darren Aronofsky (2000), whose characters end up using different types of drugs, such as amphetamines and heroin. A young dealer (Jared Leto) dreams of overcoming poverty by means of drug trafficking, while he gets hooked more and more on heroin. At the same time, his mother (Ellen Burstyn), a widow who lives alone, spends all day watching a TV quiz show which she dreams she takes part in.
When she finally receives the supposed invitation to her favorite program, she begins to go on a diet of amphetamines to look prettier on TV.
The fatal course of this requiem for the American dream is told with a psychedelic aesthetic and at a suffocating pace that successively illustrates the critical moments of intoxication or agonies. Aronofsky concludes an overflowing cinematographic overdose committed to the unconditional intention of making the spectator understand at any cost the experience of drug use.
░ The show must go on
“Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse”, James Dean said ironically. This sentence turned sinister when he practiced what he preached. A red Porsche Spyder that usually went too fast was his grave.
How excessive is it to say that speed was the drug that killed James Dean? He had an accident on the way to a rally. Meaning, ha raced on his way to a racing circuit. And that is not all, he had just been fined for speeding a few minutes before. I know someone who would say that that is a true craving to consume.
Drugs or speed, as other thing, are signs of human behavior, deficiencies, weaknesses, or perhaps an undiscovered spirit. What were James, Kurt, Elvis, Antonio running to? Or even more disturbingly: what were they running from?
OTHERS
░ Sport and Drugs
░ Music and Drugs
░ Cinema and Drugs
░ Sexuality and Drugs
░ Domestic violence and drugs
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