White Light 8
by Gertjan Zuilhof
On paper, Cocaine Angel by Michael Tully has everything going against it. Too many American so-called indie films have been made about addicts. Always with the same degeneration. Using the ritual. The alienation of the surroundings. Outbursts of violence and waving guns that are much too new. And with beautiful women addicts who are not very degenerate and have to bare all to show it. So a film with a synopsis like this can easily end up on the pile that has less priority. And in this case that was not justified.
That pile is a bottomless pit. In an era when a schoolkid can burn a DVD with his roster, it’s easy to send a disk to a festival. If you can’t see everything. Can’t see everything straight away. Then you save things for later. Things you may consider less suitable on first sight. You have to run through the pile once, because you can make mistakes. The pile that contained Cocaine Angel. And of course plenty more.
After that pile, it’s easy to argue that a lot of bad drug films have are made. I won’t provide any statistical evidence, but it is not too controversial to argue that the majority of them are bad. The chance that a drugs film is good is considerably lower than that of drugs-free films. The chance of cliches is larger. That chance that it is not convincing is almost inevitable. Drunkenness in film is difficult, but the high of a user is often so internalised that every motion on screen easily becomes too much. Compare it with sex in the film. Film sex can be awful. Course. Kitsch. Plastic. Predictable. The litmus test for the drugs film soon emerges. After the often-obligatory sex scene in a drugs film you often don’t have to watch any more.
I think you would be quite right to argue that even bad drugs films form an essential part of the phenomenon. In these terms, a film festival may not be the ideal place for a wide-ranging film programme about drugs, because festival films have to be good, aesthetic, fascinating and innovative and those are ridiculous criteria in the view of the vague social philosophical science of drugs.
And can you argue the contrary? That the really good drugs films are less interesting to scientists? Because they avoid the ingrained patterns? Because they do not shape the rule, but the exception? Because their form is so intangible that the message is no longer clear? It may become academic. I apologise for that.
And after seeing the last pile - that can never really be a last pile - it becomes clear again that a programme can never be finished. I can go further. As the deadline approaches, the programme becomes less complete. Only then does it become apparent how little the almost completed programme resembles the dream programme you once envisaged.
I shall not argue that Cocaine Angel is a masterpiece. But it is a raw and authentic film that manages to avoid just about every pitfall in the genre. That starts soon after the opening. After 8mm footage of happier times. The junkie wakes up with a bleeding leg and sets about the ritual of preparing his daily dose. Many film makers avoid this or turn it into a kind of laboratory experiment, but Michael Tully understands, and that’s something he wants to show us, that this is the most important moment of the day. The most important moment of life. A life in which every day has to have an important moment. In addition, Tully’s junkie is also far from typical. He is just as lost as all other junkies, but he still has a house and a car and a daughter and an ex-wife. At the start of the film, he may well be outside everyday life, but apparently not for very long. At the end of the film, he is still outside ordinary life, but maybe not very far. And that is what the film is all about, about the difference between not long and not far. And how great this span can be.
And then there are of course all those films that have something to say about drugs, but are really about so many other things. For instance Spiele Leben (You Bet Your Life) by the Austrian Antonin Svoboda. A well-made, well acted and innovative film about gambling addiction, that ends with drugs intoxication yet it is really a film about gambling. Svoboda certainly gives a good picture of the obsession of the addict, only the addict is addicted to something else. And you have to do draw the line somewhere. However arbitrary that may be.
previous White Light Web Logs