20
11.03.2014
FILM
www.concrete-online.co.uk
concrete.film@uea.ac.uk
Addictive Personalities
For our Drugs Issue, Josh Mott explores the highs and lows of the rich and famous
Happy Otter
Collider
Child Starlets
Fanpop
Gary Busey
Josh Brolin
Drew Barrymore
Jamie Lee Curtis
Not strictly a traditional rehab visit, Busey appeared on the US TV show Celebrity Rehab in 2008, long after his self-confessed ‘usage period’ in the late eighties and early nineties; he proclaimed he had been sober for 13 years prior to appearing on the show. Busey in fact became a sort of spiritual leader for the other show contestants with various rockbottom stories. One included spilling cocaine on his dog and then sniffing it off the dog’s fur as it frolicked around Busey’s kitchen. Busey’s career has been on a steady downward trajectory since his Lethal Weapon heyday, now he runs the gambit of reality TV shows, including multiple series of Celebrity Apprentice.
Our most recent visitor to rehab, Brolin checked in to a Northern California centre in November when his problems with alcohol boiled over after he got into both a verbal argument with a taxi driver and a physical altercation with a bar bouncer on the same night. This was the tipping point for Brolin, who had been arrested in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2013 for public intoxication. These issues appear, so far, to have had little effect on Brolin’s prolific acting career; he has various films due out this year, including the long awaited sequel to Sin City, entitled A Dame to Kill For, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s eage r l y - a n t i c i p a t e d In h e re n t Vi c e .
Barrymore started having addiction issues when she was nine, just three years after staring in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The child star was already smoking cigarettes by then, was a cocaine addict at thirteen, and had already visited rehab twice before the age of 15. She was the quintessential advert for the negatives of child stardom. However, since her tumultuous youth, Barrymore has written a best-selling book chronicling her traumatic adolescence, and has gone on to become one of the most successful and recognisable women in Hollywood with a successful production company, Flower Films, and a slew of hits over the years, including Never Been Kissed and 50 First Dates.
The Halloween star battled a prescription painkiller addiction for an extended period of her career. She has since been sober for over 15 years and cites her recovery as the ‘single greatest achievement of my life.’ Curtis has since become a vocal critic of how addiction is treated in the U.S., writing in 2009 that ‘the addict gets what the addict wants, relief from the pain in their life... we all participate. We are all involved.’ She urges those affected by addiction to seek help saying, ‘[recovery] takes work — hard, painful work — but the help is there, in every town and career, drug/drink freed members of society, from every single walk and talk of life to help and guide.’
Representations: Drugs in Hollywood
Silvia Rose investigates depictions of drugs in film as our series reaches its conclusion A genre which commonly deals with drugs is the gangster film. Take Scarface, for example, which follows the rise of Tony Montana from a Cuban refugee to a powerful drug kingpin. It is laced with violence and greed. Cocaine is behind it all, and comes to represent Montana’s insatiable hunger for power. He uses it both to make money and to feed his ego, contributing to the popular notion that cocaine is a symbol of extravagant self-interest. What is significant is that, ultimately, this lifestyle leads to ruin. Who can forget the final scene, where Montana buries his face in a large mound of cocaine whilst his mansion is invaded by a rival gang. It is a moment of desperation, of pure annihilation, and fuels the film’s final shoot-out. Viewers are not meant to identify with the main character. Rather, the film exposes how greed corrupts a person, and how the initial allure of criminal dealings is an illusion. Cocaine is portrayed here as an empty promise of success. Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas depicts drugs in a more surreal way. Cinematic techniques are used to create a hallucinogenic effect; we see through the distorted eyes of the protagonists, who binge on a range of potent substances. It lacks any clear narrative and instead offers a blending of bizarre scenes, all against a backdrop of the city’s bright lights and carnival atmosphere. Like the anthropomorphic visions they are subjected to, the protagonists themselves turn into animals. Similarly to Scarface, excessive drug use is not portrayed as an attractive prospect. We watch as their grip on reality loosens and paranoia seeps
into every moment. This drug-fuelled carnage can be seen as disillusionment with the American Dream. Throughout the film, we are shown the coarse nature of consumerist culture, epitomised by Las Vegas, with its ugly decadence and lust for money. The fear and loathing that the characters feel can be seen as a product, of not only the drugs, but of Western society’s obsession with excess. The treatment of drugs in British film is slightly different because of its focus on the everyday. Trainspotting is the most prevalent example of this. It is not gritty realism by any means, it is heavily stylistic. But it follows the lives of ‘ordinary’ people in the sense that the characters are all young people living in late 80’s Glasgow. The film explores the process of heroin
addiction, beginning with the pleasure and excitement, the sense of community amongst addicts, before progressing into a downward spiral. It unmasks the poverty and depravation that can come from hard drug use, and though it is playful, there is no glamorising involved. The main character, Renton, has to remove himself from his peers, and therefore from drugs, in order to have his happy ending. Though these are only a few examples, we can see that Hollywood films treat drugs in a more otherworldly context, and in an exaggerated manner, meaning we can separate ourselves more easily from the content. British films deal more with real experiences and relatable characters. What connects them is the fact that most of the films end with destruction. Cinema is undoubtedly seductive, and some people may worry about its part in encouraging drug use, but it must be stressed that the danger of drugs is always exposed, reminding us that what goes up must come down. Credit: Celeb Guide