n Ted Demme’s film “Blow” the dollar is laced with cocaine and eaten raw. Like iceberg lettuce you can put anything on it and its still bad nutrition. The only thing more crunchingly greedy is the stock market obsessions of high and low rollers waiting for a quick fix. Greed and obsession is the foot and mouth disease of the American psyche, and the bank roll of drug trafficking films.

If you can make money at wheeling and dealing drugs, coming and going, lucky for you.  If you can make money wheeling and dealing in drug films, coming or going, lucky for you.  We learn from the top of our heads to the bottom of our soles that making money is all about walking the walk and taking the take. The only question is how good you are at making it  – and that’s where the drama of drug trafficking lies. Its pure capitalism backwards and forwards.

“Traffic” captured attention because of the parental and political dilemna of a full time conservative Dad (Michael Douglas). Douglas played a drug czar leading the war on drugs,  who gets caught up in his daughter’s down hill slide into oblivion. In “Blow” Johnny Depp’s sympathetic portrayal of real life drug traffiker George Jung – making bundles of money ruining lives,  including his own and his daughters – is the spitting image of  “Traffic”; the  other side of the coin. The point of view of a bag man with a left over life to kill. After he’s killed off yours.

Films about people shooting up, messing up their lives, struggling for money to buy more drugs, and mumbling in self pity and self deception leave me cold. The fix, the obsession, the depression, the self imposed exile of dead beat revelations, may be hypnotic for some people, but for me, its all about cash. Producers of drug films have a great cash cow that goes right to the heart of the market place. That’s why we get so many of films about drugs. The market place has, as we know, and have been taught, no heart. And that’s just right for those spin doctors of greed who are trying to find a heart before a stint gets put in to keep out the bad cholesterol.

Big time film makers make tons of money, just like big time drug dealers, milking the cash cow dry. Interlocking script directives determine time and place. The inevitable plot solutions are weaseled into a script like a hand in a glove. If you tell a good story about bad guys long enough, and often  enough, it becomes mindless sympathy. Sympathy for the hustler, the dealer, and the killer. 

Depp’s laid back performance with a pony tail adds to the effect of a cool head playing the drug money angle for all its worth, and then losing everything despite his best efforts.  Gee,  there must be a lesson in this! A calculated repetition of a successful film formula can turn a film into a cash cow classic.  And we all know where cash cow classics lead: a possible academy award. What’s good for the box office is good for the USA.

Ultimately doing a drug film becomes a question of who will make the most money doing a take on the drug scene? Michael Douglas or Johnny Depp? Negotiating the right contract to get the right kind of money has magnetic appeal for those of us living in make believe ball room time moving from one stock to another in an effort to rise above it all.  What’s the formula? How do I go about getting my share? Who’s got the right connection? Nothing counts but the bottom line. 

Real time drug dealer George Jung himself appears in a cameo role in the final moments of “Blow”. He stares at us with a hang dog look in all his worn out glory inside the walls of a prison. And we are told in bold print in no uncertain terms that his daughter refuses to visit him. Not only is George Jung a prisoner of drugs, now he’s trying out for the part of a prime candidate for Amnesty International. Despite his trials and tribulations I felt nothing but compassionate conservatism for him. Where’s the pardon in all this?

Robert Downey Jr., where are you now that we need you?

© 2001 Ned Bobkoff

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