The Panid in Needle Park
Brudnoy, David
22 The A l t e r n a t i v e November, 1971 In Lenin we see Marx put into practice. The Communist Party is that gnostic group which possesses the secret knowledge of the future...
...not provided any reason for the true believer to doubt his faith...
...Both more than resemble,they Create hordes of their contemporaries in large cities across the land-no doubt in small towns too...
...Big, the supplier...
...A new film has just hit the theatres, one so significant as didactic cinema in the best sense, that I draw it to your attention...
...and to "dry out," will ever be realized...
...He "doesn't know" that either, though heroin can be snorted too, and from snorting to shooting is a short road...
...But when he's not up, he turns exclusively to the search fo...
...Furthermore, upon receipt of your check or money order, we will L~ send you decals for your windows, stickers for your bumpers, bumpers for your stickers and buttons for your lapels -- all decorated with appropriate inscriptions, a tantalizing list of which we here offer you: The Palh~tique is chic - Don't pan Petr I'm a Thai for Tchai Win with Gene Onegin Get high on Tchai Shun La Mer and hoot it...
...Moses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry, Arlington House, pp...
...With considerable skill, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK describes, in the form of an "'entertainment" (disquieting entertainment, to be sure), the life of young people caught up in the pursuit and use of heroin, espcially in the frequent periods of "panic" or drug shortage...
...Anyone who is willing to make peace with any or all of the present is automatically at war within the Party...
...So one loses anyway...
...We may regrettably have to acknowledge that those now hooked on H will have to be provided with it, or something substituting for it, for the rest of their days, which means we can only try to convince people not now using heroin to avoid it like poison...
...entered the theatre one atter,oon, sat for 100 minutes with --I'd guess -- fifty or sixty people, sat with them in rapt s~lence and went away shaken, moved by a chilling experience, one true to the facts as I have come to know them...
...Lenin viewed the dictatorship of the proletariat as an organization of war...
...If one prefers to criticize films from the point of view of an apolitical, rather demanding film lover, as I generally do, one gets it in the neck from those who must divine political meanings in every flick...
...We know that heroin is possessed of no "socially redeeming" value, no "'mind-expanding" properties, no worth except insofar as it induces a brief period of feeling good, after which occurs the corrimg down, the crash, and the immediate craving for more...
...World War II was as.absurd as Catch 22 made it...
...Only a commitment to the overthrow of the present is permissible for those initiates of the secret knowledge...
...The movie is not tragedy by classical standards -no one is noble and no one falls mightily from nobility to a terrible end...
...and the notion of "no enemies to the left" as reasons for this blindness...
...As long as the doctrine of the revolutionary overthrow of the present-day society has not been touched, the central core remains intact, and no substantive change has occurred...
...We know a great deal about heroin, and we also don't know some things...
...The Communist Party is that gnostic group which possesses the secret knowledge of the future reality...
...Francis River, one mile below Wappapello Dam...
...We do not, for one minute, believe that Bobby and Helen will not soon gravitate to heroin again...
...We do not know if real heroin addiction is actually curable...
...And he will steal, brutalize, and even murder, to get it...
...Nathan is fat) and probably inspired...
...In addition, we are planning both gala concerts and intimate musical evenings...
...THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK is directed by Jerry Schatzberg, whose last film was PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD, and screenwritten by John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, the novelist and former Nation Review contributor, from the hook by James Mills...
...David E. Frost Terre Haute, Ind...
...We know that a disproportionate number of today's crimes against persons and property has come to be committed by people seeking money to feed their ever-increasingly expensive addiction...
...This cannot be stressed too much...
...Neither of these young actors has been in movies before, yet each is magnificent in his and her role...
...Toward that end, we have commissioned the writing of a definitive biographical study (When Wa.~The Lo, st Time They Played the 1812...
...It is no more a liberal cliche that all officers in our armed forces are semi-fascist, etc...
...That it had to be fought and that we were the good guys, made it no less so...
...Only in this way can one exist...
...Gib Kaplan New York, New York To the Editor: I did think you missed the point about Catch 22...
...If Henry's electrifying speech rang true to the American colonists opposed to a British over-lordship, then his words are all the more urgent in the face of a militant totalitarian ideology...
...The expansion of Communist control in the last fifty years, as well as the leverage secured through allies in strategic areas of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America have...
...They turn to crime (theft and prostitution) and inevitably to "ratting" -- buying their freedom from long prison sentences by informing on their friends (in Helen's case, by informing on her lover, Bobby...
...Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer...
...Nonsense...
...It is photographed by Adam Hollander, whose camera sees the real Needle Park of New York's West 70s, the cheap hotels, luncheonettes, garbage-strewn alleys and tawdry pads of the city...
...Paeine and Miss Winn a r e supported by Richard Bright, as Bobby's brother, a rotter, a user of people, and by assorted minor characters whose names I don't remember but whose faces I'll long recall...
...As Niemeyer points out in Dedeitfizl Peace, even the West has tended to accept the Party's claim to represent the Revolution, and to view the Revolution as inevitable...
...We did some ghastly, unforgivable things in that war, and why you feel threatened by a movie that says so is a puzzle...
...In any war there may be truces which allow for regroupment and resupply...
...At our peril, I would suggest...
...Though there are snippets in other films revealing people in agony because of heroin and medical docomentaries showing how insidious its use is, nothing but PANIC is at present going to reach enough youngsters to give them the sort of serious pause that may, literally, save their lives...
...I think of a friend on Cape Cod where I summer, who now "snorts" (sniffs) cocaine, which gives him, he reports, a delicious high...
...Since the future stays ever out of reach, more "transitions" are added in order to justify why the revolution remains permanent...
...Maybe the Japanese, though...
...The Chinese verbal assault on the Kremlin line of peaceful coexistence is taken as evidence of Kremlin sincerity...
...We predict repeated Performances of his work...
...but it is contemporary tragedy, the story of valuable lives wasted, lost, in fact destroyed by a substance easily available to me down the block from my front door, and to you, probably just as near...
...Many have argued that Communists have not followed the letter of Marx's historical materialism, and have concluded that Communists are either losing their faith, or have never really had a faith, but have only used their ideology as an instrument of social control...
...And when to heroin...
...This is the drug with which PANIC IN NEFDLE PARK deals, or rather, this is the drug whose victims the movie studies with compassion, hard-nosed reality, and intelligence...
...Truces and retreats the Party has made, but whenever in doubt the Party has consistently chosen "that alternative which favored irreconcilable struggle and its power requirements...
...This is not a plug for other drugs, but rather a warning to those who would ignorantly agglutinate the use of grass and psychedelics to that of heroin and attempt to root out the latter by making unavilable the former...
...rant pis...
...You can't always analyze art through a Marxist lens...
...The only zone not in a state of war is within the Party...
...Although Communists are committed to permanent revolution, the announcement of a policy of "peaceful coexistence" has been interpreted by some to represent a change of heart, a willingness to live and let live...
...People read all sorts of lessons into films, and we are informed by some critics that we have been told the Very Truth about the redneck mentality (EASY RIDER)~ or the Indisputable Message about hardhats (JOE), or of the necessity to curb " the military (PATTON), or about the perfidy of today's fascisti (Z), and on and on and on...
...And I think that we can include among those legitimate means the strictest, punishment of those selling that drug...
...Nixon's agreement to destroy much of next year's crop with the government of Turkey, where a lot of the world's supply is grown, that there is a huge quantity of heroin floating about the globe, a considerable amount entering the United States each year and finding its way, with a little help from their "friends," to young people and adults...
...He is a regular dontributor to Ideas, National Review, New Guard and Counterpoint...
...In point of fact, heroin use and acquisition become the major preoccupations of those involved with it...
...Try thinking of that movie as surrealistic and a lot of your remarks would seem beside the point...
...Labin's excellent "'Goa: End of the Line," which I believe to be accurate for a portion of the drug cult, will, I fear, be seen as the last word, the end-all and be-all, by some of our friends, who then will rest comfortably, "'knowing" that even marijuana is the devil's invention, so let's ban it all...
...David Brudnoy David Brudnoy is a cosmopolitan residing in Boston...
...believe...
...the goal of war, of overcoming the enemy's resistance, remains...
...That's the army...
...Since only the Party is working for the supreme good, then whatever means the party chooses in order to advance history toward that end are immediately justified...
...THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK does not say so in words, in pat, packaged homilies...
...149) - That the Communists would prefer even death as the outcome of false confessions to trumped-up charges to risking the security of the party's rule is a matter of record...
...Bobby, played by A1 Pacino with charm and grace and virility and a just-right mix of cockiness and pathos, is a New Yorker who ties in with Helen, an ordinary midwestern runaway, acted winningly by Kitty Winn...
...Petr is sweelr Swan Lake is unPolluted Anothr Student for Petr...
...Ed Chronister of Poplar Bluff, Mo., who has only one good eye, and who, according to the local gazette, caught a record-breaking, ninety-four pound flathead catfish in the St...
...Especially at the peril of those of us on the right, who are so rarely fed anything intelligent about drugs in our journals...
...Not since THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM has the job been done so well m a movie, and PANIC is about today...
...But those predisposed to try anything, those willing to get their kicks anyway are likely to reach eventually for heroin...
...Its use is not, as some of our simplistic fellows on the right would have us believe, a corollary to ultra-leftist politics...
...Morever, you will receive our monthly newsletter, Petr Patter, a lively collection of biographical tidbits, never before published photographs, and snippets from Our standardized scores, suitable for whistling...
...It is laughable to read, and to be told by sanctimonious people who've never tried drugs other than alcohol, that marijuana leads automatically to I.s which leads automatically to heroin...
...Mrs...
...Generally the congruence of art, or what passes for art in most films, and moral instruction, or what resembles that, is awkward...
...Many specialists maintain that true cures, real, permanent giving up of heroin and methodone without the transference of addiction to some other drug, are rare, so rare, in fact, that some people knowledgeable in the field refuse to recognize the existence of even one genuine return to nonaddictive life...
...Don't know...
...The Congratulations to Mr...
...The war applies to the Party's attitude to foreign governments as well as fellow countrymen who do not adhere to the Party's premises...
...Niemeyer ascribes the ideology of enduring peace (e.g., One World, the United Nations, etc...
...it does not end it...
...Movies Pass the Syringe, Baby (and Never Pass Go) Didacticism in the cinema is a bore, usually...
...A. N. Romm The Times-Herald Record Middletown, New York ANNOUNCING the formation of the P e t r llich Tchaikovsky Society The Saturday Evening Club hereby informs a heretofore unappreciative public of the formation of a society whose purpose, as revealed in...
...we prophesy nothing less than what could he called an overwhelming Tchaikovsky revival had our misunderstood genius gained a proper hearing in the first place...
...as a session of instruction about what is rapidly becoming a major disaster "of our time, PANIC is unquestionably superior beyond what I had come even to hope for...
...Our membership card will entitle you to all privileges listed in our Con- . . _9 . , st]tutlon, as well as to authorization to complain to the FCC when you feel the works of this master are being repressed...
...Shall we try argument...
...If we keep firmly in mind the datum of the loss ol volition - - the inability once under heroin's sway to w//l oneself off it - - we can see the insufficiency of the libertarian approach in this case...
...And it is a nice, neat little argument, pure in the libertarian fashion, as are most libertarian arguments...
...The movie struck me as a very Western-civilization thing...
...Reformism (as opposed to compromises of necessity) implies an acceptance of the present reality...
...The one does not inevitably lead to the other...
...And so what can we do about it...
...He is also Midwest Director of InterCollegiate Studies Institute and co-host, with R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., of In Our Time, a talk show to be aired on WTTVTV (Indianapolis) beginning in DeCember...
...It is a zone open to" entry for only those who recognize that the one single possible system of order is the future reality...
...He pops anything in his mouth that anybody hands him...
...We cannot escape heroin, nor can we legislate it away by simply buying up the Turkish crop, thus ending its availability...
...The war is actually begun...
...our Constitution, will be "To encourage the dissemination and popularization of the music of Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky," Too long unknown, too long collecting the dust with which cruel History buries its premature offspring, This lonely and obscure Russian composer deserves the attention tfi~ genius demands, but which for more than seventy years has failed to elicit from a musical public so obsessed with the emotive dribble of Bruckner, Strauss and Mahler...
...we plan a thorough survey of his extant scores, editing and revising wher# his own marginal notations seem to warrant it...
...much-vaunted, very cheap methodone treatment, which substitutes for the now-expensive heroin, merely displaces the debilitating need...
...And this cannot be done effectively through the stupid recourse to unconvincing scare tactics by which so many of our fellows attempt to ar...
...aggression is understood to mean Western resistance to the "status quo...
...According to Lippmann, Khrushchev understands the status quo to mean the permanent revolution (overt or covert wars of aggression...
...Sir, we have been trying that for the last ton years...
...Niemeyer argues that while it is true that Communists have abandoned elements of their ideology, the crucial question is which elements...
...Instead, Niemeyer argues, the real split involves two communist power centers disagreeing only on whose interpretation of Marxism-Leninism authoritatively prescribes the destruction of limited government and free enterprise...
...that's surrealism...
...The fish too had only one good eye...
...When the McNamara papers came out, I was reminded of an incident on an Army Air base where I was in charge of the engineering, drafting department...
...Imagine bundling up all the blue-prints of the top-secret (every one of them stamped that way, down to the gaskets) P-47, tossing them out the hangar window and looking down to find German prisoners of war picking them up...
...Why else would Communists maintain their unity and discipline were it not for "a common cause and a common principle in which they...
...Both resemble how many people I know, how many you know...
...You can't imagine the Maoists making it, or the Russians...
...Of late, only Suzanne Labin's superb piece on hashish in National Review ( 13 July) is an exception to that general rule...
...24 The Alternative November, 1971 'What ~re you on today...
...Worse than nonsense, because it is just ,,such jumbled up post ho6 ergo propter hoc rhetoric that has, in today's parlance, turned off so many young people, turned them away from listening to those who preach against heroin...
...NiemeYer's analysis of communism casts considerable doubt on the hopes of those who expect to deal with Communists as if they were just another group of politicians...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...
...We know, despite Mr...
...than it is a conservative cliche that they are all sweet, earnest, upstanding, good heroes...
...No doubt this phrase has been seized upon more often than any other single phrase to "prove" that communism is mellowing...
...It says so by presenting a remarkably weUdone take of the worst environmental waste of all, the waste of human beings...
...Address all correspondence to The Saturday Evening Club, c/o The Establishment, R,R...
...The Soviet peaceful coexistence line has achieved additional credence in the West from the Sino-Soviet split...
...In a society of just men and wmnen, do we not have an obligation to try, with everything which we can legitimately bring to bear on the discussion, to convince our fellow human beings to avoid heroin...
...By all standards of reasonable investigation, the state of our knowledge about the possibility of ever escaping the nightmare of heroin is primitive, if not downright non-existent...
...that is, heroin use in not just psychologically addictive, as alcohol and some other drugs can be, but physiologically addictive as' well, which means a mere act of will is insufficient to get off it once one has become a frequent user...
...Aside from the historical record to the contrary, we have Khrushchev's explanation of the phrase as reported in 1958 by Walter Lippmann...
...just something Bey gave me," he replies...
...The tendency of many reviewers, faced now with a surfeit of perfectly dreadful movies designed for the youth audience and with a simultaneous spate of films (like LOVE STORY and SUMMER OF '42)turning away from Message to Romance (heralded by Time and other journals as the Coming Thing), will be "to ignore PANIC...
...The reader of Niemeyer's latest two books could best express his conclusion of the author's message in the words of Patrick Henry's famous "give me liberty, or give me death" speech...
...Have we anything new to offer upon the subject...
...more H. Until ehe finds it, all other concerns are drained from him...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editor: ~corge Nathan's edito~l '~ Fat Woman They are Beautiful," was beautiful (I do not know if Mr...
...For examples see Robert Conquests' The Great Terror, and Anatoli Granovsky's I Was a NKVD Agent...
...I ask him...
...The Alternative is magnificent...
...The road to the future is seen, as in the past, a succession of stages called "transitions to socialism" by the Party...
...To the Editor: I just want to take this opporunity to tell you I think Coyne's review of Hemingway was the best I read anywhere...
...When a user is "up," he's very happy, and he may talk of (though rarely make) love, or dig music, or play a bit at politics...
...Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is coming on...Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace...
...We know that it has long been used by the subculture (the "ghetto' denizens) but has in recent years come to be used by many others, including hundreds of thousands of kids, and a frightening number of GIs in Vietnam and elsewhere...
...We know that it is addictive...
...Once is not tantamount to addiction, but once is usually just the prelude to more, to much, to addiction...
...The Alternative November, 1971 23 Even Mme...
...What heroin does is destroy, including the destruction of the capacity to think of much else but getting more heroin...
...I think we do...
...I have another friend who shot up once, recorded hisreactions for his own satisfaction, rejected further doses of it and has never done it again...
...Is it...
...gue their case...
...we plan to unearth previously unavailable or lost scores...
...A strict libertarian argument, which I tried out on a local television program just for experience, has it that people should be able to go to hell in the wltgll~rrows of their own choosing, and were heroin available legally, its cost could be minimal, and crimes of theft and violence now attendant upon heroin addiction would cease...
...Now What do you think about that...
...It does this job without moralistic over-kill and without the documentary-style pomposity from which we tend these days to run m terror...
...Lawrence D. Pratt Lawrence D. Pratt is a pro2ticing ontologist and encounter group mullah of the Moon Mullins Study Group...
...142-145...
...we play a compJete cataloguing of his manuscripts, elevating the orchestration of his symphonies, for instance, from the provisional to the authorized...
...But I cannot believe it, cannot accept ~its callousness toward others, even though I once enunciated it myself...
...In fact, we have been given no reason to believe that during her time out of prison, Helen has not been shooting H. We do not see anything which would lead us to think Helen's once-expressed desire to escape the city, to move to the "country" (where is that today, with heroin everywhere...
...or, as sometimes happens, if one finds oneself confronted with an overdose of manifest propaganda in a movie and writes about it from that angle, one's arty buddies drip condescending scorn...
...Briefly: Bobby, a heavy user, meets Helen, who comes to love him, and consequently to use and then addiction, as Bobby becomes hooked...
...The West has been gullible in face of the Red peace offensive...
...This, I would urge, transcends any pristine libertarian ruminations about the Free Market...
...As a movie qua movie, irrespective of theme, it is merely good, or perhaps very good...
...There is no happy ending in the film, even though it finishes with Helen waiting for Bobby after his release from prison, a stay shortened, of course iby his having "ratted" on Mr...
...Best of luck to you all...
Vol. 5 • November 1971 • No. 2
