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...
...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...
...In addition, we are planning both gala concerts and intimate musical evenings...
...We cannot escape heroin, nor can we legislate it away by simply buying up the Turkish crop, thus ending its availability...
...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...
...Maybe the Japanese, though...
...Briefly: Bobby, a heavy user, meets Helen, who comes to love him, and consequently to use and then addiction, as Bobby becomes hooked...
...So one loses anyway...
...But when he's not up, he turns exclusively to the search fo...
...And when to heroin...
...The Alternative November, 1971 23 Even Mme...
...Toward that end, we have commissioned the writing of a definitive biographical study (When Wa.~The Lo, st Time They Played the 1812...
...Niemeyer ascribes the ideology of enduring peace (e.g., One World, the United Nations, etc...
...And this cannot be done effectively through the stupid recourse to unconvincing scare tactics by which so many of our fellows attempt to ar...
...But those predisposed to try anything, those willing to get their kicks anyway are likely to reach eventually for heroin...
...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...
...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...
...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 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...
...aggression is understood to mean Western resistance to the "status quo...
...He is a regular dontributor to Ideas, National Review, New Guard and Counterpoint...
...Anyone who is willing to make peace with any or all of the present is automatically at war within the Party...
...David E. Frost Terre Haute, Ind...
...Nathan is fat) and probably inspired...
...Have we anything new to offer upon the subject...
...It does this job without moralistic over-kill and without the documentary-style pomposity from which we tend these days to run m terror...
...The one does not inevitably lead to the other...
...THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK does not say so in words, in pat, packaged homilies...
...Not since THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM has the job been done so well m a movie, and PANIC is about today...
...We know a great deal about heroin, and we also don't know some things...
...The war is actually begun...
...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...
...Of late, only Suzanne Labin's superb piece on hashish in National Review ( 13 July) is an exception to that general rule...
...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...
...The movie is not tragedy by classical standards -no one is noble and no one falls mightily from nobility to a terrible end...
...No doubt this phrase has been seized upon more often than any other single phrase to "prove" that communism is mellowing...
...The movie struck me as a very Western-civilization thing...
...Francis River, one mile below Wappapello Dam...
...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...
...Niemeyer argues that while it is true that Communists have abandoned elements of their ideology, the crucial question is which elements...
...Try thinking of that movie as surrealistic and a lot of your remarks would seem beside the point...
...Address all correspondence to The Saturday Evening Club, c/o The Establishment, R,R...
...it does not end it...
...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...
...Sir, we have been trying that for the last ton years...
...We know that it is addictive...
...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...
...Nonsense...
...rant pis...
...24 The Alternative November, 1971 'What ~re you on today...
...I think we do...
...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...
...He pops anything in his mouth that anybody hands him...
...The Congratulations to Mr...
...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...
...And it is a nice, neat little argument, pure in the libertarian fashion, as are most libertarian arguments...
...Generally the congruence of art, or what passes for art in most films, and moral instruction, or what resembles that, is awkward...
...Only in this way can one exist...
...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...
...But I cannot believe it, cannot accept ~its callousness toward others, even though I once enunciated it myself...
...than it is a conservative cliche that they are all sweet, earnest, upstanding, good heroes...
...Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer...
...He "doesn't know" that either, though heroin can be snorted too, and from snorting to shooting is a short road...
...Once is not tantamount to addiction, but once is usually just the prelude to more, to much, to addiction...
...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...
...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...
...Big, the supplier...
...we plan to unearth previously unavailable or lost scores...
...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...
...We do not, for one minute, believe that Bobby and Helen will not soon gravitate to heroin again...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editor: ~corge Nathan's edito~l '~ Fat Woman They are Beautiful," was beautiful (I do not know if Mr...
...much-vaunted, very cheap methodone treatment, which substitutes for the now-expensive heroin, merely displaces the debilitating need...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This cannot be stressed too much...
...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...
...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...
...It is no more a liberal cliche that all officers in our armed forces are semi-fascist, etc...
...That's the army...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Its use is not, as some of our simplistic fellows on the right would have us believe, a corollary to ultra-leftist politics...
...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...
...Is it...
...142-145...
...and to "dry out," will ever be realized...
...What heroin does is destroy, including the destruction of the capacity to think of much else but getting more heroin...
...In any war there may be truces which allow for regroupment and resupply...
...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 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...
...At our peril, I would suggest...
...You can't always analyze art through a Marxist lens...
...And I think that we can include among those legitimate means the strictest, punishment of those selling that drug...
...Now What do you think about that...
...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...
...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...
...Don't know...
...we plan a thorough survey of his extant scores, editing and revising wher# his own marginal notations seem to warrant it...
...And he will steal, brutalize, and even murder, to get it...
...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...
...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...
...Both resemble how many people I know, how many you know...
...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...
...I think of a friend on Cape Cod where I summer, who now "snorts" (sniffs) cocaine, which gives him, he reports, a delicious high...
...Why else would Communists maintain their unity and discipline were it not for "a common cause and a common principle in which they...
...I ask him...
...more H. Until ehe finds it, all other concerns are drained from him...
...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...
...According to Lippmann, Khrushchev understands the status quo to mean the permanent revolution (overt or covert wars of aggression...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Moses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry, Arlington House, pp...
...We know, despite Mr...
...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...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...
...This, I would urge, transcends any pristine libertarian ruminations about the Free Market...
...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...
...World War II was as.absurd as Catch 22 made it...
...Lawrence D. Pratt Lawrence D. Pratt is a pro2ticing ontologist and encounter group mullah of the Moon Mullins Study Group...
...Reformism (as opposed to compromises of necessity) implies an acceptance of the present reality...
...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...
...Since the future stays ever out of reach, more "transitions" are added in order to justify why the revolution remains permanent...
...Especially at the peril of those of us on the right, who are so rarely fed anything intelligent about drugs in our journals...
...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...
...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...
...that's surrealism...
...Best of luck to you all...
...Lenin viewed the dictatorship of the proletariat as an organization of war...
...Gib Kaplan New York, New York To the Editor: I did think you missed the point about Catch 22...
...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...
...For examples see Robert Conquests' The Great Terror, and Anatoli Granovsky's I Was a NKVD Agent...
...Movies Pass the Syringe, Baby (and Never Pass Go) Didacticism in the cinema is a bore, usually...
...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...
...You can't imagine the Maoists making it, or the Russians...
...We do not know if real heroin addiction is actually curable...
...We predict repeated Performances of his work...
...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...
...Aside from the historical record to the contrary, we have Khrushchev's explanation of the phrase as reported in 1958 by Walter Lippmann...
...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...
...In point of fact, heroin use and acquisition become the major preoccupations of those involved with it...
...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 road to the future is seen, as in the past, a succession of stages called "transitions to socialism" by the Party...
...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...
...Petr is sweelr Swan Lake is unPolluted Anothr Student for Petr...
...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...
...The Chinese verbal assault on the Kremlin line of peaceful coexistence is taken as evidence of Kremlin sincerity...
...Only a commitment to the overthrow of the present is permissible for those initiates of the secret knowledge...
...Shall we try argument...
...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...
...David Brudnoy David Brudnoy is a cosmopolitan residing in Boston...
...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...
...believe...
...the goal of war, of overcoming the enemy's resistance, remains...
...That it had to be fought and that we were the good guys, made it no less so...
...The Alternative is magnificent...
...The fish too had only one good eye...
...The only zone not in a state of war is within the Party...
...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...
...We did some ghastly, unforgivable things in that war, and why you feel threatened by a movie that says so is a puzzle...
...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...
...As a movie qua movie, irrespective of theme, it is merely good, or perhaps very good...
...gue their case...
...we play a compJete cataloguing of his manuscripts, elevating the orchestration of his symphonies, for instance, from the provisional to the authorized...
...The Soviet peaceful coexistence line has achieved additional credence in the West from the Sino-Soviet split...
...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...
...Neither of these young actors has been in movies before, yet each is magnificent in his and her role...
...The Communist Party is that gnostic group which possesses the secret knowledge of the future reality...
...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...
...The West has been gullible in face of the Red peace offensive...
...just something Bey gave me," he replies...
...not provided any reason for the true believer to doubt his faith...
...Mrs...
...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...
...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...
...It is a zone open to" entry for only those who recognize that the one single possible system of order is the future reality...
...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...
...And so what can we do about it...
...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...
...It says so by presenting a remarkably weUdone take of the worst environmental waste of all, the waste of human beings...
...Both more than resemble,they Create hordes of their contemporaries in large cities across the land-no doubt in small towns too...
...and the notion of "no enemies to the left" as reasons for this blindness...
Vol. 5 • November 1971 • No. 2
