Review Traffic's Sophisticated Propaganda
Lazare, Daniel
Traffic USA Home Entertainment Gramercy Pictures/USA Film 2000 Retail: VHS $14.98 DVD $19.98 Traffik Channel Four 1989 Retail: VHS $49.98 DVD $39.98 When the movie Traffic burst onto U.S....
...The agent just laughs it off...
...In its place, we get a lot of high-voltage action interspersed with set speeches whose chief purpose is to underscore the hopelessness of it all...
...While depicting the drug war as an exercise in futility, it celebrated the drug-war rank and file, the frontline drug cops, as heroes...
...In a culture based on surface impressions, it offers the appearance of being hard-hitting while waffling about the subject at hand...
...This was more than a bit one-sided...
...When the new drug czar reminds his wife of her own drug past, she angrily retorts, "I'm not the one who has to have three scotches just to walk into the house and say hello...
...With that, Traffic dredges up the worst propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s, in which drugs were portrayed as the ultimate evil that turned innocent girls into "white slaves" at the hands of Svengalilike Jews, Fu Manchu-style Orientals, or primitive blacks...
...The point, hammered home with the usual Hollywood subtlety, is that the drug warriors are no better than the people they are chasing because they are no less drug-dependent...
...Just as Traffik showed police shooting a suspected trafficker in the foot, Traffic does also...
...Vol XXXVI, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 55REVIEW drug bust across the border in San Diego, in which dealers and drug agents blast away at one another with semi-automatics and cops hurtle high fences in pursuit of fleeing criminals...
...Instead of poor farmers trapped by economic circumstances, it opens with a couple of Mexican police officers battling against the drug trade despite a vast and monstrous conspiracy against them...
...Drug arrests remain at record levels, the militarization of Colombia continues unabated, and John Walters, the Bush administration's DrugCzar, is even more hard-line than his predecessors...
...So where did the filmmakers go wrong...
...Where Lithgow lives in a relatively modest London row house despite being a member of government, his American counterpart lives with his wife and daughter in a palace in a wealthy suburb, flits around the country in a private jet, and hobnobs with big shots at glamorous Georgetown cocktail parties...
...Is the war on drugs so big at this point that it is simply impervious to criticism...
...By weaving together three different stories in order to show how heroin makes its way from Pakistan to Great Britain, it highlighted an aspect of the modem drug trade that is certainly squalid and unpleasant, but far from representative of the phenomenon as a whole...
...But where the first film described the incident as an accident, the second shows it as purposeful, a bit of humorous horseplay by a couple of likable narcs...
...The film then cuts to a Vol XXXVI, No 2 SPTEMBERIOCrOBER 200255 Daniel Lazare has written widely on drug issues, urban affairs and other subjects...
...Unlike the first movie, it rarely shows its main character without a drink in hand...
...Yet in refusing to consider any alternatives to the drug war itself, Traffic is unwilling to think outside the box as well...
...Intellectual analysis fades into the background...
...When Michael Douglas' Drug Czar, alarmed at how little the drug war is accomplishing, demands of his underlings that they "think outside the box" and come up with something new, the silence is deafening...
...Rather than putting the blame on evil drug lords, it explored the real-life forces that drive poppy cultivation in the first place...
...So, remember, you work for a drug dealer, too...
...legalization...
...Traffik's perspective was economic and political...
...Indeed, when a poppy farmer named Fazal is forced off the land by government troops, it shows him moving his family to Karachi and taking ajob with an especially vicious trafficker...
...The idea that alcohol is not necessarily evil and that some people might actually derive pleasure from its use is verboten in the new puritanical climate, as of course is any suggestion that drugs might lead to something other than arrest, prostitution and death by overdose...
...Still, the film was refreshingly un-melodramatic in its discussion of the political economy of opiate production and its effect on upscale users...
...Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy (1989) was a brilliant tour of the life of an addict, while Rush (1991), based on Kim Wozencraft's account of her experiences as an undercover cop in Tyler, Texas, was a powerful examination of how the drug war destroys lives far more effectively than any illegal substance...
...Underscoring this lurid melodrama is a streak of of prudery that is also typically American...
...Since then, the drug-war juggernaut has continued to roll...
...Written by Simon Moore and directed by Alastair Reid, Traffik -the filmmakers used the German spelling because much of it was set in Hamburg-was far from perfect...
...It showed the drug trade to be as impersonal in the final analysis as trade in grain or steel...
...This is the "grunt's-eye-view" long beloved of Hollywood producers...
...It was a point the movie drove home in one of its final scenes in which a drug enforcement agent named Montel Gordon bravely plants a bug in the home of a ruthless drug kingpin...
...Although Traffic was supposed to change the way Americans talk and think about drugs, it in fact changed little at all...
...Although highly faithful to the British original in certain respects, the Hollywood remake shifts the emphasis...
...Traffic didn't just pull its punches-it gave assistance to the other side...
...Where Traffik centered around a British politician named Jack Lithgow, Traffic features a federal judge in Cincinnati named Bob Hudson Wakefield who has just been tagged to become the new Washington Drug Czar...
...This is at least part of the reason why Traffic was such a huge success...
...Tell him how you murdered my partner, Ray Castro," the drug agent hollers as he is hustled away...
...Rather than freeing Fazal from the nightmare, the drug war sends him tumbling in deeper...
...Hollywood is not incapable of making good movies about the drug war...
...But for all its cynicism, the effect is actually to strengthen militarism by marginalizing its critics...
...Only when the girl is locked in her room and forced to enter a 12-step program does she pitch scarily downhill and ends up in bed with a well-muscled dealer who is African-American...
...You only got to me because you were tipped off by the Juarez cartel, who's trying to break into Tijuana...
...The movie moguls thus get to have their cake and eat it too...
...In a society in which people feel dwarfed by political institutions, it emphasizes the degree to which the drug war and the federal bureaucracy behind it are effectively beyond the citizenry's control...
...You are helping them...
...It pretends to probe deeply while contenting itself with superficial cliches...
...This has allowed critics, pundits, and politicians to applaud it as a serious exposed without thinking very seriously about the problem it purports to expose...
...But films like these were effective because they were small, whereas Traffic is as thoughtless and overblown as the drug war it pretends to dissect...
...Traffic's fundamental duplicity comes through most clearly in comparison with the 1989 British TV miniseries on which it was based...
...Moviegoers see it as realistic because it mirrors the passivity and helplessness that they themselves feel...
...Rather than presenting the problem in trerms of economics, Traffic moralizes it by presenting it as a battle between good-guy cops and bad-guy narcotraficantes...
...The worst part about you, Monty, is you realize the futility of what you're doing, and you do it anyway," a dealer-turned-federal witness tells one of his DEA escorts...
...While showing why the rationale for the drug war doesn't add up, it refused to consider any alternatives to today's neo-prohibitionist policies and managed to avoid all mention of the dreaded L-word (i.e...
...So determined was director Steven Soderbergh to rub American noses in the truth that a thorough and penetrating debate would be impossible to put off any longer...
...It's a lousy war, the generals don't know what they're doing, but the guys in the trenches will keep soldiering on because they're soldiers and that's what soldiers do...
...movie screens in December 2000, the pundits were unanimous: By confronting a difficult subject in a compelling, head-on manner, the film would force Americans to grapple with an anti-drug crusade that was costing billions of dollars a year and sending millions of people to jail, yet doing little to stop the flow of illegal substances...
...Just as Hollywood movies of an earlier era were unable to depict extramarital sex as leading to anything other than scandal and suicide, Traffic is unable to show booze leading to anything other than raging arguments and divorce...
...This is one high-achieving teenager who seems to have her drug use in control, yet the movie struggles to invent a problem where none necessarily exists...
...W here the original struggled to avoid bombast, the remake piles it on...
...The answer is the latter...
...Police brutality is thereby condoned...
...Or was Traffic less than it seemed, a movie that, for all the hype and glory, preferred to bob and weave rather than engage its subject in direct combat...
...Yet the overall effect is to underscore the filmmakers' own hypocrisy...
...They get to criticize the drug war while scoring points with the drug warriors who bash down doors and make arrests...
...After being briefly jailed as part of a drug bust the Drug Czar's daughter Caroline tells an incredulous social worker that not only does she get straight A's at the elite private school she attends, but that she is also vice-president of her class and a member of a halfdozen student clubs to boot...
...He is the author of America's Undeclared War: What's Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It (Harcourt, 2001...
...The result was a dual message: As hopeless as the drug war may be, there is no alternative, which is why it will keep rolling forward in the face of all criticism...
Vol. 36 • September 2002 • No. 2
