Near as I can tell – at 1:30 on a Tuesday morning – there is one fundamental problem with human beings: We are either unwilling or unable to believe that the sordid tendencies of others might actually be beneficial to them. Oh, we accept those tendencies, usually; we tolerate them; we even celebrate them in a sort of amused, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kind of way. But acceptance only goes so far. It allows us to live in a state of tenuous peace with our neighbors. But it doesn’t get us inside their sinister little heads.
That’s what’s so great about movies about writers who have substance-abuse problems: They’re the only opportunity most of us have to drop our moral and aesthetic guard completely and revel in the idea that maybe – just maybe – there are people out there for whom destructive self-indulgence is the source of creativity, of inspiration, of power and identity. For some, I’m saying, squalor is the key to the kingdom.
I don’t see this as an act of romanticizing, as you do, but rather as a celebration of the great, vast, unending variety of human personality. I admit I went though a William S. Burroughs phase in high school (I may have actually been recording secretary in our school’s fan club, but who can remember that far back?), and I’ll gladly admit now that part of my affection for the man was born out of my romantic fascination with the junkie lifestyle (that and a reverence for his indifference to the rules of grammar, a reverence born, I think, out of a desire to rebel against the strict proper-usage regime I had been raised under). But fascination only gets you so far. Real works of art are explorations of the human condition, whether that condition is something you can accept or not, and the great writer/addict movies are the ones that don’t downplay the role degradation can – can – play in the creative act.
The best example of this is Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, which goes out of its way to celebrate the catastrophically dangerous habits of its hero, Hunter S. Thompson. Booze, guns, pills, powders, tinctures, joints, adrenal glands: Say what you will about the sanctity of the creative act or the holiness of the human body; to claim that Johnny Depp’s character would be better off – as a writer or a human being – if he just straightened up and flew right, is an act of highest delusion and moral arrogance. I remember, after I saw Fear & Loathing for the first time, saying to myself, “Thank God that movie didn’t apologize for anything.” If director Terry Gilliam had tried to argue that Thompson’s life was actually a mess, or that all those drugs had prevented him from becoming the writer he could have been, or that the lifestyle he chose should be avoided at all costs – that kids, in particular, shouldn’t be subjected to it lest they get ideas in their heads – I would have run from the theatre screaming. Instead I strolled out smiling, something I often do after watching a movie that holds off from judgment.
Though I know you hate him, there is a great line in the film version of Bukowski’s Factotum that puts the whole issue is some perspective. The film’s hero, Henry Chinaski, drinks and writes and drinks and gets fired from miserable day jobs and mistreats the women he goes to bed with and drinks, but he doesn’t try to ease our concerns about humanity by allowing us the comfort of a nice tidy moral about self-control and self-improvement. He is what he is, and he creates how he creates.
(Plus, he drinks.)
“All I want to do is get my check and get drunk,” Chinaski says to one employer after losing another job. “Now, that might not sound noble, but it’s my choice.”
This article appears in October 10 • 2008.