Why addiction melodramas are set to strike a… | Little White Lies

Why addic­tion melo­dra­mas are set to strike a chord this awards season

20 Oct 2018

Words by Paul Ridd

A woman comforting another person on a sofa, holding a mug.
A woman comforting another person on a sofa, holding a mug.
Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met and Lucas Hedges are earn­ing plau­dits for their ten­der por­tray­als of trou­bled young men.

While tor­tured men look­ing for mean­ing and pur­pose in out­er space fea­ture in both First Man and High Life, from direc­tors Damien Chazelle and Claire Denis respec­tive­ly, anoth­er kind of bro­ken male – the fig­ure of the trou­bled (and beau­ti­ful) boy – looks poised to strike the most res­o­nant chord this awards sea­son. Two films in par­tic­u­lar seem emblem­at­ic of a cer­tain malaise, fea­tur­ing a mil­len­ni­al male and his help­less fam­i­ly at sea in the face of his dev­as­tat­ing addiction.

In Felix Van Groeningen’s Beau­ti­ful Boy, Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met plays Nic, a young man from a lov­ing fam­i­ly who becomes addict­ed to meth and, despite the tire­less efforts of his father David (Steve Carell), seems des­tined to end his life trag­i­cal­ly. In Peter Hedges’ Ben Is Back, mean­while, recov­er­ing hero­in addict Ben (Lucas Hedges) returns from rehab for Christ­mas with his fam­i­ly only to become embroiled once more in drug use and leave his moth­er Hol­ly (Julia Roberts) to search for him across town.

A person in a green jacket and blue beanie embracing a young person in a graveyard setting, with gravestones and floral tributes visible.

What dis­tin­guish­es these two films was their sin­gu­lar per­spec­tive. Sto­ries of lost chil­dren and heart­bro­ken par­ents have recurred ever since Rebel With­out a Cause and the hey­day of the angry young man. This is pri­mar­i­ly as a means of explor­ing the wreck­ing effects of addic­tion, but also a fas­ci­na­tion with gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ence, social change and the very idea of rebel­lion. The nar­ra­tive of the drug-addled child and the anx­ious par­ent has been a trope worked to exhaus­tion by TV movies and soaps.

But there exists a more inter­est­ing lin­eage of addic­tion melo­dra­mas – and more broad­ly parental pan­ic films – which finds its strongest expres­sion in the inde­pen­dent films of the 1970s. These films act as jump­ing off points to pro­cess­ing what Beau­ti­ful Boy and Ben Is Back will mean for audi­ences in the berserk social real­i­ty of 2018.

At one point in Beau­ti­ful Boy, Steve Carell’s David revis­its his youth­ful exper­i­men­ta­tion with drugs by doing a line of coke in his office, seem­ing­ly in an attempt to get into the addled mind of his son. A sim­i­lar sce­nario plays out in John G Avildsen’s 1970 film Joe, in which ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive par­ent Bill (Den­nis Patrick) search­es for the daugh­ter he has lost to hero­in addic­tion, dab­bling in drug use him­self along the way. Played by a young Susan Saran­don, Melis­sa is shown liv­ing in a hov­el where her abu­sive boyfriend alter­nate­ly feeds her drugs and beats her. It’s a bleak vision of a coun­ter­cul­tur­al lifestyle at the cusp of 60s ide­al­ism and bleak post-Man­son hip­pie squalor.

But the film is less inter­est­ed in Melis­sa than it is in her father, a man baf­fled by his child’s choic­es and at a loss to help. Bill teams up with Joe (Peter Boyle), an embit­tered blue-col­lar work­er, and togeth­er the pair ven­ture into a dark under­world, by turns dis­gust­ed and fas­ci­nat­ed by its sex­u­al free­dom, drug use and hedo­nism. In a cru­el twist, Bill winds up acci­den­tal­ly killing his own daugh­ter, the film’s per­verse vision of fam­i­ly con­flict find­ing a log­i­cal con­clu­sion in nihilism.

A sim­i­lar dynam­ic plays out in Paul Schrader’s 1979 film Hard­core, in which George C Scott’s ultra-repres­sive patri­arch dis­cov­ers that his run­away daugh­ter has descend­ed into drug abuse and adult movie pro­duc­tion. He ven­tures into the cityscape deter­mined to recov­er his daugh­ter by any means. In the film’s most icon­ic scene, Scott is forced to watch a porn film in which his daugh­ter has rough sex, his repul­sion and fas­ci­na­tion only strength­en­ing his resolve to res­cue her.

These two films play on a trope that had hit the main­stream by the mid-’70s with the likes of 1974’s Death Wish: the con­cerned father and the vic­timised teen, the one embody­ing patri­ar­chal pow­er, the oth­er fre­quent­ly explic­it­ly stand­ing in for counter-culture.

Two people, a man and a woman, sitting on chairs outdoors in a grassy area with a blurred background.

Beau­ti­ful Boy and Ben Is Back enact a quite dif­fer­ent social real­i­ty. In these movies, there is a clear and defined ene­my – addic­tion – and while Ben and Nic may very well be at war with their par­ents, there is a sense of uni­ty and fam­i­ly that bypass­es gen­er­a­tional con­flict or rebel­lion. Hol­ly and David may be on a quest save their chil­dren, just as Bill and Jake were, but the key dif­fer­ence is that, with­out this dichoto­my between con­ser­vatism and coun­ter­cul­ture, the fam­i­ly unit remains the only solu­tion to these children’s fate.

Film aca­d­e­m­ic Robin Wood writes fas­ci­nat­ing­ly on the idea of 70s hor­ror, iden­ti­fy­ing The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left as emblem­at­ic of a hor­ror cin­e­ma where vio­lence emerges from with­in fam­i­ly and wider social units. He con­trasts this with lat­er hor­ror cin­e­ma, in which exter­nal threats become the dri­ving forces of hor­ror nar­ra­tives – demons, mon­sters, and recur­ring fran­chise vil­lains. His the­sis is that the 1970s inde­pen­dent land­scape pre­sent­ed a new­ly rad­i­calised body of work which reflect­ed a peri­od of great upheaval and social ques­tion­ing. For Wood, the era of con­ser­vatism ush­ered in by Rea­gan and the block­buster encour­aged a tac­it endorse­ment of pre­cise­ly those units which had been the the­mat­ic lifeblood of the hor­ror new wave.

It’s a handy way of think­ing about hor­ror, but also oth­er gen­res, espe­cial­ly those con­cerned with inter-gen­er­a­tional con­flict. Think­ing back to the vio­lent trans­gres­sions emerg­ing from the fam­i­ly with­in pro­gres­sive hor­ror and inde­pen­dent films of the 70s, per­haps the rather abstract­ed idea of addic­tion’ in these new movies is equiv­a­lent to the exter­nal threat in the post 70s con­ser­v­a­tive films. In this light, Nic and Ben’s rela­tion­ship with drugs becomes some­thing akin to the super­nat­ur­al boogey­men of fran­chise hor­rors, a threat which must be cast out in order for har­mo­ny to be restored to the fam­i­ly unit.

It’s telling that nei­ther of these films goes into much detail about acquir­ing nar­cotics or the fab­ric of addict com­mu­ni­ties, such affairs only hint­ed at as unseen hor­rors, framed through the hor­ri­fied eyes of parental con­cern rather than the child’s lived experience.

The dis­cov­ery of a large­ly apo­lit­i­cal threat to famil­ial har­mo­ny – name­ly, sub­stance abuse broad­ly divorced from the real­i­ties of drug pro­duc­tion and pro­cure­ment – is either a handy short­hand for, or deflec­tion from, social real­i­ty. In a moder­ni­ty defined by finan­cial cri­sis, a pop­u­lar drift towards the right, and a lack of pro­vi­sion for younger gen­er­a­tions, the mid­dle class drug abuse melo­dra­ma can either be an effec­tive expres­sion of a too-com­plex socioe­co­nom­ic real­i­ty, or affirm the fam­i­ly as the only recourse in the face of strife. It remains to be seen whether audi­ences will respond to these new films as cathar­sis or ques­tion their lack of an explic­it sociopo­lit­i­cal dimension.

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