| Ben Tuthill |
The Panic in Needle Park plays at the Trylon Cinema on Wednesday, June 11th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The Physical Education department at St. Paul Central made the inspired decision in the mid-2000s to screen Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream as the capstone to the anti-drug unit of sophomore-year health class. We needed a parent’s signature to watch it. During the third day of screening my friend Jane fainted in her seat. We watched Jared Leto’s arm rot off, Marlon Wayans go into prison withdrawal, Jennifer Connelly undergo humiliation in an underground sex club. I guess we were supposed to learn about what happens when you do heroin. Instead, we learned an important lesson about cinema: when something pleasurable that alleviates a character’s struggle is introduced in the first act, it will inevitably lead to their downfall in the third. Or, in more direct terms: every drug movie is a morality tale.
The correct teenage response to a morality tale is to internalize the opposite message, so I did things the right way and became obsessed with heroin. My major takeways from Requiem for a Dream were that it sure seemed nice to be in love staring at the ceiling in a pile of crappy photo prints and that stealing TVs seemed fun. If I could capture that and get fashionable bags under my eyes without my arm falling off, then I’d be good to go. I’ve always been too scared of drugs to go anywhere near them, but I did the next best thing and got my hands on all the heroin media I could find. To my 16-year-old brain, intravenous opioid use was about the coolest thing a person could do, and if you sort of seemed like you were the kind of person to do it, then that was cool too. I walked around St. Paul blissed out to Velvet Underground & Nico on headphones. I watched the music videos on my CD/DVD copy of Psychocandy over and over and imitated the Reid brothers’ poses in the mirror. I checked NME daily for new pictures of Pete Doherty and Kate Moss. I never contemplated how much any of these things had anything to do with actual heroin use (turns out, not much), because it all had the right vibe, the high contrast between numb and mess. I fainted giving blood, I hated needles, I hated even the thought of having veins—and the disgust was the cherry on top of the aesthetic: blissed out, raw, high contrast, high-cheek-bones.
I’m sure my teachers rolled their eyes at this, the same way I roll my eyes now at kids now who idolize dead Soundcloud rappers. None of the romance I associated with heroin has anything to do with the actual experience of opioid addiction. Which isn’t to say that heroin media only accentuates the glorious sides of an opioid high. To the contrary: the entire appeal of heroin chic is that it’s dirty. Cinematic heroin makes you beautiful when you lean against the side of a Lower East Side dump. It gives you scabs and bruises that you have to cover with leather jackets and ratty sweatshirts. It puts you into life-threatening situations where you can only be saved by your friends who understand the high just as well as the danger.
I got over this fantasy the same way most people get over vampires. Eventually the threat of hepatitis and absences got worse than the charm of being disheveled and gaunt. But the appeal will always be there for me. I’m clearly not alone, because we live in a heroin-rich culture. Not in the sense that heroin is widely available, though I suppose that’s true too. I mean that our culture is filled with stories about beautiful people who become addicted to heroin. We love to consume this story, so long as we’re given a reminder, after the lifestyle is presented as lovingly and beautifully as possible, that all of this stuff is bad.
Nowhere do we settle this score better than film. If our cinematic love affair with heroin began with Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and peaked with Trainspotting, it came into its own in the late 1960s. Prior to Altamont, heroin was mostly a plot point in crime thrillers. The breakthrough came in 1969 with Barbet Schroeder’s More, a messy travel film that sets the now familiar beats of the heroin movie: boy meets girl, boy and girl smoke grass, girl chips heroin, boy tries heroin, boy gets hooked, relationship gets druggy, house gets dirty, all set to a Pink Floyd soundtrack. In More, the girl gets away and the boy dies. In 1971’s Jennifer On My Mind, it’s the same plot but the opposite conclusion: boy ends up stuffing girl’s body in an antique harpsichord. There are exceptions to the rule, like Paul Morrissey’s depraved masterpiece Trash and Bert Deling’s hot mess Pure Shit, but for the most part the heroin movie holds romance at its heart: a dead-eyed boy and a complicated girl, two against the world, caught up in a love that’s going nowhere but downwards, and what makes that love so beautiful is the use and abuse of heroin. Through Sid and Nancy and Drugstore Cowboy and all the way up to Candy and High Art, the heroin movie at its heart is a story about codependence.
This plot has close to nothing to do with the actual lived experience of heroin. A drug user can romanticize a drug the same way anyone can romanticize anything, but that doesn’t mean the drug has anything to do with true love. This reality is what necessitates the other side of the heroin movie: the grime, the decline, and the moral. We can’t tolerate a purely romantic heroin movie because we’re too fully aware of the damage that a romance like that can do. There must be a message: if not an explicit anti-drug PSA (Basketball Diaries) then a horror/disgust perspective (Requiem for a Dream). And if neither of those will work, then we have to opt for realism.
If there’s one film that establishes the romance of heroin addiction, it’s the one that tried the hardest to establish itself as realism. Jerry Schatzberg‘s The Panic in Needle Park is filmed with every claim to cinéma vérité: on-location shooting, real intravenous needle injections, no soundtrack, reportage-ish origins, Joan Didion script. Needle Park aims to present an unflinching account of heroin use without leaning on Hollywood tropes. Instead, we get a ripped-from-the-headlines story of an art-girl who falls for her boyfriend’s dealer after he’s the only guy who comes to visit her after her abortion. She’s pulled into his lifestyle and eventually sneaks into his stash. Chipping leads to addiction, which leads to sex work, which leads to domestic violence, which leads to boy and girl selling each other out to the cops.
It’s realistic enough, except for one thing: the boy is Al Pacino, not yet a star but clearly one in the making, putting on one of the most charming performances ever put to screen. Even through the lens of the 50 years of unhinged performances to come, it’s impossible not to fall in love with him. He’s young, he’s virile, he’s all twitches and swagger and sideways smiles. Maybe Schatzberg didn’t realize what he was getting into when he cast him. But the result is that Needle Park, for all its realism, can’t escape the romance at its heart. Not just the romance between Helen and Bobby, but the camera’s romance with the ruin that the two of them bring to one another. From start to finish, no matter how bad the surroundings, we can’t get over what a beautiful couple we’re watching. The audience is caught up in the surrogate of Kitty Winn’s Helen, in love with Al Pacino’s Bobby even as he robs us blind.
Bobby and Helen stay beautiful to the very end of Needle Park. The only long-term effects of heroin use are incarceration, poverty, and the occasional well-placed bruise. The film is famous for its raw depictions of nurse-administered needle injections, but the most memorable scenes are the romantic ones. The bathroom kiss after Bobby destroys the house when he finds out that Helen has gotten into sex work. The collapsed embrace on the ferry after Helen realizes that she killed her puppy. The tender rooftop scene where Helen caresses Bobby with a pair of scissors as she thinks about how she just sold him out in a drug bust. And of course the final long shot, when Bobby finds Helen waiting for him outside of prison, and, after initially walking away from her, turns back to invite her along for another ride.
Schatzberg shoots Needle Park like a documentary, and he gives us the close-up needle injections to remind us that what we’re experiencing is terrible—a true-crime slice-of-life in Taxi Driver-era New York City. But he knows that isn’t why we’re watching. We aren’t even here for the train wreck. We’re here for the romance, for the perverse hope that we’ll find a love as real as the isolation that cinematic heroin makes possible. The heroin story is akin to the underdog story, human triumph against unbelievable odds: two people, alone in the world, their love destroying one another and the world around them, but brave enough to stick together even when everyone else has turned against them.
If you’d caught my teenage self at an honest and self-reflective moment, I think I would have admitted that I would hope, after 20-so years of solid adjustment and healthy living, to no longer appreciate the appeal of cinematic heroin as an adult—to end up on the side of my health teachers. Instead, here I am in my mid-30s, still wishing I were Al Pacino in a black hoodie. I’m caught in the first and second act of the movie, Jared Leto with Jennifer Connelly or Al Pacino with Kitty Winn high as kites on the roof, clinging to each other as they plot to pawn another TV. The appeal will always be there, the longing to be uniquely beautiful in a nasty world where the consequences never quite catch up to the sweetness of the moment. The disgust at the rot allows you the moral distance to convince yourself that you aren’t just there for the beauty of the high. And the film—comeback, horror story, or documentary—grants you the distance to say you’d only ever want to watch this happen to someone else. This is the real function of cinematic heroin: the ability to shake your head at something from afar as you secretly wish that you had it. It’s romance for people who call themselves realists—in other words, people, like kids in health class, who nod along to the right answer while clinging to the wrong one like they’re the only ones who get it.
Edited by Finn Odum