In the December 2000 issue of
Details Magazine, there is a short article about
Steven Soderbergh and his new movie, Traffic, which is about the drug industry and its effect on the movie’s characters. The only movie of his that I’ve seen is his most famous,
Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but after reading this article, I’m due to keep my eyes peeled for others of his. I didn’t know that he had grown up an hour from here in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and that he had taken his first filmmaking class in high school. When someone as talented as he hails from this state, I tend to have that much more respect for him.
Traffic makes no moral commentary on national drug policies or even about drug use itself. It uses different colored filters in each of its three stories. In blue, Michael Douglas’ character is a drug czar who discovers his daughter’s drug addiction for the first time. In scenes bathed in green, Catherine Zeta-Jones comes to realize that her husband is a drug smuggler, and in yellow, a Tijuana police officer, played by Benicio Del Toro, worms his way up the corrupt Mexican police force. Some scenes are in Spanish with English subtitles, and to quote the article, “Traffic was made to provoke and upset nearly everyone who sees it.”
Soderbergh himself believes, or was quoted in Details as such, that if people would only get off booze and switch to pot, they would not be killed or beat up nearly as often. In addition, he stated the following:
Going after the supply is like an ant at the bottom of the Matterhorn. I think we need to cop to the fact that there are some people who can do drugs recreationally and some people who can’t. And we need to start helping the people who can’t. The desire to alter your state of consciousness is not inherent in humans that I just don’t know how you can control that.
After reading that, I began to think of my own feelings about drugs, since I would consider myself someone who is not really capable of doing drugs recreationally anymore. In college, it was fine, it even made sense, and in New Orleans, it’s practically the standard. While I don’t do drugs anymore and try to keep to that, I still drink and get tipsy on occasion. I still smoke, though I’m hoping to quit sometime next year, when New Orleans, among other things, is behind me.
But I still am drawn to see movies about drugs, to keep me alert. Requiem for a Dream was something I needed to see, and likely too, Traffic will be another one.