Whereas Boys Don’t Cry and Your Friends and Neighbors depict one terrifying intersection of sexuality and criminality, a pair of powerful films about drugs show another such intersection. In Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, young women strung out by addiction trade sex for controlled substances. These desperate exchanges are part of complex and occasionally contradictory discourse about controlled substances that runs through Gen-X movies, reflecting how attitudes toward drugs have changed in the lifetime of Generation X.
At the time illegal drugs became a pervasive part of youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s, the cinema had a spotty record of addressing drug use on screen. Movies such as 1955’s The Man With the Golden Arm explored addiction to hard drugs with almost hysterical intensity, and that particular movie caused something of a scandal by attacking a taboo subject head-on. Yet by the dawn of boomer-oriented cinema, controlled substances were virtually a required narrative component: Movies from Easy Rider to The French Connection to Lady Sings the Blues are inextricably tied to the drug trade. And in a huge leap from the traditional, ultra-cautionary depiction of drugs, some boomer movies depict the use of “innocent” mind-altering substances, notably marijuana, as an innocuous form of adult recreation. While movies of this period still cast a horrified eye on the blight of heroin and other hard drugs, the relaxed attitude toward recreational drug use that permeated boomer cinema was a sure sign that times had changed.
Times changed back again before Gen Xers got their first chances to explore drug use onscreen, however, because conservative politicians of the 1980s initiated a costly and largely ineffective war on drugs. The drug war, accompanied by such comical spectacles as First Lady Nancy Reagan’s pervasive “Just Say No” ad campaign, created a climate in which drug use was demonized in public even as it was embraced in private. Cocaine in particular become a fashionable indulgence in the 1980s, and its rise is a critical story element in such Gen-X films as Boogie Nights and Blow.
Yet not long after America’s most powerful elected officials (and their spouses) committed themselves to fighting drugs, a presidential candidate danced around the facts of his own drug experimentation. In his 1991-1992 campaign, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton made headlines by acknowledging that he had tried pot, but hadn’t “inhaled.” Opponents tried to turn Clinton’s alleged drug use into a talking point, but by the early 1990s, marijuana seemed so tame compared to heroin, cocaine, and other lethal drugs that the issue became more of a joke than a controversy.
Whether he inhaled or not, Clinton became the first president to openly admit experimenting with illegal drugs, making him symbolic of America’s paradoxical relationship with controlled substances. The nation’s highest official, and thus the guiding force behind America’s war on drugs, was himself a past drug user—albeit a casual partaker given to equivocating the nature of his experimentation. Within this context, it makes perfect sense that Gen Xers find the demonization of drug users and peddlers highly hypocritical and best avoided altogether. So while Gen Xers often make powerful statements about drug-related issues, such statements are generally devoid of moral absolutes—and instead suffused with moral uncertainty.
Generation X’s perspective on illegal drugs was informed by more than the discourse of politicians, of course. The Pandora’s box that the boomers opened by embracing a variety of controlled substances as recreational drugs stayed open once the next generation came of age. Author Geoffrey T. Holtz, in his study of the societal factors that define Generation X, reported that alcohol and drug use increased dramatically among youths during the generation’s formative years, and he offered some possible explanations for the phenomenon. Reiterating the now-familiar factors that forced Gen Xers to grow up quickly, Holtz argued that Gen Xers “simply assumed some of the adult prerogatives that went along with their adult obligations. Just as many adults seek relief from the stresses of life in drugs or alcohol, so did a growing number of [Gen Xers]. They were just compelled to make these choices at a much younger age.”1 This reality is reflected in pictures such as Boaz Yakin’s Fresh, which tells the story of a twelve-year-old drug dealer.
Concurrent with their voluntary embrace of alcohol and illegal drugs, Gen Xers had the unfortunate distinction of being the most medicated youths in American history, because legal drugs such as Ritalin were widely prescribed throughout the 1970s and beyond to curb “difficult” behavior in children. As Holtz bitterly observed, this was one more example of adults prioritizing convenience over the welfare of nascent Gen Xers, so the idea of doping children who require special attention is not far removed from the idea of refusing to fail students who do poorly in school: In both trends, children are treated as assembly-line products to be passed into adulthood as quickly, and with as little effort, as possible.
“Thus, for all intents and purposes,” Holtz wrote, “between 3 and 4 million [Gen-X] children were given sedatives simply to make them more compliant in the classroom, or because their behavior was outside of some ideal that a particular adult desired.”2
Since they were raised in a time during which illegal drugs were openly embraced throughout numerous pockets of mainstream culture, and during which legal drugs were employed as an ancillary to the nurturing process, is it any wonder that Generation X grew up poised to experiment with controlled substances, and suspicious that anyone who told them they shouldn’t was just another hypocrite?
The dangerously casual attitude toward drugs that appears in several Gen-X movies is the most shocking aspect of Doug Liman’s Go, an exuberant adventure that stops just short of endorsing drugs as a hobby. The fast-moving, cheeky picture follows a handful of young characters whose lives intersect during one wild night, and typical of the youths populating the film is Ronna (Sarah Polley), a grocery clerk who stumbles into moonlighting as a drug dealer. Among her adventures: She kills time at the grocery store by smoking and doing drugs in the store’s freezer section; she leaves her friend Claire (Katie Holmes) at the home of an edgy dealer as collateral until she can pay off her drug debt; and she snows several gullible youths by selling them allergy medicine and chewable aspirin while telling them the tablets are ecstasy. Drug use is played for laughs throughout the movie—as in a scene of stoned youth imagining that a cat projects the words “I can hear your thoughts” into his mind through telepathy—and even the sporadic flashes of violence in the film fail to add much gravity to the story. Go makes selling and using drugs look like a cheap thrill with bothersome repercussions that can be avoided with a little ingenuity and patience.
Liman’s inspiration probably was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which similarly tracks several lives that intersect because of criminal activity—and which contains perhaps the most notorious drug sequence in all Gen-X cinema. The sequence begins when hip hit man Vincent Vega (John Travolta) gets assigned to entertain Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) for an evening; Mia, importantly, is the wife of Vincent’s violence-prone employer. Before Vincent even sees her, viewers watch Mia blast a line of coke up her nose, which explains the bouncy energy with which she enchants the comparatively laconic Vincent. Over the course of an evening of dining and dancing, the two bond share a string of pop-culture-laden exchanges and sweetly intimate revelations. Mia keeps the party moving with a steady supply of the drug that novelist Jay McInerney once described as “Bolivian marching powder.”
But just as the pleasant evening is due to conclude, Mia discovers a bag of white powder in Vincent’s jacket while he’s in the bathroom. Unaware that it actually is heroin, she snorts the stuff and immediately stumbles into deadly toxic shock. Vincent discovers her and is overwhelmed with panic that he’ll take the blame for the death of his boss’s wife, so he rushes her to the home of his wasteoid drug dealer, Lance (Eric Stoltz). Lance produces a monstrous hypodermic needle filled with adrenaline, then indicates what needs to be done, so Vincent steels his nerves to oblige—by punching the needle through Mia’s chest and into her heart with the force of a maniac attacking a victim with a butcher knife.
The desperate attempt succeeds, and after recovering their composure, Mia and Vincent agree to treat the incident the way mischievous children hide their misdeeds—they go their separate ways and swear not to tell Mia’s husband about what happened. While this scene has an undeniable cautionary aspect, it also uses drugs to elevate the bond between two characters. Their shared adventure is precious because it was illegal and nearly fatal—making the bond between Mia and Vincent the same that joins the characters in Go, who walk away unscathed after sharing a thrilling misadventure.
The cautionary aspect of Generation X’s depiction of drugs is more prominent in Boogie Nights, which shows characters destroying their lives through the use of controlled substances. Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), the matriarch of the movie’s surrogate family of porn stars and filmmakers, has a debilitating cocaine addiction that fits perfectly with the narrative’s time frame, because she’s at the forefront of hedonistic culture in the 1970s and 1980s, the period during which cocaine’s popularity surged.
In a key scene, she sits around snorting coke with Rollergirl (Heather Graham), the damaged young woman who has become a star in the skin flicks made by Amber’s companion, director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). As the distraught Amber gets more and more jazzed by the dope in her system, she laments that she’s separated from Andrew, the child of her previous relationship. Amber says that if she isn’t a mother, she’s nothing, so Rollergirl picks up the mood by asking Amber to be her “mom.”
Just a few scenes later, Amber goes court for custody of Andrew, and loses her case because she’s a porn star with a long arrest record stemming from her involvement in drugs and prostitution. Perhaps the saddest instant in the short, painful hearing scene is when Amber sincerely declares that she doesn’t do drugs, even though we saw her fill her nose with coke just a few screen minutes previous.
Later in the movie, drugs cost a character more than visitation rights. The film’s protagonist is porn star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), who by the mid–’80s finds his career prospects so limited that he segues from acting to dealing drugs. Dirk and a buddy hook up with edgy crook Todd Parker (Thomas Jane), who involves them in a deal to sell drugs to a manic playboy named Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina). Even worse, Todd persuades them to substitute innocuous white powder for the dope, meaning they have to grab Rahad’s cash and flee before he discovers their ruse. The would-be players arrive at Rahad’s home to find him wired on freebased coke, and the situation goes south when Todd tries to turn the deal into an armed robbery. Shots are fired and Todd gets killed, but Dirk escapes with his life and the realization that compared to selling drugs, sleeping with women on film is a safe way to make a living.
Amber’s legal defeat and Dirk’s near-death experience both underline how the drug trade became a more serious business in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and how the wise figured out that it was time to get out of the game. Ted Demme explored the root causes of this shift in Blow, his glossy biopic of George Jung, the American dealer who helped bring South American cocaine to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, Demme’s film is a travelogue of young America’s relationship with drugs that spans most of the counterculture era.
Early in the movie, George (Johnny Depp) moves from the Northeast to California and hooks up with a flamboyant pot supplier, Derek Foreal (Paul Reubens). Fueled by his enthusiasm for grass and his burning ambition to make a quick buck, George quickly becomes a successful dealer on the West Coast, then strikes upon the idea of sending dope back home to the Northeast. His enterprise eventually grows to include illicit flights from Mexico, where George scores huge mounds of pot that he then sells in America, and everything seems to go swimmingly until George gets busted.
In prison, however, the dope mogul is tossed in a cell with Colombian drug peddler Diego Delgado (Jordi Mollà), who fatefully introduces George to infamous Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar (Cliff Curtis). Undeterred by his stint in prison and the violence of which he knows Pablo is capable, George becomes Pablo’s American connection—and such a powerful supplier of cocaine that he claims at one point to import nearly all of the coke used in the United States at the height of the drug’s popularity.
Taking a powder: One of several Gen-X movies about illegal drugs, Ted Demme’s Blow stars Johnny Depp (left, with Jordi Mollà) as a rich cocaine dealer (New Line Cinema).
In keeping with the cautionary but not necessarily moralistic depiction of drugs in other Gen-X movies, George pays for his hubris by losing his relationship with a beautiful Colombian woman, and by getting separated from his beloved daughter. At the end of the movie, an unrepentant George rots in jail as a lonely old man who has been betrayed or abandoned by almost everyone he ever loved. Yet he doesn’t seem to regret the life he chose or the damage he wrought by choosing that life—instead, he regrets getting caught.
This distinction feels especially murky because Demme and his collaborators mostly gloss over the effects of George’s smuggling. Blow focuses obsessively on George’s trajectory, so we don’t see the countless lives that were ruined because of how George and his cronies made an enticing drug readily available, and we don’t see much of the violence that punctuates the relationships between drug suppliers, peddlers, and users. In fact, it’s easy to walk out of Blow with the impression that George is some kind of tragic figure doomed by foolish choices that resulted from a tumultuous childhood. That whitewash approach tarnishes the whole film, turning what could have been a powerful historical snapshot into a dangerously naive love letter to a scumbag.
Whereas Demme’s Blow misses the mark by taking a microcosmic view of a massive societal ill, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic achieves the opposite result by taking the opposite tack. A sprawling, multi-character epic adapted from a British miniseries called Traffik, and written for the screen by recovering drug addict Steven Gaghan (who won an Oscar for his endeavors), Soderbergh’s movie encompasses a dizzying number of perspectives to show that everyone involved in the drug trade—manufacturers, sellers, users, even soldiers in the so-called war on drugs—wrestles with the same thorny issues. Soderbergh also puts across the powerful argument that the war on drugs is destined for failure, not just because the enemy has deeper pockets and fewer scruples, but because fighting drug manufacturers and sellers in effect translates to fighting drug users—whom, the movie argues, are victims as well as culprits.
Soderbergh democratically doles out screen time to all of his memorable characters, but two particular figures occupy the heart of the story. The traditional hero is Ohio Supreme Court Judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), recently appointed as America’s new drug czar. He represents America as a babe in the woods: Even though he talks a hard line about arresting the flow of illegal drugs into the country, he’s oblivious to the deadly drug use taking place under his roof. His willful teenage daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), regularly snorts and smokes and shoots drugs with her idly rich prep-school friends. The metaphor that America, as personified by Robert, is ignorant of internal problems but quick to blame other countries, specifically Mexico, is among the film’s most heavy-handed elements—but also among its most crucial statements.
The other key character is a small-time, corrupt Mexican state policeman, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro). At the beginning of the story, he’s content exploiting the drug trade for a payoff here, a payoff there; as one character says, “Law enforcement in Mexico is an entrepreneurial enterprise.” But when Javier gets caught up in a complex intrigue involving his country’s leading anti-drug warrior and a pair of warring cocaine cartels, the policeman realizes the human cost of helping to maintain the status quo.
Robert’s journey slams home a damning point about America’s ass-backwards approach to drugs, but Javier’s has tremendous impact on a human level. These stories—and others involving a blithe rich wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose husband is busted for smuggling dope, and a pair of casually competent FBI agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) assigned to snare and then protect a key witness—were designed to make viewers consider drugs in a new way. The filmmakers lay out reasons why politics, corruption, and money make even the United States’ most valiant efforts to stem drug traffic laughably insufficient, then try to show that compassion and intervention can cure more ills than seizures and arrests.
After the film was released, Gaghan explained in an interview why his own experiences with drugs informed his decision to write the Americanized version of the story:
Part of the recovery process is a commitment to truth, and I began to feel that I was not being truthful. The stigma and shame of drug addiction is part of what makes it difficult for people to raise their hand and ask for help, and I felt that by not being completely honest I was, in a way, perpetuating that stigma…. If there is a message to the movie, I guess it’s that drugs should be a health care issue rather than a criminal issue.3
Interestingly, the most powerful Gen-X movie about drugs also is in some ways the most traditional. For while the style of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is utterly contemporary—certain aspects of the director’s frenetic storytelling are even ahead of their time—the content of the film is an intense morality tale almost in the mode of such antiquated films as The Man With the Golden Arm.
Caught in the crossfire: Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a pampered socialite who discovers her husband is a drug dealer in Traffic, for which Steven Soderbergh won a Best Director Oscar (USA Films).
Writ large, the movie simply says that drugs will kill or nearly kill you, but the devil here is very much in the details. Adapted from a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., the movie explores the impact of both legal and illegal drugs on a spectrum of characters, and the delicate way that Aronofsky balances scenes showing his characters’ complicity in their own fates with scenes suggesting that the characters are doomed by social factors adds layers of complexity to his generally straightforward narrative. More importantly, the power of Aronofsky’s filmmaking and the unflinching bleakness of Selby’s story converge in a cinematic assault that’s painful to experience.
Requiem for a Dream is a symphony of despair: Characters spiral downward because of their addictions to street and prescription drugs, descending into degradation, madness, and physical deterioration. The movie features d.t.’s, infected veins, drug-induced hypertension, sex traded for money, and terrifying hallucinations, all of which are made even more intense by Aronofsky’s signature “hiphop montages,” super-quick sequences that slam images and sounds at viewers with the force and momentum of aggressive music. The director also employs sped-up camerawork, ultra-fast editing, and disassociated images, all of which make the storytelling confusing and abrasive.
Despite—or, more likely, because of—the director’s confrontational approach, Requiem for a Dream often has the impact of a fist to the face. The most arresting story line involves urban widow Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), a virtual shut-in who becomes obsessed with appearing on her favorite game show. She starts using diet pills to slim her aging figure for the television appearance, but careless doctors overprescribe the drugs—and then over-prescribe drugs meant to bring her down from the diet pills. Sara becomes shaky, paranoid, delusional, and deranged, all in hopeless solitude because her beloved son (Jared Leto) is caught in his own cycle of drug abuse. In her darkest moment, she’s a frazzled, emaciated asylum inmate getting blasted with electroshock therapy—at roughly the same time that her dear son has a drug-destroyed arm amputated. Showing the pain experienced by Sara, a comparative innocent, puts the rigors of life among drug dealers such as her son in a new context: All are damned to horrific fates because they use drugs as a short cut on their journeys toward humble dreams.
The gap between drug scenes played for thrills, like Mia’s overdose in Pulp Fiction, and those played for chills, like Sara’s psychological derailment, is huge—and indicative of how hard it sometimes is for Gen-X directors to find a clear path in the wilds of contemporary culture. Just when it seems that an answer presents itself, as in the Traffic assertion that treatment is more humane than arresting drug users, an opposing view emerges. For surely aggressive means are required to help the victims of Requiem of a Dream, at least one of whom gets her fix not from a street pusher, but from a neighborhood pharmacist. “What the film is about,” Aronofsky noted in an interview, “is the lengths we will go to escape our reality.”4
Given that the central theme of the cinema of Generation X is the question of how a generation raised amid historical turmoil can find a place for itself in a vastly changed society, the simplicity of Aronofsky’s comment speaks volumes. In the context of other Gen-X movies, the reckless dive into oblivion made by the characters in Requiem for a Dream is a sadly resounding extension of slackerdom, workplace rebellion, and the myriad other means by which Gen-X characters respond to the chaos of modern society by extracting themselves from it. The logical next step beyond hard drugs, of course, is suicide, and statistics bear out that vast numbers of Gen Xers have made that final leap.
Suicide is not a prevalent theme in Gen-X cinema, but a few pointed depictions reflect the dark fact that suicide has been a fact of life for American teenagers throughout the years of Generation X’s existence. In fact, the numbers of youths who choose this unreversable solution to their problems has steadily increased since the early 1960s, when the first Gen Xers were born. In 1960, 10 of every 100,000 American men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four took their lives; by 1980, that number had more than doubled to 25 of every 100,000 men in this age group.5
David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson have featured suicide in at least two films each. Fincher’s debut feature, the third installment of the popular sci-fi/horror Alien series, memorably concluded with long-suffering protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) throwing herself into a vat of super-heated ore to kill the monster growing inside her body. And Fincher’s The Game climaxed with the image of a beleaguered businessman (Michael Douglas) throwing himself off a building because he believed he had just killed his brother. The businessman’s death was prevented with an airbag, and the brother’s death had been faked, but the shock of the imagery resonanted. (Whether it manifests as suicide or otherwise, martyrdom is a recurring theme in Fincher’s work: The death of his young wife prompts a principled cop to become a killer in Seven, and the death of a beloved colleague prompts a cult to new levels of violent anarchy in Fight Club.)
In Boogie Nights, Anderson depicted a cuckolded husband (William H. Macy) walking into a room where his wife was having sex with another man. The husband shoots both lovers to death before putting the gun into his own mouth and pulling the trigger. And in Anderson’s Magnolia, a depressed trophy wife tries to deaden her pain by downing a massive amount of prescription drugs and then settling into a car so she can choke on exhaust fumes.
In all of these films, however, the suicide attempts are outgrowths of other story material, so the most significant Gen-X films about characters taking their own lives, or trying to, are those that both forefront suicide and explore its causes. One such movie is James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted, a sterile but interesting adaptation of Susannah Kaysen’s memoir of her 1960s tenure in a psychiatric ward. In the film, Susannah (Winona Ryder), is a poor little rich girl who takes a near-fatal overdose of pills. Her parents commit her to a mental-health facility in the hopes their her self-destructive tendencies will be curbed. Although she is chronologically a boomer, Susannah’s journey reflects trends that had a tremendous impact on Generation X: Her parents essentially wash their hands of her when she becomes “difficult,” and once Susannah is hospitalized, she’s forced to take medication that her doctors hope will “normalize” her behavior.
During her long stay in the hospital, Susannah befriends several fellow patients, most of whom suffer from afflictions far more crippling than her own rampant neuroses. Mangold resorts to clichés familiar from such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and generally treads so softly that Susannah’s time at the hospital sometimes seems like a summer at camp. Yet the film has several passages of sensitivity and power, particularly a vignette during which Susannah and her freespiritied acquaintance Lisa (Angelina Jolie) visit a fellow patient who was released and now lives in her own apartment. As the passive Susannah watches, Lisa torments the fragile Daisy (Brittany Murphy), who responds to the abuse and other factors by killing herself while her guests sleep one floor below her.
The moment starts Susannah toward an epiphany, but in the superficial language of the film’s narration (spoken by Ryder as Susannah), her breakthrough comes out like this: “Seeing death—really seeing it—makes dreaming about it fucking ridiculous.” While blunt and even a bit flip, this line nonetheless reveals an important truth: Suicide was so familiar to youths of the 1960s and beyond that it was possible for teenagers, and even children, of these eras to entertain notions of taking their own lives without any real concept of what such a choice entails. Like anything else that once was a taboo subject, suicide lost some of its stigma when it became commonplace, and therefore became a dangerously approachable concept.
Just as the issues about suicide that pervade Girl, Interrupted have a significance that spans two generations, so too does the strange fact that Susannah elects to stay hospitalized for several months after learning that she has the option to leave whenever she wants to. In the following dialogue spoken by one of Susannah’s psychiatrists, the no-nonsense Dr. Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), note the echoes of behavior that is generally thought to be the province of contemporary slackers:
DR. WICK: It’s a big question you’re faced with, Susannah. The choice of your life. How much will you indulge in your flaws? What are your flaws? Are there flaws? If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital for life? Big questions, big decisions. Not surprising you profess carelessness about them.
If Girl, Interrupted suffers from flat storytelling and superficiality, it isn’t for lack of trying on the part of producer-star Ryder, who was instrumental in bringing the story to the screen. Like Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, Ryder had a personal connection to the story she helped tell, and the revelations she made when promoting Girl, Interrupted add resonance to her portrayal even as they exemplify the painful difficulties that so many Gen Xers have when trying to grapple with the realities of modern life.
I’ve never been a suicidal person, but there have definitely been times when I’ve thought, I’m too sensitive for this world right now; I just don’t belong here—it’s too fast and I don’t understand it. Those were times when I would hibernate. And it wasn’t healthy—I would get very lonely and very helpless…. I spent some time in a psychiatric ward when I was nineteen. I really thought that I was losing my mind. I’ve always been an insomniac, and I was really, really overworked and overtired and not sleeping. I was convinced I was having a nervous breakdown, and I checked myself in…. I debated whether to talk about it, but it is true, and I’m not really ashamed of it. I think everybody goes through these times in their lives—I think you’re very weird if you don’t.6
So far, the most evocative Gen-X expression of the formless angst that can lead teens to end their lives was seen in Sofia Coppola’s debut film, The Virgin Suicides—which takes a uniquely Gen-X approach to its subject matter by preventing viewers from penetrating the psyches of its doomed characters. Coppola shows viewers some of the external factors that make five fictional sisters venture into oblivion, but she lets the characters retain their mystery.
Judging from the opaque, almost dreamlike quality of the film’s storytelling, it seems as if Coppola wanted to do more than offer a movie-of-the-week answer to a widespread social affliction. She apparently wanted to present suicide as part of the confusing haze of American adolescence, in which hormones and rebellion butt against the parameters of neatly ordered suburban life. The movie’s trancelike beauty sucks viewers into the dark milieu of its characters, in effect drawing the audience into a deadly emotional whirlpool.
Set in 1970s Michigan, the film begins when Cecilia Lisbon (Hanna Hall), one of five girls living with their parents in the affluent Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, tries to kill herself by slashing her wrists. The near-tragedy piques the curiosity of a clique of neighborhood boys, who are schoolmates of the Lisbon sisters. The film then focuses on Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) and her relationship with the local bad-boy dreamboat, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett). After Cecelia’s second suicide attempt succeeds—she impales herself on a fence—the Lisbon parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) lock their daughters in the family’s house to prevent any further tragedy. The plan, as the plural of the film’s title indicates, backfires terribly.
Although her direction lacks focus, often getting mired in such ethereal images as blazing sparklers and floating balloons, the scenes that Coppola gets right have a palpable humanity that makes the image of youths imprisoned by their parents reflect the Gen-X idea of being both disenfranchised from, and repressed by, institutions from which they should rightly expect to draw comfort and support (in this case, the Lisbon parents). In one choice scene, the neighborhood boys communicate with the “jailed” sisters by playing records over the phone as a sort of coded conversation: The boys throw Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me” onto their turntable, so the girls respond with Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again, Naturally,” and so on.
The sequence in which the girls end their lives is played not for horror, but for otherworldliness: In the dead of night, they simply slip from this realm to another one. This scene is a far cry from the martyrdom of Fincher’s suicide imagery and the shock tactics of Anderson’s. Whereas other Gen-X directors portray the voluntary end of a life as a grand gesture or a violent surprise, Coppola sensitively portrays it as girls like the Lisbons might live it: a poetic expression. The mere fact that needless death can be envisioned as a creative act is indicative of how life has been devalued in these modern times, and this poignant connection between fiction and reality makes The Virgin Suicides one of the most disturbing films yet created by a Gen-X director.
Todd Haynes’s Safe is disturbing in a different way because it depicts another means of escaping contemporary society. The daring film follows the travails of a woman named Carol (Julianne Moore), who develops a condition called environmental sickness, victims of which have allergic reactions to car exhaust, cosmetics, television signals, and other mainstays of “civilized” life. In a slow-moving story told from a cold and detached perspective, Haynes shows the various steps that Carol takes to combat her illness: She tries psychology and medication before joining a cult-like collective that lives in a remote area at which the members are free from the toxins that demonize them. The possibility that Carol’s condition is psychosomatic is tested when she develops severe physical symptoms, yet the metaphor that she’s allergic not to her environment but to her antiseptic, materialistic lifestyle comes through loud and clear.
Don’t dream it’s over: Doomed teen Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) enjoys a moment of happiness in Sofia Coppola’s ethereal drama The Virgin Suicides (Paramount Classics).
Once Carol arrives at the collective’s compound, she’s told a story by a fellow environmental-illness sufferer named Claire (Kate McGregor-Stewart). Claire says that when she first fled her old life for this new existence, she hid in her “safe room” until she was able to look herself in the mirror and say “I love you.” In addition to amplifying the idea that Claire, Carol, and their peers are escaping not a physical condition but a psychological one, this scene sets up the ambiguous, haunting ending of Safe: After severing virtually every tie to her past life, and indeed virtually every tie to society in general, Carol retires to her new living quarters, a Spartan dome so bereft of potential toxins that it’s more like a jail cell than a home. After clearing her throat, Carol looks herself in the mirror and forces herself to say “I love you.” This lost soul has learned to appreciate herself, but the cost of her actualization is that she has cleaved huge parts of herself away from her soul. At the end of the movie, this wife and mother is reduced to a tender wound.