I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #50 - Drugstore Cowboy (1989, dir. Gus Van Sant)

For several days after I first saw Drugstore Cowboy I was high with fantasies about being a junkie. Which is weird because on the surface it’s a bleak film about addiction: Matt Dillon plays a dude named Bob who runs a little two-couple crew that robs pharmacies across the Pacific Northwest and shoots their loot into their veins. It’s 1971, cloudy pretty much all the time, and during the first act the protagonists stumble into a bit of bad luck that gets worse and worse. But still the film is beautiful, and when it ends I want to escape back into it and live it. It’s Gus Van Sant’s second film, but his first to reach a real audience, and it showcases his style as well as anything else he’s ever made; he’s one of the best of the slow, subtle story tellers, and his cinematography is art gallery caliber. What got me jonesing after Drugstore Cowboy was how he zooms in on the whole ritual aspect of addiction, so close that at times the screen fills with nothing but the tip of a needle drawing liquid out of a spoon, or a streak of blood coiling into the chamber of a syringe, or the sizzling end of a cigarette, all of these edited together in rapid-fire succession. It’s just plain gorgeous, and seductive.

            There are also super-high/dream sequences where cows and hats and bubbles float across the screen and Matt Dillon’s face, and there are time lapses of clouds and the moon. But it’s not a pro-drug movie any more than an anti-drug one. The story is too cool and detached to take a moral stance one way or the other. Bob is a philosophical junkie with a talent for spinning far-out aphorisms like, “You can buck the system but you can't buck the dark forces that lie hidden beneath the surface,” and, “Most people don't know how they're gonna feel from one moment to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.” He sees the world as a game of chance, and the druggie adventures form an allegory for an indifferent universe where good forces and bad forces rule in equal degree, where good and bad are interchangeable depending on the angle from which they’re viewed. He’s a great character, and the script and the pacing of the plot make for a contemplative viewing experience that, like the beauty of the images and the editing, leaves you wanting to come back for more.

            The acting? It’s not bad, but it’s not the movie’s strong suit. Dillon is good, but not at the level of skill he’s brought to other roles. He has moments, usually when he’s alone on screen in stoned-out reverie. But his co-star, Kelly Lynch, never seems like quite the right match for her role as an addict, and she seems to throw him off his game. The supporting roles, on the other hand, are quite well-acted, especially the character of Nadine, a young, innocent-looking girl played by Heather Graham in one of her earliest film parts. And then there’s William S. Burroughs, who appears late in the film as an aging junkie priest. He’s just great, with his weird, high-pitched, raspy voice, and his bony, hunched-over back. He brings the specter of religion into the story’s mix, and subtly pushes the story beyond the high and lows of a drug life to something that represents life itself. So maybe that’s why the movie left me craving something I’ve never even tried. It’s not the pharmaceuticals and needles I wanted, but rather that something, as Bob said, that people reach for “Something to relieve the pressures of their everyday life, like having to tie their shoes.”

            - Joe Miller

I'd Love to Turn You On #55 - "Good Old Boys"

Not long after I moved to Georgia I was out for lunch with a few of my new colleagues when the name Lester Maddox came up, and immediately my mind went, “Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show with some smart-ass New York Jew. And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox. And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox, too.” I didn’t know anything about Maddox except those lines. They’re the opening verses of “Rednecks,” the first track on Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, one of the best singer-songwriter albums of all time. Turns out Maddox was governor of Georgia in the 70s. When he campaigned, he carried around an ax handle and he bragged about how he swung it at blacks to keep them out of the restaurant he owned. In the song, Newman sings, “He may be a fool but he’s our fool. If they think they’re better than us they’re wrong. So I went to the park and I took some paper along, and that’s where I wrote this song.”

I couldn’t get the song out of my head when I first moved down here. It has so many great lines. “We talk real funny down here. We drink too much. We laugh too loud. We’re too dumb to make it in no Northern town.” And, “College boys from LSU. Went in dumb, come out dumb, too. Hustling around Atlanta in their alligator shoes. Getting drunk on the weekend at the barbecue.” And all these little Southern vignettes are punctuated with (forgive me): “We’re keeping the niggers down.” And just when you’re about to give up on the song, despite its lovely melody, because it’s just too obnoxious, Newman sings, “Now your Northern nigger’s a negro. You see, he’s got his dignity. Down here we’re too ignorant to realize, the North has set the nigger free. Yes, he’s free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City, he’s free to be put in a cage in the Southside of Chicago, and the Westside.” And so on through Cleveland and East St. Louis and San Francisco and Boston: “They’re gathering up from miles around, keeping the niggers down.” And then the chorus again, as punch line: “We’re rednecks. We’re rednecks. We’re keeping the niggers down.” Ha ha. Joke’s on, well, all of us.

You wouldn’t know it from his cartoon soundtracks, but Newman is one edgy bastard. “Rednecks” treads right on the razor edge of offensiveness but remains on the good side because it’s smart, and it’s true. It’s especially ballsy for when it came out – in 1974, when the nation was turning hard toward the left and away from centuries in which overt racism was pretty much an acceptable thing. And it sounds great. It’s just a plain, old song, sung in the simple hum-along style of all good, old songs. The album is full of them, most all of them related in some way to the South. Every number is a different character: the factory worker from Birmingham with a big, black dog named Dan in his backyard; the forlorn drunk who needs a whole lot of medicine to pretend like he’s somebody else; the kingpin politico who may be corrupt but he sure gets things done; the beauty whose dad was a midget, mom was a whore and granddad was a newsboy till he was 84. Some of the songs are slow and beautiful, some got a little more kick to them, but they’re all easy on the ears, though never syrupy and sentimental. A few are achingly beautiful. One that always gets me is “Louisiana 1927.”  It’s a ballad about a terrible storm that rolled in from the North and made the river rise until there were six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. If you listen to it in the context of the time in which it was released, it comes across as a metaphor for change in the South. But now it’s hard not to hear it as prescient, with its chorus, “Louisiana, Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away,” hard not to think of Katrina and all the neighborhoods in New Orleans that remain vacant today. Great records are timeless in that way, and this one’s truly one of the best.

---Joe Miller

I'd Love To Turn You On - At the Movies #34 - Joe (1970, dir. John G. Avildsen)

The first thing the namesake character for the 1970 cult classic Joe says when he appears on screen is the N-word. He’s sitting in a blue-collar bar somewhere in New York ranting about the state of the world -- blacks and black-loving hippies are messing up the country and making it hard for a workingman to get by. He’s supposed to be a parody/cultural-critique character, sort of a proto Archie Bunker, someone for us all to laugh at or recoil from, but he caused a sensation when the movie first appeared on the silver screen. Men would watch it and stand up from their seats, shake their fists and shout along. Which is scary, because Joe does a little hunting by the time the final credits scroll through, and it’s not deer he aims his rifle at.

This legend is part of what elevated the flick to cult status and inspired me to rent it from the video store in the first place. It looked like an artifact of bygone craziness, and it is, but what keeps me coming back to it is its profound darkness and weirdness. In addition to Joe’s rants (which are hilarious, if you can get past the racism, because they’re so dumb and impassioned), you’ve got: the surliest hippie boys who’ve ever graced the big screen – scowling, greasy-long-haired guys who devour every drug in reach, lie and steal and treat their women like shit; women who take three measly hits off a joint and get so high they rip off all their clothes and jump on the nearest guy; and a grey-haired corporate exec who unwittingly murders hippies and says really creepy things while he’s peeing at urinals. Ultimately they all converge around a hookah for an inter-generational love fest that goes horribly wrong. All along the way the plot is punched up with low-budget psychedelic effects. They’re like a cross between the light shows they used to have behind bands in the late sixties and the superimposition-heavy dream sequences from mid-seventies soap operas. It sounds horrible, but it’s quite lovely to look at, like an outrageously and wonderfully garish find at a thrift store. Plus it’s Susan Sarandon’s first role (and yes she gets naked). 

All told, this mélange of gloomy oddness paints a telling portrait of that period in time in a way that only Hollywood can. There’s something about the way the movie industry tackles big social trends and issues and crams them into their violence-loving formulas that makes for a kind of apropos bleakness that would be unbearable were it not for all the hilarious schlockiness. Then again, some people took this particular piece of pop-culture pertinence as a rallying cry and seized the racist, hippy-hating Joe as a hero. And that makes Joe all the more fascinating. It’s one of those cases where Hollywood puts out something that seems totally phony and punched up with gratuitous sex and violence. Yet it’s on point for the way a lot of people in country are feeling. To me, that makes the film as valid a depiction of the late 60s/early 70s as Woodstock or Zabriskie Point or any of the other classics we associate with that period. It’s just another side of a many-sided story.


-Joe Miller