From Chaplin to Charlie--cocaine, Hollywood and the movies

Abstract

Throughout the history of cinema, the use of drugs such as opiates and marijuana has been consistently condemned or has passed through distinct phases from opprobrium to celebration. But because of both its image and functionality within the film industry, the framing of cocaine use has been more ambivalent and fluctuating. The period prior to World War II saw cocaine use portrayed both in comic situations and in so-called exploitation films which more closely mirrored sensational press coverage where cocaine was viewed as the 'gateway' drug to opiates. Cocaine largely disappeared from the recreational drugs scene until the late 1960s. Since then, films as diverse as Easy Rider (1969), Annie Hall (1977), Scarface (1983) and Clean and Sober (1988) have framed cocaine use and dealing variously as comic, heroic, glamorous, as well as damaging. This contrasts with crack cocaine in the context of black cinema in the 1980s and 1990s where settings of violence and death predominate. With the cocaine cartels as the focus, Traffic (2000) questions for the first time in a Hollywood movie, the efficacy of the 'war on drugs' while the cocaine trafficking film Blow (2001) returns to a more traditional Hollywood view of vice punished.