This isn’t a typical awful screen essay. It’s really just a thought that’s been rattling around in my head for the past couple of weeks. Fragmentary, probably. Please feel free to disagree. Maybe I’ve ‘created a type of guy’ but for films, and I’m wrong.
The machineries of cinema imply the consumption of drugs (sheer output, big personalities). Its engine has been likened to a drug (flickering lights, distorted time). We’ll take that for granted. But this piece isn’t about cinema-and-drugs in the round, but—rather—asks why we’re seeing a trend (I think, over the past few years) in which drugs (particularly psychedelic-primitivist drugs) have (re)entered broadly-conceived arthouse film, and asks why these treatments of drug-taking could be described as a kind of white collar psilocybinism. I’ll explain.
First, examples. Recently, The Northman by Robert Eggers. Previously, Midsommar by Ari Aster. Also, The Worst Person in the World (by Joachim Trier). The pot nostalgism of Paul Thomas Anderson (say, Liquorice Pizza) is neither here nor there. The white-collar psychedelic experience pertains to a bounded moment within a film, something like a portal or a doorway. That is to say, a ‘liminal’ space in the sense articulated by Arnold van Gennep in their Rites of Passage (1909). It is a process of transition that is cleaved from the wider film, the psychedelia never really bleeding through into the flesh that surrounds it. The trip has a bounded end; making it extraneous. Deus ex machina.
Northman. Amleth is exposed to the corporeal-smoke-inhaling wolf-parade of his father’s shaman. His vision is of gaudy, gobby faces and exaggerated disease (by which I mean, un-ease). Later, Olga boils a broth with a globby-looking mushroom, sending those who consume it into a crazed paroxysm of self-obliteration. Midsommar. The drug (again, liminal) is consumed by Dani and their travelling companions, initiating them into their own deaths. What about The Worst Person in the World? Julie consumes mushrooms in their apartment and she experiences a torturously exaggerated ego-death through which she’s exposed to all the traumas and guilts she’s left behind.
What they share is their boundedness from the surrounding film. These acts provide a kind of liminal transition in the structure of the plot, and in all cases (listed here) really signal toward something bilious and fearsome. Often they lead to death. Drugs are dangerous, and bad. Here is their anxious white-collarism.
But this also exemplifies their boundedness. Narratively, the trip is (often cleanly) excised from the wider film, functioning something like a buffer. There is reality, and there is the psychedelic experience. The drug consumption is treated with great wariness, eager to borrow the aesthetic trappings of the trip itself (an excuse to go off on a wild visual tangent), while signalling a certain disdain for the act itself. Here lies their co-option by (and sublimation to) the neutered aesthetics of silicon valley. Microdosing toward Bethlehem. These are films in which the drug-act takes place in a narratively bounded space (a scene, two scenes, Etc), allowing the filmmaker to pursue a momentary trajectory away from the realism that otherwise/elsewhere dominates their film; as films in which perspective/seeing itself is rarely ever challenged or perturbed. They get to be ordinarily, cleanly beautiful cultural products that also dip their toe (just a little) in the froth of insanity. They microdose.
These bounded scenes allow the filmmaker to extract the aesthetic juice from the psychedelic experience while reinforcing their pearl-clutching anxiety about it (it leads to death, discomfort, Etc). It’s the momentary libidinal release from ordinary ‘realism’ (in The Worst Person in the World, Julie’s body distends, becomes gross, while the background goes pitch-black and weird figures populate her periphery). This looks very appealing when cut into a film’s promotional trailer, giving the illusion of perspectival derangement while treating it in entirely bad faith. It is like a banker with a hidden tattoo, or a bureaucrat with a motorbike. The trappings of the countercultural are absorbed, cleansed, and spat out, recycled through the kidney of bourgeois propriety (e.g., because they enjoy the momentarily trippy visuals while making clear their disdain for the thing that gave rise to them). It is a cinema that is obsessed with its surface, anxious about its reception, and yet desperate to inhale a little of the second-hand smoke of a properly psychedelic transformation.
What does this mean? I’m unsure. It might say something about our particularly anxious cultural moment, where identity is something cleaved to rather than escaped, and where the deranged is embraced only if we can easily claw our way back. This embodies a professionalisation/‘white-collarisation’ of the techniques of avant garde cinema (as art-house film), seeking to retain its broadly PG-appeal and bourgeois respectability while also eating a little of the countercultural cake. It is a cinema of unwitting dissonance, desiring to be perceived as extreme while pulling its punches when it comes to actually scrambling/disorienting the act of perception on which experimental film is really, properly founded.
But it also expresses a poorly sublimated desire (I think) to explore a trajectory away from its own austere respectability, and a certain distrust of its own instruments to achieve the ends of visual difference. Alterity must be induced. The extravagant or simply weird has to be reached through artificial means, rather than the means of the filmmaker’s own optics (and the lens). It has a substance abuse problem. The last thing it ever wants to be accused of.
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really, really enjoyed this - have come back to it more than a few times and will doubtless again - thanks so much for sharing your thinking/writing!