Movies and drugs

This is how Netflix founder Reed Hastings conceives his company's role in your life:

For most people, 1 out of 3 movies that you watch you just rave about, you love, it's a goose-bump moment. And we look at ourselves and say we're in an adrenaline-emotion-delivery business, like Starbucks is in the caffeine-delivery business, or R.J. Reynolds in the nicotine-delivery business. We deliver emotional jolts better than a lot of people but still nowhere near what we want to do. If we can bump that to 2 out of 3, you'll just stop going to sports, you'll stop watching TV because every time you watch a movie, you love it.

The "adrenaline-emotion-delivery business." I love that. While a bit clumsily worded, it's a dead-accurate description of what an audience member really wants when she sits down in the theater. It's why religion is so often at war with the movies. We're both peddling the same thing. And we both require a suspension of disbelief to deliver the drug. The difference is that the filmmaker will let you drop your illusions when you exit the theater, whereas God sometimes wants you to go home and kill your children.

I'm not saying I'm better than God. I'm just saying my drugs are cheaper.

At the 1996 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, Jim Jarmusch very briefly introduced Dead Man by saying, "I made this film to be like a drug trip. So...I hope you enjoy it in that spirit." At first I thought he was trying to apologize in advance for the film, but Dead Man really is like a drug trip, and a good one. Mission accomplished.

The best real drug trip I ever had was in the California desert the night we finished principal photography on my first feature film, Hang Your Dog in the Wind. A bunch of us decided that the best way to mark the occasion was to drop acid and spend the night together on the large trampoline that was part of the desert set. So that's what we did.

A lot of things happened that night, not all of them on the trampoline, and, truth be told, probably not all of them really happened. What I remember most is how intense the peaks in the experience were, yet I never wanted them to stop. In the middle of the night, I was sitting on the edge of the trampoline, staring out at the stars, when a car came screaming out of nowhere, kicking up dust, and skidded to a halt in front of me. A member of the production crew, let's say, oh, "Jim," leaned out of the driver's window and yelled to me, "Let's go for a drive!"

I stared at Jim for a while, trying to figure out what he wanted to communicate. I wasn't really understanding the words. But as Jim morphed into a giant cartoon-figure representation of the Grim Reaper, and his arm beckoned me in slow motion, it dawned on me what he was saying: Come with me and you will die. So naturally I jumped into the back of the car. Another tripper joined me, and she and I held hands and screamed "We're going to die! We're going to die!" as the Grim Reaper drove like a madman around the desert, doing his best to make our prediction come true.

Damn, that was fun. And, really, what is a horror movie but the same thing--enjoying the hell out of being scared to death?

It's useful, I think, for filmmakers to remember that they are drug dealers, first and foremost. You can put up all the pretty curtains you want in your heroin den, but if you don't have heroin, the users won't show. Conversely, if you have good heroin, it really doesn't matter how nice the curtains are. In fact, I imagine that many heroin dens aren't furnished very well at all. The smack is the thing.

Too many indie filmmakers, including me, forget that the purpose of a movie is to carry the audience away on something like a drug trip. Neglecting our guests' primal needs, we give them an experience that is more mental than emotional, give them an object to watch and appreciate rather than a world to plunge into and live. Focusing on ourselves instead of the audience, we make our movies depositories for what we think are our clever thoughts and notions.

But that's not what movies are for.

That's what blogs are for.