heroin

2 Highest 2 Lowest

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Over the past few months, I have consistently watched one to two classic episodes of Law & Order every night around dinner time. The ritual started as a fascination with the high cinematic quality of the show’s early seasons, especially in contributions from all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson and maniacally intense screen actor Michael Moriarty. Now that I’m about five seasons deep into the show, though, both of those notable names have departed, and I can no longer tell if I’m impressed with the craft anymore or if I’m just addicted to the storytelling format. There’s a hypnotic satisfaction to the show’s procedural narrative rhythms that soothes something deep in my otherwise anxious brain. It’s so hypnotizing, in fact, that every movie I watch just reads as different flavors of Law & Order now. The last time I went to a repertory screening was to see the grimy 80s crime thriller Night of the Juggler, which just played as an especially trashy episode of vintage Law & Order (with extended chase scenes that would’ve blown the show’s weekly budget). This week, I got to see a double feature of films by Akira Kurosawa and Spike Lee at The Prytania, and I still could only interpret them as variations of Law & Order. 1963’s High and Low? That’s classy Law & Order. Its new straight-to-AppleTV+ remake? That’s Law & Order as early-aughts melodrama, with some occasional twerking in the courthouse. Everything is Law & Order for those with eyes to see (and access to a family member’s Hulu log-in).

I would like to extend myself some grace for mentioning my new Law & Order habit in yet another classic movie review, since High and Low and Night of the Juggler share a similar first-act premise that invites the reference. Both films start with a crazed criminal kidnapping the child of a wealthy businessman they envy & loathe, only to discover that they have abducted the wrong kid by mistake, complicating their chances of collecting the demanded ransom. While Night of the Juggler uses that premise to launch into a Death Wish-style campaign of brute-force vengeance against the scurrying sickos of NYC, High and Low is much more thoughtful & introspective about the wealth disparity issues of Yokohama, Japan. Longtime Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune stars as an executive at a ladies’ shoe manufacturer who’s in the middle of a complex negotiation to take over the company when he’s informed by telephone that his son has been kidnapped. Only, his servile chauffer’s son has been abducted by mistake, which corners Mifune’s hard-edged business prick into a tough moral quandary: whether to use his life’s savings to fund the purchase of his business or to fund the return of an innocent child whose father cannot afford the outrageous ransom demands otherwise. While he struggles to make his choice, his wife, his grieving chauffer, and the detectives assigned to the case look on in horror, amazed that he would consider for a second to choose shoes over the life of a child. He eventually relents.

Like all great Law & Order episodes, High and Low really gets cooking in its second half, after the crime has been fully defined and all that’s left to do is exact punishment. It’s not only satisfying to watch detectives zero in on a prime suspect by listening for evidence of specific streetcar rattles in his recorded phone calls or by staging stake-outs to catch him purchasing heroin in an American GI jazz bar, but the way the investigation’s success is dependent on how public sentiment plays out in the press adds another layer of tension to the on-the-ground drama. As the walls close in around the working-class maniac who takes a wild shot at a corporate goon above his station by fucking with his family, the “high” and “low” signifiers of the title become increasingly literal, recalling the geographically “upper” & “lower” class distinctions of Parasite. The businessman’s invaded home is revealed to be perched at the top of an otherwise economically dire neighborhood, a symbol of financial superiority that visibly mocks the struggling workers below. As cruel as the kidnapper is for threatening the life of a child (and murdering his accomplices with overdoses of pure heroin) while rocking ice-cold mirrored sunglasses, the source of his resentment is vivid, and the businessman’s innocence in their clash is proven to be a matter of law, not of morality. The Law & Order connections also become unignorable in the back half once the detectives start interviewing the kidnapper’s neighbors for clues while they continue to work their manual-labor jobs at fish markets, junk yards, and bus depots. All that’s missing is the show’s iconic reverberated gavel-banging sound effect to punctuate each change in locale.

I wish I could say I got as much out of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest as I got out of the Kurosawa film. His modernization of the classic crime picture is one of those conceptually baffling remakes that only invites you to question its changes to the source material instead of engaging with it as a standalone work. Lee casts Denzel Washington (one of the few working actors who could credibly be said to be on Mifune’s skill level) as a record company executive instead of the more logical hip-hop version of the original character: a sports sneaker magnate. Instead of mistakenly kidnapping the son of an anonymous employee, a disgruntled rapper who couldn’t earn his way on to the exec’s label (A$AP Rocky, holding his own against Washington’s trademark intensity) kidnaps the exec’s godson, as the chauffer in this version is a close family friend (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright). That major change to the central dynamic weakens the tension of the businessman’s moral dilemma, but Lee makes other changes elsewhere that feel more thoughtful & pointed. At the very least, the update from tracking public sentiment in the press to tracking public sentiment in social media memes helps make it apparent why Lee might have thought to remake High and Low in the first place (even if it appears that he hasn’t seen a meme in at least fifteen years). Likewise, when the record exec and his chauffer decide to seek vigilante justice outside of the official, sluggish detectives’ investigation, it opens the movie up to broader social commentary about how true justice is achieved. There’s also some interesting visual play in how Lee relocates the final showdown between businessman & kidnaper on either side of a plexiglass barrier from prison to recording booth, but then he stages that same showdown a second time in a prison cell anyway, so the point of the exercise starts to muddle.

Questioning Spike Lee’s every minor decision does not stop at how Highest 2 Lowest relates to its source material. It’s constant. The movie opens with the worst Broadway showtune I’ve ever heard in my life, with its title populating onscreen in a childlish Toy Story font. The first half of the story, before the kidnapping victim is returned, is scored by an oppressive strings arrangement that makes every familial heart-to-heart play like TV movie melodrama instead of a big-screen thriller from a major auteur. The whole thing reads as laughably phony, especially by the time Washington has one of those melodramatic heart-to-hearts in his teenage son’s bedroom, which is decorated with a Kamala Harris campaign poster. Again, baffling. At the same time, Lee does occasionally convey total awareness of how he’s trolling his audience, pairing Jeffrey Wright’s casting with a full art-gallery collection of Basquiat paintings, drawing attention to his casting of Allstate TV commercial spokesman Dean Winters by nicknaming one of Wright’s handguns “Mayhem”, and having Washington erroneously refer to Law & Order: “SUV” like a true out-of-touch millionaire. The most generous reading of these small, playful touches could link them to Kurosawa’s own jokey details, like staging his kidnapping during a child’s game of Sherriff & Bandit or delegating the police-artist suspect sketches to a child who can barely fingerpaint. Personally, I don’t find any comparisons between the two films to be especially flattering to Lee. He seems to be having fun in Highest 2 Lowest, and I suppose it’s overall worth seeing for his trademark fleeting moments of brilliance, but its lows are much lower than its highs are high. It resembles the modern, corny version of Law & Order I had assumed the show had always been, whereas Kurosawa’s High and Low recalls the classic, refined version I never knew existed until this summer (which is somewhat ironic given Lee’s professional connection to vintage Law & Order cinematographer Ernest Dickerson).

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Arrebato (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the recently restored cult curio Arrebato (1979), a trippy not-quite-horror picture about addiction to movies & heroin.

00:00 New Orleans Abortion Fund

07:05 The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
09:05 Scream (1996)
14:55 Movie of the Month
18:05 Intermission
25:15 The Batman (2022)
32:45 Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)
38:45 Raising Arizona (1987)
46:00 Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2022)

49:50 Arrebato (1979)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Jerry Schatzberg’s Early Career in Fashion, Heroin, and Telling the Truth

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Our current Movie of the Month, the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child, has a very curious relationship with reality. Its entire narrative about a young fashion model (Faye Dunaway) who’s chewed up & spit out by her industry is filtered through its protagonist’s distorted perception of real-life events. There’s a dissociative effect between the audio of Dunaway’s narration and the logic of the events depicted onscreen, to the point where she becomes entirely unreliable for parsing out what’s “true” and what’s fantasy. This is largely because the Patriarchal pressures from her personal & professional life drive her to a complete psychological break, so that she can’t even trust her own recollection of her life’s events. As subjective as her memories are and as experimental as the film can be on a sensory level while expressing that unease with Truth, however, Puzzle of a Downfall Child still somewhat traffics in verisimilitude. The original inspiration for the film was a series of interviews director Jerry Schatzberg recorded on reel to reel tapes with fashion model Anne St. Marie, who he had formerly collaborated with as a photographer. Screenwriter Carol Eastman then reinterpreted those interviews into the semi-fictionalized narrative seen in the film, so it’s difficult to determine how much of the final product is true to St. Marie’s version of the real-life events without studying her recorded interviews for comparison. So, then, we’re left with a film that’s both true & untrue, fact & fiction, with an undeterminable balance between reality & madness.

Although Schatzberg’s follow-up feature, The Panic in Needle Park, didn’t derive from a real-life oral history like his debut, it seemed much more invested in conveying unmitigated Truth in its own narrative. The Panic in Needle Park steps back from the subjective relationship with reality Puzzle of Downfall Child explores by filtering the real world through the distorted perceptions of Anne St. Marie. Featuring a cowriting credit from journalist Joan Didion, The Panic in Needle Park is more of an intellectually-distanced docudrama than its predecessor, an experiment in the cinema verité style of its 1970s era. Its central tragic romance (performed by Kitty Winn & first-time lead Al Pacino with great dramatic weight) is entirely a work of fiction, but the film strives to remain honest to the real-world subculture & locales it depicts in all other ways. The ”Needle Park” of the film’s title is an actual location in NYC, known officially as Sherman Square at Broadway & 72nd street. In the film’s era, that small park had become a notorious haven for heroin addicts, and Schatzberg make a point to stage large portions of its action on-location there, including many real-life junkies & hangabouts among its extras. Released the same year as The French Connection, The Panic in Needle Park is cited as the first mainstream film to document the real-life preparation & injection of heroin on the big screen – trivia that hints to how honest & raw Schatzberg was hoping the film would come across, depicting real-life junkies as they lived. Whereas Puzzle of a Downfall Child experiments in replicating the dreamlike state of a psychological break, The Panic in Needle Park took pride in supposedly presenting the tragedy & grime of the real word as it truly was. Its own narrative was entirely a fictional creation (based mostly on a novel by James Mills), but it somehow seems less affected by subjective interpretation of the truth.

For all practical purposes, The Panic in Needle Park feels less like a shift away from the subjectivity of Puzzle of a Downfall Child for Schatzberg than it does a direct response to the melodramatic youth-culture romance of Love Story, released just a year prior. Love Story’s own depiction of a doomed young couple’s tragic downfall maintains a certain romantic detachment in the way of teen-marketed melodrama. The Panic in Needle Park, by contrast, feels entirely disinterested in appealing to anyone. Its story of a young small-time heroin dealer who falls in love with a homeless woman and ruins her life with addiction and subsequent survival-based sex work is devoid of romantic escapism. It’s brutally honest & relentlessly grim, only truly worth its discomfort if you’re already on the hook for its era of cinema verité morbidness. The attention to detail it pursues in recreating authentic-looking track marks via Flexible Collodian effects and then covering them up with long-sleeve shirts at the height of summer is almost perversely fixated on “reality.” Its title even refers to a real-life phenomenon that occurs within junkie communities: a “panic” of users turning on each other when supply is low. The theft, prostitution, ratting to cops, jailtime, and overdoses that define a junkie scene in the middle of a panic guide the ups & downs of this film’s tragic couple, leaving very little room for joys or victories, no matter how brief. Even the film’s casting of then-unknown Al Pacino in the central role can be read as an attempt at conveying realism in all things, as the much more famous Jim Morrison was initially considered for the role. Even as a fictional romance, The Panic in Needle Park is absolutely fixated on staying true to reality, and its interpretation of reality is that it is nothing but death & misery.

Because Schatzberg seems to equate reality to relentless misery, I can at least report that Puzzle of a Downfall Child’s looser relationship with verisimilitude is somewhat easier to digest than The Panic in Needle Park’s cinema verité morbidness. However, the Faye Dunaway fashion industry drama does often hit equally grim notes in its own tragic downfall story, especially when you keep in mind that it was inspired by a real-life fashion model’s severe struggles with mental illness. I’d also argue that it probably gets to a larger truth about the inner life of woman in that model’s position than The Panic in Needle Park does about the inner lives of heroin addicts, since its immersion in her subjective interpretation of reality is much more personal & distinct that the journalistic distance of that latter work. In either case, Schatzberg’s earliest films both experiment with an interesting balance between truth & fiction, and both likely deserve to be represented more often in critical discussion of the auteur boom of the early 1970s.

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last weeks look at The Neon Demon‘s subversion of its traditional power dynamics.

-Brandon Ledet