Movie 666

White kids want to get stoned: Traffic

Traffic is one of the few mainstream narrative movies in recent years (the Insider is another) that might claim to inform rather than simply distract its audience. Traffic, a remarkable movie about the drug war, is fascinating not for its gunfights (appreciably underplayed), but the basic “real world” conditions and situations it illuminates.

Traffic is faced with a difficult task, depicting a complex subject in a viewing environment where the “reality” of film is no longer trusted (or perhaps desired, for that matter).

Today, Bazin’s dream of a cinema of truth has been all but abandoned completely. Postmodern theory has exposed “reality” as a hollow concept inseparable from “fiction.” At the same time, digital technology with its capacity for verisimilitude has created a crisis of perception where the eyes and brain can no longer be trusted to decipher what is real in the recorded image.

The coup is complete as the notion of “artistic license” has given filmmakers free reign to pick and choose those parts of the world most convenient to drama while disregarding things too mundane or too complex for a sensation seeking audience.

The net result is that anyone watching movies to learn more about the world is in effect confusing themselves about it even more. The world of mountain climbing is hardly exposed in Vertical Limit, space travel is bastardized in Mission to Mars, and the kidnapping industry is simplified in Proof of Life. In terms of providing knowledge, these films with their requisite peaks and valleys, commercial prerogatives, Aristotelian formulas, and creative distortions actually make viewers know less about the subjects they exploit.

To be fair, most cinema is in the business of entertaining, and usually by any means necessary, logic and ethics aside. This is why Traffic appears so remarkable, since it deals with a “real world” issue but in a manner designed to inform rather than simply sell buckets of popcorn.

Traffic combines real life references, location shooting, and non-actor cameos with scenes that are hyper-stylized, overtly symbolic, and sometimes (uncomfortably) didactic. In this fashion, Traffic navigates the troubled battlefield of “fiction” and “reality” — evoking reality with its images, icons, and references while simultaneously exposing what it conjures as the result of the technologically mediated and fiction-producing process of cinema.

Telling are the scenes of Mexico. While these are filmed on location in the streets with everyday people, they are also distorted with acidic hues of gold. In this regard, the basic “reality” of the street scenes is undermined by the blatant “fiction” of the hyperstylized image.

What Traffic seems to imply is that truth is only accurate when its inherent fiction is emphasized. An attempt to cloak this fiction (say, through a documentary style) would only disservice Traffic’s basic task of exploring an actual social situation instead of providing yet other mind numbing hit off the Hollywood crack pipe. Only through an overtly stylized, blatantly opinionized portrait of the drug war can Traffic be trusted in its vision and make a claim to inform rather than exploit its subject.

Traffic also makes a point of challenging many of the worn out cliches of the cop and gangster movie. When Mexican police officer Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) is kidnapped by a drug cartel, the action is understated. There is no dramatic escape as he is handcuffed to a car, driven nonchalantly across the border, forced to dig his own grave and resign to his own death. Likewise, even glitz and glamour actors like Del Toro and Catherine Zeta-Jones appear by Hollywood standards overweight and fatigued throughout the film (Zeta-Jones is actually pregnant), shifting the focus away from the cult of glamour and reinforcing the atmospheres and issues in the film.

Finally, in a film genre that has historically depicted the non-white minority as perpetrators of the drug war, it is in fact the wealthy white characters in Traffic who are regarded as complicitous if not largely responsible for much of the drug problem in the first place (take that, Dirty Harry). Traffic conflates many of the social tropes that have dominated cinema (corrupt Mexicans versus upright Americans, upstanding white citizens versus dope dealing urbanites, cops versus robbers, good versus evil) and conflates them in such as way as to educate rather than retard the viewer.

Related posts:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Hollywood Blockbuster
2. Beyond the Hollywood Domain: the Cinema of the Web
3. Canooing the Matrix
4. Special Delivery for Robinson Crusoe: Dreamworks Sells out Cinema with FedEx Corporate Love Song
5. Alive (2002)

Tags:action, bazin, drama, drugs, mexico, police, reality, traffic

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