Grass Is Greener

I’ll stay away from the political and social ramifications of whether or not Marijuana (I capitalize out of respect) should be legalized here. Although I do think that once Washington is full of baby boomers and no longer haunted by greatest-generation holdovers who think of pot as “jazz cigarettes for the coloreds”, this “Devil’s weed with its roots in hell” will hardly be scary enough for lawmakers to resist legalizing, exploiting, and draining all the fun from.

No, what I want to talk about here is/are/am Movies (again, out of respect).

(These columns will generally vacillate between bits about Movies and bits about Rock and Roll. This is by no means a statement of purpose, or a healthy restriction of topics, but simply a measure of the rather limited scope but fiery focus of my expertise.)

So, as a bonus to you all as first-time readers of this first-time posting, I’ll keep this short, succinct, and, you know, generally lacking in extemporaneous verbiage. What I’m trying to say is that this will be a short piece. You can probably see where it ends even now, without having to scroll down at all. Nice, right? Life has gotten much, much faster these days, and that must be because there’s so much more good stuff out there to experience, right? So we won’t waste a-n-y more time.

I always feel the fourth paragraph is where you want to state your thesis, and I feel one coming on. And here it is: Marijuana is the only drug – and I include coffee and cigarettes, as well as alcohol, under that heading – that does NOT imply something negative about an on-screen character when that on-screen character makes use of it recreationally. It’s the only drug a character can smoke on-screen that does not necessarily point to a fixable-by-the-third-act character flaw.

If a character smokes cigarettes, he can’t be trusted. If he smokes a pipe, he’s a curmudgeon. If a character drinks coffee (in an establishing scene), she probably needs to spend the rest of the movie in Barbados rediscovering her groove. If a character has a headache and takes aspirin, the character just needs to find a good woman or man.

But if a character lights up a joint, that’s the filmmakers letting you know that this character is relaxed, hip, well-balanced, still young-at-heart, etc. Look at AMERICAN BEAUTY, EYES WIDE SHUT, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and on and on. In all these cases, despite the various outcomes, the revelation of the Marijuana in the cabinet is a revelation of humanity, a lack of stuffiness, etc.

Now, sure, at the end of WONDER BOYS, Michael Douglas has to throw his stash away. And we don’t ever want to see young kids smoking or huffing anything. Illegal is illegal, I suppose. But from Charlton Heston in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS to Cheech and Chong, the on-screen use of pot is almost always a signifier that “this guy is on the side of the humans.”