We've come a long way from fried egg anaologies.
Darren Aronofsky's anti-meth ads. If the goal here was to scare the living shit out of anyone who might consider trying crystal meth, mission accomplished. These PSAs are as terrifying as anything Lionsgate has produced over the last decade, and it's mostly because DA and the producers were willing to push the limit of how dark the spots would go. No recovering addicts with the shakes but on their way to better times, no passive adult junkies who should have known better. Here, we've got kids whose one lapse in judgement lands them in intractable hell. Teens who narrate their own demise, seemingly from beyond the grave. We're shown the worst moments involving the least deserving of victims. The spots gain an undeniable force from their unflinching stare.
As opposed to, say, a Lovely Bones-ish scenario where the deceased teen is a victim of some external, malevolent force, here the kids are their own undoing. Yes, the evil exists, but it's in taking the bite of the apple, that conscious decision, that the whole thing unravels. It's a key feature of traditional tragedy, the heroine deciding on her own to take a step that seals her fate.
And no longer is it some authority figure telling us what drugs will do if you try them. Instead it's the victim herself who laments her own fatal mistake, narrating the proceedings as we see exactly how it unfolded. There are no ifs. Here's how it happened, the first-person account. Aronofsky is a very talented guy, and he's smart to have harnassed the power of the victim's testimony (an approach that is also reflected on the MP website in the form of written reflections on meth use written by adolescents who've recovered to some extent). If the era of social networking has taught us anything it's that if you want teens to listen, you send the message via a peer, not via some generic father figure cooking breakfast.
And in hiring DA, the Meth Project seemed to find the exact right person given the director's track record with the aesthetic of drug addiction. Requiem for a Dream stands out as an obvious exporation into the world of addiction and self-destruction, but its a thread that runs through his other studies of psychosis and self-delusion as well. In Black Swan, Natalie Portman's character is crushed beneath the weight of her own sexual repression; in his first feature, Pi, Aronofsky's protagonist falls into madness at one point taking a power drill to his own skull.
And so too is madness at work, here. We see not the standard heroin junkies who lay slumped in a corner, but instead the kinetic ravings of kids who are distilled down to pure fury and panic. These are the manic zombies of 28 Days Later that have given up their lumbering around for unbridled rage that affords them both volume and speed. It's a terrifying effect, seeing aggression as naked and unrestrained as it is. The home invasion spot owes a debt to A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick's cold eye as the mundane turns ultra-violent in an instant.
If there is one danger, here, and this seems to be Aronofsky's Achilles heel as well, it's that the squalor becomes somehow darkly attractive, the agony fetishized in a way that the results in the opposite of the campaign's intention. It's the allure of flirting with severe consequences--how long can you hold onto that lit M-80 before you toss it a safe distance away from you? do you dare go home with that hot, strange guy with a reputation for hurting girls? If you're a teenager in 2013 and you see the fried egg spot, you'll roll your eyes and maybe snort in derision. Maybe you'll head to the kitchen to fix yourself a snack. If you see these spots, is there any chance that you're so taken with the story, so to speak, that somehow, the situation looks bleakly attractive? Jesus, I'd hope not, But there is the sense that the beauty of despair is something that Aronofsky is, on some real level, interested in. He likes it. And he's good at it. He's no clinician, not delivering a hands-off diagnosis. You get the sense, given the surprising number of spots in the campaign and how each of them is so passionately rendered, that DA wants to keep going back there, wants to put differnet clothes on the same corpse, to see how that look works. He enjoys seeing these scenes play out, which if you step back from it for a second, seems just a tiny bit creepy. In the same way that Larry Clark partying with the kids in Kids was creepy. Part of him is not at all repelled by these situations, but is instead excited by them, the cinematic possibilities. And if he get excited, it wouldn't be surprising if some contingent of his audience became excited as well. Here's hoping that I'm overstaing the possibility.
If you feel the need to return to a kinder, gentler time: