The
sexual liberation, which began in California during
the 1960s, was accompanied by the recreational liberation.
A weed from México brought temporary Nirvana to consumers
and vast wealth to kingpins. In the 1970s, however,
a powder from Colombia gradually replaced marijuana
as the drug of choice among the affluent population.
That drug was cocaine, colloquially known as "blow."
Blow tells us about the American who was
primarily responsible for the shift—George Jung (played
by Johnny Depp). Indeed, thanks to voiceovers throughout
the movie, Blow is Jung’s autobiography,
though the screenplay is based on the book of the same
title by Bruce Porter, with the subtitle How a Small-Town
Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cartel and Lost
It All. When the initial credits roll, we see how
the coca leaf is harvested and processed into white
powder. We next see Jung assuring several men that the
cocaine is of the highest grade, but that scene is repeated
later in the film. The movie then reverts to Jung’s
life as a child in Weymouth, Massachusetts. He observes
his mother Ermine (played by Rachel Griffiths) hysterical
about the minimal income earned his father Fred (played
by Ray Liotta), who served as Jung’s role model and
emotional supporter throughout his life. Nevertheless,
when his father takes momentary bankruptcy philosophically,
Jung resolves that he will earn a lot of money so that
he will never experience economic hardship. In 1968,
while in his early twenties, Jung and his close friend
Tuna (played by Ethan Supliee) move to Manhattan Beach
and meet pretty girls, all stewardesses. One of the
girls, Barbara Buckley (played by Franka Potente), falls
for Jung and introduces him to marijuana. When Jung
realizes that easy money could be made by selling the
weed around town, Barbara introduces him to the local
supplier, foppish Derek Foreal (played by Paul Reubens),
who is too busy with the world’s first male hair salon
to sell the stuff. Jung and Tuna, however, have no job,
so they have the time to be drug pushers, and they are
extremely successful. Next, an old friend, Kevin Dulli
(played by Max Perlich), arrives on vacation from Massachusetts.
On learning about Jung’s lucrative business, he offers
to be the New England distributor, pointing out that
the offspring of the rich who attend small colleges
near Weymouth have a lot of spending money but nothing
much to buy. Stewardess Barbara and her friends offer
to serve as mules from Los Angeles to Boston, and the
business booms. Jung realizes that he can cut out the
middle man (Derek) by buying directly from the source
in México, so he charters an airplane, meets a grower,
and soon profits soar. In due course, however, Jung
is arrested, sent to a prison that is a school for crime,
and meets Diego Delgado (played by Jordi Mollà), who
is from Colombia. Upon release from prison, Delgado
introduces Jung to Pablo Escobar (played by Cliff Curtis)
in Medallín, and Jung becomes the principal supplier
of the new drug to the United States, depositing his
millions into Panamanian bank accounts, which are later
expropriated by Manuel Noriega. After various doublecrosses,
he is again arrested, skips bail, but is eventually
betrayed by friends in a sting operation, and is imprisoned
for a much longer sentence than before. Credits at the
end say that he will be released from Otisville Penitentiary
in 2015, if he lives that long; he appears senile in
the final frames of the film. Interlaced with the story
about Jung’s criminal activities is a depiction of his
human qualities—his love for his parents; his love for
his wife Barbara, who dies of cancer, presumably from
too much snorting; his romance with golddigging Mirtha
(played by Penélope Cruz): and his steadfast affection
for his daughter. Directed by Ted Demme, the ying-yang
portrayal shows that Jung was in many ways a product
of his upbringing, a child of the 1960s, and a victim
of the effort to criminalize substances that are sold
only because Americans want to buy them. Blow
provides an in-depth look at how the drug industry operates
upstream (production, processing, transporting). For
a look at the downstream drug trade, of course, we already
have Traffic
(2000). MH
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Blow
by Bruce Porter
The
up-your-nose, in-your-face life of George Jung, the
high-school football star from small-town USA who became
the American linchpin of the Colombian cocaine connection.
Relying on extensive interviews with Jung and other
key figures, Porter (Journalism/Brooklyn College) recounts
a sleigh- ride-to-hell story of how 60's hippie innocence
turned into 80's megadepravity.
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