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April J. Antoniou

Something Beautiful Must Break: A Confluence of Feminist Theoryand Addiction Studies in Film

“I only do this because I'm having fun. The day I stop having fun, I'll just

walk away” -Heath Ledger

In the twentieth century, the US witnessed a series of

narratives on addiction, each with a particular political

construction and cultural representation. Concepts of addiction

have continued to change because sociocultural transformations

never cease. However, the intersection of gender and addiction

that occurs in cinematic representation is something that has not

changed over time. This essay will analyze two heroin-based

addiction movies; Scott Kalvert’s The Basketball Diaries (1995) and

Neil Armfield’s Candy (2006). These films negotiate a relationship

between the syntax of addiction narrative as constructed in film,

and the semantic representation of an addict…that is to say, what

does it mean to be an addict? Signifiers are placed in these film

to determine the meaning of the word ‘addict,’ which can only be

defined and understood through gendered terms. This follows the

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cinematic principle of the ‘male gaze’ assumed by the viewer

which arranges women as male objects on screen, as opposed to

being the subject of their own narrative discourse. Mulvey argues

that “women’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the

bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and

cannot transcend it” (1972). Women can only be appreciated in

relation to male ideology. If men are not threatened by female

castration, then they are envious of the womb and are looking for

ways to return to that primal environment. Thus, when women are

portrayed in social problem narratives like that of addiction,

the female body becomes a narrative site for the projection of

trauma and suffering and remains fixed there. The trope of such

films is self-evident. In their natural state (as defined by

men), women are ‘pure.’ When women become addicts, they rebel

against their pure natural state - their virtue is compromised.

It is this rebellion that must be signified in gendered terms to

be a) the cause of their addiction, as well as b) the catalyst of

their suffering. When their virtue is compromised, they suffer

greatly and are thus in need of a patriarchal savior. When the

addict is a male, the only way to project this trauma onto him is

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through his emasculation. In other words, the man must be

castrated so that a proper female canvas can be revealed, on

which this fixed image of suffering can then be painted. He will

be denied the womb. In the social problem film defined by

Classical Hollywood Cinema, prostitution then, for both men and

women, becomes the terminal signifier of society’s semantic

understanding of the heroin addict.

Early images of Prostitution

The image of an addict has been shaped by time and changing

social philosophies. In the late nineteenth century, the typical

addict was an older middle class woman who was prescribed various

drugs, especially opiates, to mitigate the effects of “female

troubles,” or to treat various mental and physical illnesses.

Kiere elaborates, “As a result of this thirty-year association of

women with addiction, both users and observers saw drug addiction

as something feminine as late as the 1930s, long after men had

become the majority of users” (1998). This is a sharp contrast to

the notion of the hustling junkies depicted in modern cinema. The

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image of the junkie has changed as our definition of “the addict”

has shifted through the twenty-first century. However, the image

of an addict, however it is understood by society, continues to

be represented as, if not a candid female problem, then most

certainly a feminized affliction. Keire observes that “the

continued cultural association of addiction with femininity

shaped the perception of addiction throughout society, and

influenced the decision of men to incorporate drug use into their

rejection of conventional male gender roles.” Thus, the early,

cultural formation of an addict was specific. It centered on

prostitutes who took heroin because they were constitutionally

and morally weak, suffering mentally as a result of their

demeaning occupations. The lowest form of the social ladder has

continued to be that of a prostitute, even during the periods of

time when this was an “accepted” legal occupation. Kiere

continues

It was in the face of these continuities – opium smoking by prostitutes, gamblers and entertainers – andchanges – heroin and cocaine use within the growing youth culture – that members of the sporting class and outside observers interpreted the new patterns of drug use. They did so by drawing on, but altering, an older cultural reference: the femininity of drug use.

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For example, in Basketball Diaries, this negative view of female

prostitution is solidified early in the film. We first see the

addict, Diane, at night. Clearly under the influence, she is

stumbling around, slurring, dressed in cliché black leather with

red lipstick sloppily painted on her lips. She is not attractive.

She approaches the boys and attempts to sell herself for fifteen

dollars. Jim demeans her by suggesting that the boys all take a

turn with her. Diane looks at the boys, doing the math in her

head. Jim then dumps a bag of pretzels on her head, further

humiliating her. In this same scene, Mickey points out that

across the street, Pedro’s mom is also prostituting herself. The

women are cheap, dirty and of low-morality. They do not appear to

be conflicted about selling themselves in dirty streets to men of

any age. This relates to the analogy of woman existing as a male

object on screen: According to Mulvey, in film, this still image

of woman and how she is represented only serves a purpose as a

“bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Freud associated

scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them

to a controlling and curious gaze. This is certainly true for Jim

and his friends in Basketball Diaries. For example, the pleasure of

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scopophilia is solidified in the beginning of the film in which

Jim gains pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual

stimulation through site. This happens when Jim shows Bobby the

pictures of a woman having sex with a donkey, and when he takes

Bobby and pays to view the female dancer in the box. While

Mulvey’s thesis is brutal and unforgiving towards the unconscious

male manipulation of the female image, the point has merit.

Cinema is wonderful at skillfully representing visual pleasure by

steading its gaze on the female body. All four early images of

women in this film, aside from Jim’s mother (who is arguably

marginalized in the film), constitute women who perform various

sexually explicit acts for money. Kiere articulates this early

move to correlate prostitution with drug use that, once fixed,

has remained in place through contemporary cinema, “With

prostitutes, the association of addiction with women was literal

and direct. Prostitutes were women and prostitutes took drugs.” A

national conscious interpreted this dependence as proof that

prostitutes found their work distasteful - a sign of extremes to

which women had to go to overcome their innate virtue and purity.

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Purity, Pleasure, and the Status Quo

The images of what women represent are very different in

Candy. The film Candy opens with Candy dressed in a beautiful

spring-time sun dress. Children move about them in a circle,

swirling and excited to get to their place in the ride. Candy

reaches for Dan’s hand and pulls him to their spot in the ride.

The ride is a zero gravity ride. As the ride reaches top speed,

the floor bottoms out and the riders are held there by force. At

this moment, Dan and Candy are in fetal positions, Dan nuzzled

into Candy’s neck. Dan’s voiceover can be heard as the two remain

fixed in a world that spins around them: “When I first met Candy

those were like the days of juice, when everything is bountiful.

Birds filled the sky. A great kindness flowed through us.” In

Candy, the natural relationship between a man and a woman is

pure. It is authentic and natural, like birds in the sky or the

force of gravity. In Basketball Diaries, Jim’s virtue and purity stem

from his masculinity. In this film Jim has no romantic love

interest. In contrast to the premise in Candy, this film differs

is that it depicts Jim’s virtue as a function of his healthy

lifestyle around sports. The boys’ disregard for rules (breaking

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Swifty’s swearing rules and stealing) is almost portrayed as

light-hearted fun, things that coming-of-age boys do.

So far in both Candy and Basketball Diaries, the users are trying

to present a theme that this altered state induced by the heroin

provides intense pleasure. In Candy, the interactions in the

first portion of the film entitled “heaven” are based on the

visual representations of love and the sharing of space between

two people. They always use together. For Jim, the visual

pleasure he experienced through the visual objectification of

women is replaced by the pleasure of heroin. At 38.25, Jim asks

the viewer “Did I ever tell you about the first time I did

heroin? It was like a long heat wave through my body.” This

reference to warmth and heat signify this desire to return to the

female womb, made even more significant by Jim’s reference to

fluid: “Any ache or pain or sadness or guilty feeling was

completely flushed out.” However, all these relationships are

what J. Lacan will define as Imaginary and will serve as the

catalyst in which heroin addiction can take hold. In fact, their

relationships occur in situations which are primarily

narcissistic. This is visualized in the scene where Candy creates

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the painting that she calls “An afternoon of extravagant

delight.” She literally paints this ideology of pleasure and

presents it to Dan. However, when using, one's high is one's own

high. The act of using, even in the presence of others, and even

under pretenses of sharing or being a part of a collective

experience, is a solitary act.

In Candy, there are multiple scenes in which water or

swimming is pictured onscreen while Dan holds agency. First is

the bathtub scene in which Candy overdoses. In this scene, Dan is

the active savior. Second is the following scene, after the

overdose, when there is a jump cut to a large pool of water. Dan

is speaking, but Candy is the one we see swimming underwater. We

hear him speak: “The future was a thing that gleamed, the present

was so very, very good. I wasn’t trying to ruin Candy’s life, I

was trying to make mine better.” Interesting to note is that in

this scene, where the visual markers of water and swimming

pertain to the womb, Candy is absent as the subject and has no

voice in the discourse of the narrative. However, she is a

necessary and conspicuous visual presence to serve as a vehicle

for Dan’s happiness. Even the title of the film, Candy, is a

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double entendre. Candy is the object in both terms, as the drug

and the object of desire. Both Jim, Dan and Candy are in their

natural states: Jim as a young male adult concerned with sports

and objectifying women through sight, Dan as narrator, using

Candy to make his life better, and Candy as a non-vocal, passive

and willing participant in Dan’s story.

Gender Rebellion as a Sign of Addiction

These notions of purity cannot be upheld for any of our

heroin users once they become addicts. This shift from idealized,

romantic social rebellion or, in Jims case, the inability to

internalize trauma, to their inevitable addiction is represented

by their refusal to act in a way that is dictated by socially

constructed, deeply gendered roles. Now that these films are

grounded in their representations of purity and pleasure, it

becomes necessary to then undermine these notions through male

emasculation. It is notable how the how the very things that are

constructed and visually analogous to virtue in women serve to

emasculate the male characters in these two films. Candy is pure

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and virtuous when she expresses herself artistically, when she is

creating art in the form of her paintings. Dan is not allowed to

be artistic. In the scene at Candy’s parents’ house, Dan is put

in the male position of asking her father for money. Candy’s

parents, particularly Candy’s father, feels it is a man’s job to

take care and provide for her. He supports Candy’s artistic

endeavors but sees Danny’s role quite different. After handing

over the money, he says “The question is not the money, the

question is the future of my daughter…the question is you. When

are you going to do something?” Dan responds “I have some ideas.

I sent some of my poems into heat magazine.” The father, Mr.

Wyatt, doesn’t take Danny’s poetry seriously as it is not a manly

way to provide. Dan has been designated as a person whose

identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions

of male or female gender roles, but has been made to move between

them. He had been transgendered. Mr. Wyatt then offers a final

condescending, emasculating blow: “You’re not a teenager anymore,

you know that, don’t you?”

As an addict, Candy is not capable of being a ‘real women’

either. In the same scene that Dan asks Mr. Wyatt for money, the

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viewer witnesses the tension between Candy and her mother as

Candy tries to whip cream. The mother comes rushing into the

kitchen, chastising Candy for not using the hand blender the

right way. Her mother says “if you don’t know the inner workings

of the machine…” this is a direct reference to the institutions

of marriage and homemaking as a women’s role. The reference to

the “workings of the machine” is a reference to the institutions

and socially constructed roles we must assume of we are to be a

part of the machine. When people are rebelling against the norms

of society (to do heroin and not be a housewife, or to be a

contemporary male poet, for example), this is represented in film

as an opposition to gendered roles. These are roles created by a

patriarchal society and upheld by women themselves.

Jim is emasculated as a poet when the boys read his notebook

and make fun of him. Although Jim and Danny are both poets, their

relation to women as castrating objects is different. When Jim

does speed for the first time, it is because a girl, Winky, tells

him he will fuck like Superman. The drug use is directly allied

to his masculinity. The girl is slutty and pressures him into

sex, chiding him “What are you waiting for?” In this scenario Jim

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is the innocent one and it is the girl who is responsible for

removing his purity by connecting drug use to his ability to

perform sexually. Further emasculating trauma comes in the form

of Bobby’s death, which threatens Jim’s endurance, and when

Swifty solicits Jim for sex as his drug use becomes apparent. At

45:37, the coach pulls out money and offers it to Jim, saying

“Don’t act surprised,” and “Do we understand each other…just let

me do it.” It is important that Swifty is paying to do it, he

wants to put Jim in the feminized position of the one “receiving”

pleasure. When Jim declines the monetary exchange, Swifty tells

Jim to keep the money as a bribe to remain quiet. Another

critical emasculation occurs later when Jim takes drugs and his

ability to “perform” during the basketball game is diminished.

Referring back to Kiere’s earlier statement that “the continued

cultural association of addiction with femininity…influenced the

decision of men to incorporate drug use into their rejection of

conventional male gender roles.” With Dan, his relationship to

women was not what emasculated him, it was his relationship to

Candy as a pimp, specifically, and as a heroin user.

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At first there was a purity to Jim and Candy. That purity

has been undermined by each character’s inability to conform to

their gender roles as they transition from casual users to fully-

entrenched addicts. In defense of the addict (i.e. in a “social

problem” film), there must be great suffering. Film must create

an appropriate vision of such suffering if there is to be any

patriarchal "saving." As the films continue their narrative

courses, the tension between instinctual drives and self-

preservation is polarized in terms of pleasure. In and of

themselves, they have no signification. The act of sex alone has

no significance. Instead, these acts of pleasure must be attached

to an idealism. When, as Cui writes, the “female sexuality or the

sensuality of the female body is replaced with a genderless and

sexless symbol that signifies the sociopolitical collectivity”

(2003), this move to a pleasureless form of self-preservation

takes on a greater meaning. The move from the syntactic addiction

discourse begins to take on semantic meaning. J. Lacan

distinguishes the Symbolic from the Imaginary and the Real. As

previously mentioned, the Imaginary relationship with the other

occurs in a dual situation which is primarily narcissistic. The

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Symbolic element is one that intervenes to break up an Imaginary

relationship from which there is no way out" (Penley, 1988). The

ultimate symbol of these character’s addictions, the act that

will lead to the most suffering from which there is no way out, is the

act of prostitution. This takes what little agency Jim and Candy

have left and subverts their power to a male hegemony.

Rock Bottom

In Basketball Diaries, Jim’s bottom comes not from his overdose

and near death, as one would expect. Instead, it begins when Jim

is forced to confront the scopophilia he embraced at the

beginning of the film. He willingly submits when he is forced by

his addiction to become the consenting object in an act of

prostitution. The pleasure Jim experienced through the

objectification of women has been subverted. Although Jim has no

female love interests in the film, and we have seen earlier

evidence of his emasculation, this scene is enough to fully

sterilize him – there is no lower Jim can go now that he has been

placed in the female image as “bearer of meaning.” Jim meets a

clean and sober Diane on the street and begs her for change. She

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tricks him into thinking she is going to give him some dope.

Instead, she throws change on the ground and, as she walks away

from him, yells at him “Who’s desperate…who’s the whore now?” Jim

yells at her “You’re still a whore to me...I know you!” Jim tries

to align with his sadistic voyeurism to gain control. He tries to

find pleasure in ascertaining guilt to Diane, in a feeble attempt

to save his masculinity, by subjecting the guilty Diane to verbal

punishment. Jim must hold on to that belief because that is the

only way in which he can still hold power over her as an object.

Jim’s prostitution scene happens immediately after he meets

Diane on the street. At 1:21:46, Jim is standing next to a well-

dressed man in the subway in front of a sign labelled “men.” Jim

is smoking, looking down at the man who is counting out money.

Jim takes the money and nods. Money in hand, Jim leads the man

into the bathroom where there appears to be a tall skinny Latina

woman in a tight black dress leaning up against the wall,

whipping her curly dark hair. Upon closer inspection it is a man,

a transsexual. Or perhaps he is a cross-dresser. The degree of

specificity here is not as important as the visual representation

of the idea of gender confusion, and the movement between

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personalities as Jim consciously decides to change his gender

behavior from primarily masculine (in the preceding scene with

Diane) to primarily feminine. The movement is very fast. There

are two policemen, or security guards wearing hats, that are

looking at the cross-dresser. These men of authority glance at

Jim and the older man who is following him, but do not intervene.

One would expect men in a role of authority to intercede on a

youth’s behalf, but upon close (and quick) inspection, one of the

cops is holding onto the other’s waist and they are leaning in to

kiss. It is immediately understood that they will not help, since

they too have been emasculated, depicted as homosexuals. Jim and

the man pass two rough looking Hispanic men with tattoos, one of

the men is holding something to the other man’s nose to sniff -

clearly this is a seedy bathroom. Jim and the man enter the stall

painted green and do not bother to close the door. The older man

caresses Jim’s face and kisses him but when the man moves to kiss

Jim on the lips, Jim pushes the old man away. The man slides

downward out of frame, holding on to Jim’s hips. The shot remains

on Jim’s upper body and face as this sexual encounter continues.

He looks down to the man and then winces like he is in pain,

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clamping his eyes shut tight. There is old dried blood around his

collar. Jim braces himself, holding on to the walls on either

side of him. He opens his eyes and there is a close up shot of

his face. We cut to Jim’s POV as he is looking out of the stall.

The old basketball coach comes into the shot from the right. It

looks like Swifty is watching, trying figure out what he is

seeing, smacking his gum slowly. The male gaze has been realized

with Jim as the object. The camera reverses back to an extreme

close up of Jim’s face as he wipes his eyes, as if Jim is trying

to rub this very thought out of his head. Jim is breathing hard

while a disorienting sound plays in the background. A reverse cut

back to the coach shows him entering the stall and shaking his

head no, as if he is disappointed in Jim. Swifty takes the yellow

wad of gum out of his mouth, and then laughs at Jim maniacally.

Swifty puts the wad of gum back in his mouth and the camera pulls

back to a medium shot of Jim as his eyes roll back into his head.

Jim’s orgasm completes this transformation into the feminine

realm. Jim looks down at the man and pushes him off, puts his

beanie back on his head, and walks toward the exit. The bathroom

looks normal as Jim leaves. It looks like the other gay men with

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shaved heads are smoking and talking, no longer intimidating, and

the policemen are further away as well, not touching, like

nothing seedy has just taken place. Jim runs out of the frame.

The single prostitution scene in Basketball Diaries stands

in contrast to the sequence of prostitution scenes in Candy.

However, the first scene in which Candy sells herself is

important in this discussion of visual elements of suffering in

film. Dan and Candy are parked on the street opposite from a

yellow pawn shop of sorts (16:58). She is twisting her ring that

belonged to her nana, clearly distressed at the prospect of

selling it. Dan tells her “We’ll get it back.” Candy tries to

sell her art supplies but comes back and drops everything on the

seat, telling Dan that the man gave her $25.00 for the ring but

he doesn’t want the paints. Candy doesn’t get in the car. Instead

she remains outside the car, higher than Dan. She looks directly

at Dan with a serious expression and tells him that she’ll be

back because the shop owner said “maybe we can work something

out.” Candy enters the store and the shop owner - a fat, older

white man with a pot belly and a bulbous nose, looks left, then

right, and closes the door, switching the sign from ‘open’ to

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‘closed.’ Danny looks on from the car as the image slowly pans

around to view him. From the outside he is slowly covered, barely

seen through the dirty windshield. He says nothing but the look

on his face shows that he is aware that they have crossed a line

or, rather, that they have closed a door. The noise from the

street grows louder and then cuts off immediately as Candy enters

the vehicle and slams the car door. She looks straight ahead and

says “let’s go.” Danny looks at her with wrinkled brows and she

continues to look straight ahead. Candy says, matter-of-fact,

“Yes, I fucked him. 50 bucks. He stank,” to which Danny responds

“Are you okay?” Candy doesn’t respond. Danny whimpers “I’m

sorry.” Still looking ahead, Candy simply replies “Don’t be.”

The “Exchange”

The ultimate suffering for all these characters is marked by

this submission into an exchange for money fueled by the desire

to obtain drugs. According to Penley, women function as a

signifier in a circuit of exchange where the values have been

fixed by a patriarchal structure (1988). This certainly cannot

be overlooked in heroin addiction movies that almost always

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constitute the exchange of sex, both by men and women, to men.

Examples of this include Julian in Less than Zero, Jim in Basketball

Diaries, Candy in Candy, and Helen in The Panic in Needle Park. The idea

of woman as a sign is related directly and explicitly to the

circulation of money in these films. This circulation of money

and its abstraction as a sign in a system of exchange serves as a

mirror image for woman as a sign in a system of exchange.

Although constructed as an exchange, Candy has, with her

acts of prostitution, sold her virtue and hit ‘rock bottom.’ This

is observed when Candy no longer paints. In addition, we no

longer see Candy’s nakedness portrayed after this in any

beautiful way. In fact, the only time we see her, partially nude,

is the morning when they are evicted from their home. At 36:00,

business man sits on a chair in their apartment, asking for the

back rent that they owe, to which Candy replies, “Listen Phillip,

we’re junkies. I’m a hooker. He’s hopeless. Right now things are

very complicated. We haven’t got any money.” Candy’s inability to

reconcile her prostitution with her life obstructs her ability to

find pleasure in the things that used to make her happy,

including sex with Dan and painting. She confirms this by

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instigating a fight with Dan, asking him at 29:35, “Dan have you

noticed the more I work, the less I paint?”

Dan’s role in Candy is complicated and ambiguous. Upon a

first viewing Dan might be seen as a pimp. He allows Candy to

sell herself to support their drug habits. With pimps and

prostitutes alike, their drug use is a constant sign of how far

they had fallen, but for prostitutes it reinforces a

victimization that is already consistent with gender roles in

mainstream society. Women are supposed to be helpless, ailing,

and even addicted. Kiere elucidates the problem of Dan’s

inability to go out and earn money: “The pimps' addiction,

however, [is] an affront to American masculinity, for as Surgeon

General H. S. Cumming asserted in 1925, ‘opium makes a man

effeminate.’” There is a problem with the semantic representation

of the prostitute, as it could be argued that, with this role

inversion, it is now the woman who is leaving the house, earning

the money, and providing for the man. In these addiction films

the passive recipients Candy and Jim show agency though the

direct act of selling their bodies seems to conflict with the

dominant theme of prostitution as the conduit of suffering,

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necessitating a role of a male savior. This cannot be reconciled

unless this act of exchange is shown in its relation to male

dominance and a means to which the ends are not justified. Which

it is not. Candy loses a baby because she can no longer function

as a pure woman, and Jim gets arrested after a drug deal goes

bad.

Dan may have lost his purity as well through a system of

patriarchal exchange. In the first segment of the film (heaven),

Candy and Dan go to Casper’s house. Dan’s voice can be heard as

they enter the house, where Casper is sitting on the couch

playing video games: “Casper was like the dad you always wanted.

One who lets you have lollies and fizzy drink. Who lets you stay

up and watch the late night movies. Casper and I went way back.”

What is unusual here is that Dan never explains, and the viewer

is never shown, exactly how these two met, or what their

relationship to one another is. The camera pulls back and

switches angles to reveal a Hispanic man lying on Casper’s bed,

naked except for an orange speedo, looking though magazines.

Casper explains, “This is Jorge. Very limited English, but a very

large penis.” Both Dan and Candy look slightly confused by what

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they see and Casper remarks casually, “We’re just good friends.”

But the fact that they speak different languages and cannot hold

a conversation with each other suggests quite the opposite. In a

later scene, when Dan and Candy are in hell and Dan has given up

on trying to live the straight and narrow, Dan appears at

Casper’s house. This time, too, there is a younger guy at

Casper’s playing video games. When Casper hands out the heroin

(what he calls “Yellow Jesus”) the younger guy tosses his needle

at Casper, looks at him, but says nothing. The exchange, sex for

drugs, is implicit. Earlier, Dan remarks on how “My own parents

had long since cut me adrift.” What was the catalyst for Dan’s

loss of purity, which has already happened by the time the film

starts? Although ambiguous, it might be construed that Dan

himself was once one of Casper’s playthings. In “Hidden Mission

of the Psyche in Abuse and Addiction,” Gostecnik et al. contend

that traumatic experiences can become the central mental content

in one’s psychic structure, causing the abused to repeat cycles

of abuse and pain. This represents a hidden mission of one’s

psyche for resolution and “a great cry of longing for salvation.”

Dan is referred to as hopeless many times throughout the film.

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Could it be that there is no hope for him because he had “long

since” lost his virtue? Although Dan does not sell his body

during the time frame of this film, he may very well have entered

into prostitution, or some other sort of degrading exchange, long

ago. Gostecnik et al. continue, “A person can thus become fixated

on abuse and is incapable of understanding anything of the

traumatic experience that so strongly marks his/her later

perception of similar experiences” (2010). This could explain

Dan’s impotence and lack of empathy in the car when Candy submits

to her first act of prostitution.

The social problem is a harmful condition which affects many

people and the purpose of a social problem film is to suggest

that, through social action and reform, this problem can be

alleviated. Even though the name of the film is Candy, the

narrative agency is placed in Dan’s consciousness. He is telling

the story. This is true for Basketball Diaries as well. In both films

we have clearly defined male protagonists, both animated by a

desire. Classically, there must be a romantic companion for our

men. While Candy is Dan’s romantic interest, in Basketball Diaries,

Jim’s desire for a romantic interest is usurped by his desire for

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heroin. The syntax of the Classical Hollywood film is constructed

incorrectly. It is made more problematic when the typical low-

point, or “bottom” for our protagonists, is not represented by

overdose. Overdoses do happen, but these overdoses are not the

climaxes that bring about our characters’ personal denouements.

The syntax is also disrupted by the linear plot ending. Yes, both

movies end in sequence, but they are not both clearly resolved.

Saved by a Hollywood Ending?

Because they have mutinied against their gender norms, both

our male protagonists cannot have what they desire. Dan cannot

have Candy, and Jim cannot have heroin. They are, instead,

trading their self-awareness for a traditional happy ending. But

who, or what is the antagonist? Is it the protagonists who rebel

against the structured norms of society, carefully complied by a

masculine hegemony? Or is it the social constructions and

institutions that are to blame, for trying to enforce these

otherwise arbitrary set of gender restrictions? The balance or

change these films suggest at the end are ambiguous because they

are unable to clarify this change through a gendered dichotomy.

Antoniou 27

Jim finds happiness when he is allowed to perform in front of

people and share his art. This ending suggests balance - Jim can

be artistic (i.e. feminine), but he has to maintain contact and

share space with these restricting institutions. He must also

embrace his new role as the viewed object, performing on stage

for others to watch. To complete the happy ending, Reggie looks

on as savior, a smiling, surrogate father. This is the most

resolved ending. Dan is left alone in the restaurant, an

androgynous being. He has neither a woman to emasculate him or to

fulfill him, so his ending is ambiguous. The films of addiction

vary and, even within the more specific vice of heroin, these

films cannot be resolved by matter of syntax. Events happen

contrary to intuition and they happen out of sequence. The only

way to resolve these variances is to semantically represent

addiction in terms gender: the literal definition of an addict as

connoted by the feminine act of prostitution.

Works CitedCandy. Dir. Neil Amrfield. 2006. CD.

Antoniou 28

Cui, Shuqin. Women Through the Lens Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: UNiversity of Hawai'i Press, 2003.

Gehring, Wes D., ed. Handbook of American Film Genres. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Gostecnik, Christian, et al. "Hidden Mission of the Psyche in Abuse and Adiction." Journal of Religion and Health 49.3 (2010): 361-376.

Keire, Mara L. "Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century." Journal of Social History (1998): 809-822.

Less than Zero. Dir. Marek Kanievska. 1987. CD.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3(1975): 6-18. online. 12 April 2014. <https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema>.

Penley, Constance, ed. Feminism and Film Theory . New York: Routledge,1988.

The Basketball Diaries. Dir. Scott Kalvert. 1995. CD.

The Panic in Needle Park. Dir. Jerry Schatzberg. 1971. CD.