Artsculture

Drugs, Hypocrisy Flavour 'Layer Cake'

Brit gangster flick pushes stylish, irony laden narcotics.

By Dorothy Woodend, 3 Jun 2005, TheTyee.ca

Layer Cake

Lads, cads, highs and lows

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A drug is neither moral nor immoral -- it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole." -- Frank Zappa.

There is an interesting moment in the opening scene of Layer Cake, the new British gangster film from director Matthew Vaughn. The nameless hero is walking through a drug store, which is quite literally that; lining the shelves are stylish packages of heroin, ecstasy, and cocaine from FCUK, all looking very much like designer fragrances. In a voiceover, our hero informs us that "when corporations figure out just how much money there is to be made, that's it for the middle man, but while prohibition lasts, make hay while the sun shines."

The sun has long shone on the business of drugs and all along the way there have been people making extremely large amounts of money. From the maker of Godfrey's Cordial (a baby calming liquid sold in 19th century England that was basically opium and sugar) to Columbia drugs lords, it's the often the very same chemicals. How we think of them, and how we choose to buy or sell them changes frequently. Corporations have also known that drugs are where the money is, and businessmen can be worse than criminals simply because, often, they're a lot smarter. The bigger the businessman, the bigger the criminal is the point that Layer Cake hammers home, often with the toe of a boot, but also in more fashionable ways, upon the sleek bonnet of a Bentley, or the impeccable lines of a beautifully cut jacket. What the film lacks in substance, it makes up for in substance abuse. Drugs are the raison d'etre for this stylish caper, the rocket fuel that makes it all, go dog go, and style can take you a long way. Just not all the way, unfortunately.

One cool cucumber sandwich

The nameless hero is a classic middle man; he has a legit business on the side, but makes his real money from dealing Charlie for even bigger crooks. When the film opens, he is planning his retirement, but unbeknownst to him, fish higher up on the feeding chain have other plans. Nameless is summoned to a gorgeous lunch with his boss Jimmy Price, who wants a favor. Jimmy too has a friend, Eddie. Eddie's daughter has run away, disappearing into the junkie pools of East London, and she needs finding. This, being a film from the producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, is only the beginning.

There is an entire cast of colourful low lifes with names like Gazza, Slasher, and the Duke. The Duke is the opposite of our hero, a flashy twit who likes to dress the part of gangster right down to his lemon yellow Range Rover and screaming harridan fishwife who looks a lot like Posh Spice Victoria Beckham. The Duke has done a bit of naughty business, robbing a Serbian warlord of his load of primo ecstasy tablets. This was a very unfortunate idea, as it releases the Dragan, a Serbian hitman who melts in and out of view like a ghost with a very large gun.

Things unfold pretty much like you'd expect in a British gangster film. There is no honour among thieves, they gladly steal from each other, and occasionally slam each other into freezers. It's all about the double, the triple, and even the quadruple cross. If you eventually lose track of just who is doing what to whom, it doesn't really matter, the end is a foregone conclusion. When you live by the sword, eventually, you're going to get a nasty nick.

Daniel Craig, in the starring role of the nameless gangster, brings to mind the smooth operations of a young Steve McQueen. He is one cool cucumber sandwich, with a face constructed of hard angles and great wounded eyes: definitely one for the ladies. However, there aren't many ladies about in this film. Women have only one role here. If they're beautiful like fashion's favorite, Sienna Miller, they exist to be humped, and if they're less attractive, they fulfill the same function, only killed off afterwards. It's strictly lads and cads with the usual cast of British meanies all present and accounted for, including Colm Meaney and Sir Michael Gambon, who do what they do impeccably. Every word that falls from Sir Michael's lips could be engraved in marble. There is something almost obscenely luscious about his diction. When he says fuck, you will feel it right down to your knickers.

Opium’s greatest hits

The film doesn't pose many larger questions about the nature of drugs, nor does it offer any answers. It's content to dabble about. For real content, there are other films far more intelligent and ambitious, like the British miniseries Traffik. (The American version Traffic tidily removed the k but kept most of the original's plot.) Directed by Alistair Reid (The Singing Detective), the five hour miniseries was a much different interpretation of the chains of supply and demand. The same turf was being covered back in 1966 when Grace Kelly introduced The Poppy is Also a Flower. Originally made for TV, the stars donated their time in support of the film's message that drugs are bad bad bad.

But the dictum of just say no, hasn't worked all that well, especially since drugs are an increasing part of everyday life. You only need open your email to see it happen: every day, 30 more promises of a pill for every ill.

The history of drug use is a long one. Martin Booth's book Opium is a particularly illuminating look at how one single substance has come to occupy such a vilified and gloried role in society. It takes away pain yet it causes suffering. Injected morphine was initially touted as a cure for opium addiction because it was believed that people became addicted to opium by eating it, and that bypassing the digestive tract, you could cure this "hunger." Methadone, once thought of as a cure for heroin addiction, has been blamed for a rise in overdose deaths.

How and why drugs are deemed illegal has little do with the drug itself, but who uses it. Opium, cocaine, and even marijuana have been demonized because of their "effect on the degenerate races" according to the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act in the US. Peasant farmers who grow opium poppies often become addicted to their crop. In harvesting their sap from the seed pods, they make a shallow cut in the seed pod; the knife blade must be cleaned in between each cut, which farmers often do by licking the blade.

Higher and higher

The duality of drugs: good or bad, deliverance or dependency, hypocrisy or honesty. That's the tricky business, because you can't have the good without the bad. Or as Booth puts it "... For the consumer nation, opiate addiction is a major health threat, a socially destructive, crime-orientated problem which can also undermine economic and even political stability. Yet for the poppy-producing nation, opium is often the only sure means of a secure income for a large part of the population and a primary source of foreign currency for the state. The fight against drugs in one country is an attack on the well being of another."

Decriminalizing drug use, as Amsterdam and even Vancouver have shown, comes with its own set of problems. But the American example has created a prison system bursting at the seams. If you take the route of Indonesia and simply kill or imprison anyone caught in possession of drugs, you run risks of international repercussions; witness the case of Schapelle Corby, the young Australian recently given a 20 year sentence in Indonesian prison. And ironies abound. While the US may continue its war on drugs, in Afghanistan, the production of heroin spiked after US forces removed the Taliban.

The Layer Cake is the strata upon which society is built, the people at the very top live in land of sugar icing, but in order to get there they must double deal, steal, and kill. The not so subtle twist is that petty thieves, robber barons, even drug king pins are nothing compared with governments, who are sometimes the very biggest swindlers around.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films every Friday for The Tyee. [Tyee]

14 Comments:

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  • mcfur

    6 years ago

    Comments on "Drugs, Hypocrisy Flavour 'Layer Cake'"

    booze, pills, pot, heroin etc. a sedated society is not equipped to challenge or demand change from government or multi-nationals. they have it both ways, taxpayer paid programmes to use as propaganda and drugs to buy arms(ira-contra scandal) for their c.i.a. causes. revolution around the world is quite possible without drugs and without violence. a sober society? why not? at least i can dream and hope. i'm 55 and no amount of cynicism can combat that!

  • Bobb999

    6 years ago

    The book by Martin Booth cited here is informative but suffers from Booth's moralizing tone.
    "Flowers in the Blood", by Latimer and Goldberg
    gives a more balanced view/history of Opium.
    It also has an excellent intro. by William Burroughs, famous junkie man of letters, with this fascinating alternate take on opiates:
    "The recent discovery of opium receptors in the brain, and the body's own painkiller endorphin, suggests that there is a preaddiction metabolism related to endorphin deficiency. The addict needs to supplement a vital substance insufficiently produced in his body much as a diabetic needs insulin. So the absurdity of penalizing a metabolic deficiency is now manifest. The writers are careful not to take sides. By simply presenting the evidence, they demonstrate the futility and wasteful folly of the police and jail approach to addiction."

  • Truman Green

    6 years ago

    Burroughs got it right. Heroin, is not even particularly addictive, for instance, if used to treat physical pain. The entire illegal drug industry derives it intransigence, not from reasoned assessment of the problem, but from that fact that a kilogram of heroin can be had for $150.00 per kilogram in Columbia, but by the time it gets to Vancouver it's worth $150,000.00. Those who advocate using the criminal justice system to tackle the problem are thinking in reverse. The fact is that heroin addicts, (or cocaine, or meth) are people who were in trouble long before they ever started using addictive drugs, due to conditions such as untreated schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, learning problems, post-traumatic shock syndrome, familial sexual, mental or physical abuse, alienation because of unpopular sexual orientation. THEY BECOME DRUG ADDICTS AS A METHOD OF SELF-MEDICATION. I believe my story, "Jason Loves Cory" archived in the Life section of Tyee, presents an accurate portrayal, and that there's a pretty good liklihood that both of them would still be alive if Cory was not harassed, bullied and abused by the Vancouver Police Department, which I personally consider second only to the police squads of central America.

  • Truman Green

    6 years ago

    Also: recommended googling--"An Open Letter to Bill Bennett" by economist Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, September 7, l989. Furthermore: To those of you who doubt my second sentence, (heroin's not even particularly addictive...) you might contact SFU brain specialist, Barry Beyerstein, who said exactly that, a few months ago on the Fanny show. His name's in the phone book--lest you think I'm hopelessly self-deluded.

  • Korky Day

    6 years ago

    No, Truman Green, I believe you. Thanks, Dorothy Woodend, for an informative review. I probably won't see the movie, though. It sounds violent and bleak. Readers might also appreciate my Web publication on this topic, korky.ca see Part 2. I've been an anti-drug hippie since 1967. --Korky Day,

  • Truman Green

    6 years ago

    Korky Day, I read all your stuff on illegal drugs. Very sensible stuff. I particularly got a chuckle out of your Swiftian rules for smoking at school. A good update of a MODEST PROPOSAL, eh.

  • Bobb999

    6 years ago

    Yes, I too have heard from qualified spokespeople, that opiates are less addictive for people in great physical pain, the reason being that the body/brain of someone suffering physical pain, utilizes or responds to opiates in a different way than other users.
    Not only liberals, but some prominent American conservatives have come out publicly against the US war on drugs, stating that the criminal justice approach should be replaced instead by a medical/harm reduction approach. Former Republican Secretary of State George Schultz is one. I'm glad Canada , taking a cue from Europe,is (slowly) moving in this direction. The number of comments this article/topic garnered, compared to the large number of varied and passionate responses many other Tyee topics provokes, leads me to conclude: Tyee readers, despite the political, medical, social and many other implications surrounding the subject, apparently find drugs to be "unsexy", less interesting than other topics.
    Too bad. It's one of my favourite subjects!

  • sleepswithangels

    6 years ago

    Our drugs laws (and those of the USA) are a prime example of both early 20th century racism and , in the case of cannabis, an evil exercise in eliminating the once robust hemp industry to enable the cotton, steel, pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries to flourish. These laws have left us with a world hooked on toxic pollution and even more toxic pharmaceuticals. The hypocrisy of this is so overwhelming that most people can't see it. Tobacco,processed food, petrochemical pollution and unsafe pharmaceuticals kill millions while we jail people for possesing and trading the safest drug on the planet.

  • Bobb999

    6 years ago

    One out of every 2 males in N. America will develop cancer some time in their life time.
    It's a worsening epidemic, caused not only because longevity is increasing, but also due to the industrial carcinogenic toxins we're exposed to every day, as you mention. From pesticides on our lawns and on our veggies, to chlorine in our water, to mercury and PCBs in our fish, to air borne pollutants from industry and vehicles, we eat, drink and breathe a toxic soup daily.
    The legal drugs are often more harmful than the illegal ones (tobacco, alcohol,many prescription drugs), which as you say, presents a hypocritical attitude of governments (and many voters).
    I disagree that pot is "the safest drug on the planet".It is likely much safer than tobacco. It is safer for some people to take than for others, and some forms may be safer than others. I don't believe inhaling burning raw plant material of any kind is harmless to lungs. It is well established that particulate matter from burning wood contributes to lung disease. This is why bee hive burners of sawdust are being phased out. If THC was all that entered your lungs when you smoked, it would be different. Vapourizers
    or eating cannabis (Majoun, a kind of hash candy is popular in the middle east)would eliminate lung damage. Even Dr. Andrew Weil,
    author of the early '70s book, "The Natural Mind", a "pro-drugs" book, now concedes that
    marijuana and certain psychedelic drugs, can, among a very small minority of susceptible users, trigger psychoses such as schizophrenia.
    This is not a reason to criminalize use of pot or other drugs, but one must be aware that there are pros and cons to most everything in life, including drugs.

  • sleepswithangels

    6 years ago

    Hey Bob999
    very good points...vapourizers are the way to go for those into the big smoke...much safer.
    Pot has an LD factor of #650. You would have to choke on kilos of it to be toxic..you are probably quite right about triggering psychoses...I mean, here I am in the middle of the night dribbling and slobering on the web

  • Bobb999

    6 years ago

    Ah ha! Confessions of a pot head?
    I'm glad those lab rats survived the THC toxicity test!

  • sleepswithangels

    6 years ago

    what toxicity??..the answer to that question needs to be front and center in any debate concerning legalization/decriminalization. Maryjane is about as toxic as a flea's fart. I'm just cynical enough to believe that if it was toxic it would still be legal as it would have suited the powers that be in their ruthless determination to ensure that we are not a drag on society in our dotage. Toxic air and water, processed food, pharmaceuticals, tobacco technology and brainless media offerings are to various degrees..genocidal.
    I dare anyone to refute my diatribe with any solid logic.

  • Bobb999

    6 years ago

    Yes the rats proved it isn't toxic, as in poisonous, but I still maitain smoking any plant is not innocuous to users' lungs, as you acknowledge with your vapourizer comment.
    I also maintain THC can be extremely injurious to a small minority of users susceptible to schizophrenia.
    To a lesser degree, many others experience unpleasant psychological effects, including myself. I smoked a lot as a teenager, but the effect changed for me such that now, instead of a calming or pleasant feeling, I feel agitation instead. It's well known that some people feel "paranoia", not well being.
    Each to his own. Almost everyone has a drug (or drugs) of choice. Even "clean" teatotalers, are likely to have their vices, be they Red Rose Tea, McDonald's trans fat loaded "food", chocolate, or TV soap operas. Personally, I'm more a poppy tea man, and wish to give special thanks to John McCrae of "In Flanders Fields" fame, for elevating the poppy to icon status,
    far above the easy reach of the law. And grannies frequently, unwittingly, have backyard opium "grow ops"!
    -signed,
    "Morpheus"

  • sleepswithangels

    6 years ago

    wow...does that bring back memories..of English Bay beach in the wee hours of a mid-summer (1969) night...a bowl of dreams and ....
    poppies you say....hmmmmm...I think I some some in granny's garden

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