Skip to main content

50/50 and the normalization of Marijuana




I was up at my my sister and brother-in-law's over the holiday weekend.   Good liberals in a small conservative town and we decided to head to the small art-house cinema see a movie.   The movie, 50/50 , is based on a true story of a young man's brush with an unexpected cancer.  It's funny; the chemistry between the two main characters:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Adam) and Seth Rogen (Kyle) was good.   But what struck me and surprisingly didn't strike my brother-in-law, who's a doctor in a medical marijuana state, is how "normalized" they chose to show the pot smoking.  

Adam doesn't drink or smoke and his first dosage of medicinal marijuana is in the macaroons offered by Phillip Baker Hall (Alan) to deal with the nausea caused by chemotherapy.   From there, the filmmakers actually show Adam stoned, smoking with Kyle, and even socializing with Mitch (Matt Frewer) and Alan and smoking again.   It was suddenly normal for cancer patients to sit around smoking pot.  And the only noticeable effects that it seemed to have were the visual tricks it played the first time Adam ingested it. 

Now I liked the movie, and as you know, am an advocate for legalization, but I almost thought that the movie was a tad bit deceptive.   For one thing, it does show that alcohol is bad when it shows Kyle so messed up he can't drive home, yet, it never shows Adam having any sort of detrimental effects from smoking.   You never see Adam stoned at work, or Kyle getting behind the wheel of an auto stoned.   So, from propaganda standpoint, we now see pot as harmless and alcohol as bad; we now see pot as medicine and medicine only.  

Now my argument with the movie is not only that it was deceptive in how it showed pot, but it manipulates the viewer.  If the audience is anything like Adam (who's never smoked before the macaroons (?)), then don't you think he'd be a little bit more cautious?   Or is this generation (mid-20s) so exposed to marijuana that the scare tactics of DARE just didn't have any effect?



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Day the War Began

Originally written shortly after the protest in 2003, an audio of this was broadcast on KUNM on the year anniversary of the war's inception. Hopefully, reasons for writing about this will become fewer and fewer. The Day the War Began.             Three deep and two dozen across, the Albuquerque police department blocked eastbound Central Avenue. They wore Army fatigues, gas masks and helmets, held black batons, yet had no badges or name tags that identified each as a person, an individual. Judging from the surrounding army of police cars and police horses, and the four cruisers that closed Central further to the east, their function was clear. Not only do the authorities want to silence dissent, but they want to keep those not politically vocal from becoming aware of dissent at all.             One of the cops held what looked like a toy water cannon and swung it back and fo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 10 Jazz Albums

So, Mindy and I have been on a Jazz kick for the better part of 3 months now.  At first, it was just listening to what we knew and then it moved into just kinda cherry picking, but finally, it was just too overwhelming, so I broke down and bought The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings  .   So, after using the book and listening, I assigned a homework assignment.   What are your Top 10 Jazz Albums of all time (so far)?  As much as possible try and pick albums and avoid picking compilations or "best of" albums because they are more often than not just compilations of singles and not complete works of art on their own like a good album tries to be. So here's my list: 1.  In a Special Way -Miles Davis.  There really is no words to describe how awesome this album is.   Though the critics define it as "Fusion," it really was "Fusion" before people knew what that was.  And while it was recorded ensemble (unlike a lot recording whe...
Post a Comment
Read more