Hyperlink cinema (in which a film’s narrative is built over numerous characters who don’t necessarily interact, but are tenuously linked through circumstance) seems to have passed us by, diminishing the luster of its more opportunistic entries (Magnolia, Crash), while making its more genuine statements appear even stronger. In a movement with origins decades in the past but reaching saturation levels in the years after Pulp Fiction, Traffic might well be the strongest out all of them. Rather than resting its links on convoluted, whimsical scenarios, it binds them together so that they react almost directly, even across vast geographic, class, and racial boundaries.
Looking back past 9/11, it’s difficult to understand just how momentous a political issue drugs were in the 80s and 90s, and just what the stakes of the war against them were perceived to be. A good deal of that conversation centered around cocaine and its freebase derivative “crack”, and its implicit connections to immigration and government policy. A symbol of both debaucherous excess and urban decay, cocaine was many things to many people, all of whom had some stake in the outcome of the ‘war’.
Traffic’s ostensible good guys in law enforcement are just that: good guys who want to do the right thing, and dedicate their lives to doing so. They are generally free of the corruption endemic to movie cops since Serpico (though none is above the system in which they work), but they see the war in terms of small, direct actions, like court cases and arrests, that will hopefully add up to a campaign of significance. The bad guys (and Traffic makes no equivocations about that: these are very bad guys), on the other hand, see a much bigger picture, and we invest in them because of it, if only because nobody likes to bet on a losing team. Whereas the agents of government move slowly and deliberately, the dueling cartels move swiftly and effectively, totally outside of regulation. One thing becomes clear early on: the drug industry is an organic thing, as pure a manifestation of self-sufficient capitalism as one is ever likely to find. Law enforcement, on the other hand, is a slow, insufficient bureaucracy, which simply doesn’t understand human breaking points in the same way.
But as soon as the knee-jerk liberal in so many of us jumps to point out how hopeless it is to fight a chemical reaction, Soderbergh wisely (and bravely, considering his audience) shows us the horrible toll that drugs exact, and that they are not exacted justly. In one its more parallel striking parallels, the Mexican General Salazar sums up his country’s policy towards treatment of addiction: a junkie will overdose, and then there is one less to worry about. Compare that to the treatment that Wakefield’s daughter gets, or the resources that go into finding her when she goes off the grid. Traffic is filled with such contradictions and injustices, but there is none more pronounced than its division between the rich and poor, and how behavior that frustrates the institutions of one reinforces those holding down the other.
That’s another central concept of Traffic: institutions, and the way that they cannot evolve fast enough to keep pace with chemists finding new ways to package and distribute product. That is except for the film’s central institution, which is cocaine itself. The original British miniseries upon which this is based concluded with a lengthy monologue about how legislators could never defeat drugs themselves, but could only create a society from which one did not need to escape into them. That concept is here too, but it’s not as simple as that; cocaine may have found a place in society due to the failings of those in power, but it now acts as an entity unto itself, with both its consumers and producers serving as distinct forces with demands of their own. The need for recreational drugs may never be removed from society entirely, given the industries that depend on them (including, it should be noted, law enforcement), but it can be assessed rationally and the relationship between its contributors identified. This is what Traffic does so well, and what decades of public debate have failed to do.
Bonus Features
Aside from the gorgeous transfer that the film’s been given, the single disc contains a few demonstrations of the techniques that went into the film’s unique approach to coloring and editing, which serve to better highlight just how technically unique the film was. There are also some deleted scenes, some additional footage (presented raw and unfinished), some trailers, and a slideshow presentation on trading cards for the drug-sniffing dogs of law-enforcement. As if that wasn’t enough, there are three film commentaries: one with Soderbergh and Gaghan, another producers and consultants, and another with the composer.
"Traffic (The Criterion Collection)" is on sale January 17, 2012 and is rated R. Action, Crime, Drama. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Stephen Gaghan. Starring Amy Irving , Catherine Zeta Jones, Clifton Collins Jr, Dennis Quaid, Don Cheadle, James Brolin, Luis Guzman, Michael Douglas, Miguel Ferrer, Steven Bauer, Topher Grace, Erika Christensen, Albert Finney.
