On Drug Addiction, Stigma, and conformation
I just went fresh out of the cinema. Tuesday night, I eagerly needed some fresh air out of coding and sometimes-too-intense interpersonal interactions in bootcamp.
I took half-day-off, went home napped, and rewrote the lectures’ code in my own way until evening. Then I decided to go to cinema for a mental wash. There were “Tar” by Cate Blanchette, and another independent film that caught my eye — —”the beautiful and the bloodshed.” The naked back sihlouette on the poster bewitched me. So I went for it, the lady at the counter leaned in, excitingly telling me that “This film is fantastic. I really like it.” I promised her that I will tell her my afterthoughts about this film.
Nan, the artist, was telling her life story, and art exhibitions, and overall, her individual actions led to pulling down a powerful pharmaceutical family Sackler that legalized opium prescription and making millions of Americans addicted. The court eventually set the family free, the family declared bankruptcy and escaped with billions of dollars away, and is still active worldwide, in Tel Aviv, Shanghai…etc. But the artist herself, managed to organize the people who suffered from overdose, to request formidably that Metropolitan Museums, L’Ouvre, Guggenheim, Tate, and all the other museums that collected her work, either to not exhibit her work anymore, or to cancel the Sackler family’s donation and eliminated their names from the museums halls. It took them 4 years, because Nan the artist wanted not only herself, but other victims of this addictive medications to be recovered and done justice.
So they used the fundraising money for drug recovery, helping test the drug addictors which drugs were they most addictive, and where to go for medical advice.
That began from her revealing her sister’s suicide leading herself to rebellion, worked once as a prostitute in New York, and reread the journal of her sister. Relationships, friendships, people come and go. AIDS and LGBT underground groups triggered her to become an activist. The sexual dependency she glanced at between couples and herself, was blatantly honest. Sex is sex, death is death, among them are vivid lives.
I didn’t cry much. Most of the scenarios she went through were mines, too. And yet, it felt like a very close friend telling me her sufferings underneath the “famous artist” fame, and her family trauma, in a non-compromising tone.
The movie reminded of my early twenties and teenage years. I was trapped in puzzling situations among seemingly authoritative medical doctors and professors and classmates that made me even more anxious — -Diagnosis of bipolarism and being prescribed overdosingly tranquilizers and sleeping pills, yet I had to pretend to live a “normal life.” Gone are those days. When I heard Nan talking, I feel we’re at the same page. Calm, and accepting.
Beautiful, hectic, and resonant.
