Artificial Paradises.A Drugs Reader by Mike Jay

Author:Mike Jay
Language: eng
Format: epub

Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground

(1992)

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LJroken Blossoms is the tragic story of Cheng Huan (played by Richard Barthelmess), a pacific Chinese poet who comes to England; his purpose to bring Oriental spiritual enlightenment to a continent that has plunged itself into the barbarity of war. Its brutalization is underlined at one point by a casual reference to ‘only 40,000 dead this week’ - a remarkably sharp directorial sally, especially since a state of war still technically obtained during the period in which the film was made. Western brutality is personified in the figure of Battling Burrows, an East End prizefighter who terrorizes and beats his daughter Lucy, played by Lillian Gish.

Cheng Huan settles in Limehouse, where contact between the races is shown to have a corrupting effect. A magnificently composed establishing scene . . . shows white women in an opium den, surrounded by Chinamen and other men of colour. Opium dissolves the natural barriers between the races; the focus is unequivocally upon the willing absorption of the women into this smoky promiscuity.

A series of close-ups show, first, white women seated with examples of different races; then the woman at the centre of the composition is shown reclining alone. Her eyelids close, her lips part and her head tilts back in voluptuous abandonment, the cause emphasized by cuts to the Chinese man with his pipe in the foreground of the tableau. In the middle of this company, her solitary, self-gratifying pleasure is more shocking still than the intercourse - the social form implying the possibility of the sexual — between the other women and the men. Griffith

ig2 Artificial Paradises________________________________________________________________

shrewdly identified an aspect of drugtaking that remains an unspoken source of distaste for outsiders, the attainment of ecstatic sensual states in company.

Eroticized images of drug-taking; an ‘ether maniac from tum-of-the-century Paris. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

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