I fractured my arm earlier this year. It was the first broken bone I’d had since high school, and while it wasn’t as bizarrely timed as those particular incidents (first ever broken bone was on my first day of Year 7, and the second and third happened a year later almost to the day), there was still some weirdness to it since it involved a literal legs-out-from-under-me pratfall in public due to a slippery floor. Even on accident, I just can’t help but make a public spectacle of myself.
At any rate, I went to the hospital to get it checked out, they confirmed it was indeed fractured… and then I got prescribed Oxycodone (or OxyContin, as it's more widely known) to deal with the pain. I usually don’t even bother with pain meds (and this isn’t some macho ‘I feel no pain’ nonsense talking; I just don’t really notice if they’re working or not), but since that first night after the break had me in utter sleepless agony, I figured it was worth trying. The main effect I remember it having, aside from the dulling of the pain as it should’ve done, was this woozy, drowsy sensation that lasted for a good few hours. It was… nice. Pleasant.
What wasn’t so pleasant was the isolation of being stuck inside, in pain, and feeling generally useless because I wasn’t able to get household chores done. Not to get too into it, but had I not accidentally thrown out that very Oxy prescription at one point, that isolation might have led me to do something very stupid. As I got into with Talk To Me, I have something of an addictive personality, along with hedonistic tendencies, and while I haven’t tried to get any more Oxy since then (and likely never will), there’s still a part of me that wonders what might’ve happened had I not thrown out that bottle. Would I still be taking it now? How close would I get to becoming part of that terrifying statistic?
I know this is heavier than I usually open these reviews with, but I felt a need to establish a personal grounding for this because that's how the film itself operates. It's a personal portrait of someone who got tied up in the opioid crisis, which in turn became a catalyst for recognising and fighting the systems that led to it. In this case, it’s of photographer Nan Goldin, a staple of the Gay art scene in New York from the 1970s onwards, and who herself is in recovery from Oxy addiction. It was that recovery process that led her to help found Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), an activist group that regularly stage public ‘actions’ that protest the Sackler family at the alarming number of art galleries and institutions that bear their name as donors.
The structure and pacing created by Laura Poitras’ direction cuts back and forth between Goldin’s life story, growing up and finding her place within the Queer community, the history of Purdue Pharma and their role in the over-prescription of OxyContin and fentanyl, and Goldin’s more recent activist displays and the resulting fallout from them. A lot of ground is covered to keep everything in context, along with the shifting between Goldin’s own slideshows to retell the past and Poitras et al.’s modern camera work to depict the present, but credit to Poitras and editors Amy Foote, Joe Bini, and Brian A. Kates, for keeping a sturdy momentum throughout and getting the important details to stick out and resonate.
It helps that the framing of all the information allows for a similar power of imagery as that found in Goldin’s own work. The way that drug use and the pharmaceutical industry at large intertwines with the life of the artist as depicted through Goldin and her no-wave entourage makes for some particularly disquieting contemplation. Art photos developed at a pharmacy, the same name behind the drug that could have taken Goldin’s life also being adorned in the spaces that she displayed her art, the general ‘let them die’ attitude shared by both the victims of the opioid epidemic and the AIDS epidemic; they establish this specific story, and this specific conflict, as something that needs to be told, if only to highlight the heartbreaking parasitism being conveyed. One suffers, the other supplies, one creates, the other kills.
Of course, while there’s a definite infectious optimism about the power of art and activism to cause positive social change, and that change is indeed depicted in this doco, there are points where the ceiling of efficacy for such tactics becomes a bit too visible. This was most evident for me when it got to the testimony part of the bankruptcy process, where several opioid victims and their families spoke candidly before the Sacklers about how truly fucking vile they are for what they allowed to happen. There’s catharsis to be gotten out of such a moment, even looking back on it, because being legally mandated to hear the people you fucked over telling you to your face how much they hate you for it… kind of euphoric when it hits on the right people.
But that composed coldness, that deadness, behind their eyes as these people pour their hearts and spleens out, ends up confirming what Patrick Radden Keefe describes in-interview as the Sacklers treating this atrocity that they let happen as a simple P.R. moment. A thing to be swept away so that business can continue as usual. It’s enough to make your eye socket shatter.
Both as a depiction of the New York art scene and all its fabulous weirdoes, and the societal structures that, both then and now, treat them as expendable, this is incredibly compelling viewing. It offers a personal perspective on a matter that continues to grow so much that it can be difficult to even comprehend each individual affected by it, and fleshes out that perspective as that of someone who has skin in the game in more ways than one, and who has lived a life of passionate and unapologetic capturing of the world as it really is. I’ll admit that I’m genuinely curious about Goldin’s other film work like Liberty’s Booty and Variety, and while I don’t think I necessarily needed more reason to hate the Sacklers (the blood of Shock G and Mac Miller is on their hands, after all), this certainly clarified the more general reasons why.
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