Addiction and Escapism

Abstract

Including a chapter on addiction-related films in this book is not only important because of the well-known severity of contemporary substance abuse problems, the astonishing destruction it leaves behind or the prevalence of males in the grim stories drug abuse produces. This chapter is essential for this book because addiction, I argue, is not only a result of individual psychopathology, bad genes or moral weakness, as many people and public institutions would hold. More importantly, addiction can be regarded as a symptom of distress: in other words, addiction, similar to most escapist practices, is a desperate response to distress, a result of an individual’s unsuccessful inner struggles, which, on closer inspection, reveal deeply rooted social and cultural issues. Thus, addiction is also a symptom of social problems, and therefore the cinematic narratives about it can be regarded as dark mirrors held out to our culture. Therefore, exploring such social “anomalies” as addiction may be essential to understanding how “normality” works or what “normality” means today. The chapter discusses three films with three very different conceptualisations of addiction and escapism in twenty-first-century Europe: Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000), T2 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 2016) and Kills on Wheels (Attila Till, 2016).