Perfect Hell, West Virginia
Declan Lynch Louis Theroux: Dark States (BBC2) Brendan O’Connor’s Cutting Edge (RTE One)
I’VE been thinking for some time that we don’t really know much about America at all — we just assume that we do, because we have this TV or movie version of it in our heads. But in truth it may well be a lot stranger than we ever imagined it.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s this huge part of it that we don’t know about, some forgotten territory that is full of homeless people living in tents, cast out from a society that sent people to walk on the moon nearly 50 years ago, but that still hasn’t worked out some basic working concept of health insurance.
Now it seems that Louis Theroux has gone in search of such a mythical territory, an America that we don’t know about, in Dark States. He went to Huntington, West Virginia, where a quarter of the adults are addicted to opiates, part of an American epidemic that has come about through the mass consumption of prescription painkillers.
He spoke to out-and-out junkies too, like Nate, who started out on the painkillers and who now lives beside a river in a tent, injecting himself with heroin and feeling no pain whenever he gets the opportunity. He seems quite relaxed about it, at least when the drugs are working inside him. What is going on inside his head for the rest of the time, we will never know. For John Denver it was “Almost heaven, West Virginia”, now we were looking at perfect hell.
There was a sense of a whole culture, not just in West Virginia but all across the States, just checking out of reality because there’s nothing in it for them any more. This particular town of Huntington was once a strong industrial area, now there’s not much going on there except the pursuit of oblivion.
So we must understand that when Trump is putting out a version of events which exists only in his own head, he is speaking to an America which contains a lot of people who are similarly disposed — except they get there through the taking of dangerous drugs while he just seems to have it in him naturally.
However they get there, it does suggest to us that from top to bottom, there is this major disengagement from the world as it exists, and the construction of a fictional alternative — except this movie is not being written by smart screenwriters, but by people who have no idea what comes next.
And the way it’s looking, it will not end well. From the junkies’ tents by the river in West Virginia to the opulent playgrounds of Trump and Harvey Weinstein, there are moments when we see this vision of a people anaesthetised by substance abuse, ruled by monsters.
We see this escape into infantilism, both in the arrested development of the abusive moguls, and the inability of the people to face another day in the real world.
This idea of addiction as essentially a failure to grow up was described by Mary Coughlan on Brendan O’Connor’s Cutting Edge, when she recalled her own experience in treatment in the Rutland Centre — she was 35 at the time, they told her that emotionally, she was an 11-year-old. I feel that in Ireland there is not enough understanding of this, that alcoholism and other forms of drug dependency need to be spoken about more in this way, as a form of immaturity. This came during the part of the O’Connor show when they talked about life-changing or “light-bulb” moments, and it illuminated the matter for anyone wanting an insight into the meaning of these forbidding words like alcoholism or addiction — all the more so because I agree completely with this analysis.
An inability to grow up is an issue for the human race in general, but Paddy in particular has always had a weakness for it — a strong weakness, if you like.
When we look at our vulnerabilities in that domain, perhaps we should be starting there, and ending there too. Meanwhile in America, it’s hard to know where to start.