Louis Theroux offered no cure for a drug-addled city
The depiction of a town ravaged by a heroin epidemic in Louis Theroux: Dark States (BBC Two) wasn’t exactly heart-warming Sundaynight viewing. Once upon a time you could rely on a Louis Theroux documentary to offer up a feast of ironic giggles at the foibles of humankind. But for years now he’s been going mostly to dark places, usually in America, with the sole purpose of showing us just how dark they are.
Here the location was Huntington, West Virginia, a rust-belt city that used to have a thriving steel industry but seems now to be in terminal decline. According to Theroux, one in four of the city’s 49,000 or so citizens is addicted to opiates of one kind or another. Huntington’s emergency services dealt with 11,000 overdose incidents last year, 13 times the US average. Horrifyingly, one in every 10 babies born in the city emerges from the womb already drug dependent.
Theroux toured the city, meeting addicts, watching them shooting up, getting them to say stuff about their chaotic lives that, given the familiarity of such stories on television, tended to sadden rather than shock. What was affecting were not so much the individual tales of addiction as the staggering scale of the problem, the incomprehensible extent of it.
But what really shocked was the probable cause of this epidemic: the vast over-prescription of highstrength, opiate-based painkillers by local doctors – presumably encouraged by America’s pharmaceuticals giants. There was a suggestion that when the government got wind of this abuse, and cut it off at source, heroin became the cheapest and easiest relief available to those already irrevocably addicted.
Theroux offered no evidence beyond the anecdotal testimony of those he interviewed, every one of whom said they had, one way or another, got into addiction via the painkiller pathway. Only passing reference was made to the fact that the local authorities are suing some wholesale drug distributors for damages, alleging they flooded the state with prescription painkillers.
For anyone who has ever sat in a hotel room in America, aghast at how medication for every imaginable ailment is pushed relentlessly on TV, it seemed credible enough. Though why everywhere else in the US doesn’t have as dramatic a drug problem as Huntington was not explored. As ever with Theroux, all we were presented with was the situation – the possible solutions we were left to ponder for ourselves.
Oddly, the credits for Electric Dreams: Crazy Diamond, the latest in Channel 4’s series based on works by sci-fi author Philip K Dick, cited the short story Sales Pitch as its source. But nothing of Sales Pitch – a full-on spaceship-based assault on the dehumanising power of advertising – survived the adaptation process beyond the names of the main character Ed Morris (Steve Buscemi) and his wife Sally (Julia Davis).
Instead, last night we were treated to a distinctly earthbound, highly derivative Blade Runner-ish tale of a “synthetic” Jill (Sidse Babett Knudsen) attempting to forestall a terminal system failure by using her seductive powers to inveigle a dullard scientist (Buscemi) into helping her filch a phial of life-giving “quantum consciousness” from his laboratory.
Around an unnecessarily elaborate heist story was spun an inordinate quantity of padding and unconvincing eco-babble – about coastal erosion, “neural network equality” and a community policed by a security unit called Su, obviously, who was 40 per cent human and 60 per cent pig. Preposterous barely covers it.
The plot, through no discernible fault of Dick’s, had more gaping holes than your average rabbit warren. Still, it wasn’t without humour, intentional or otherwise. And mad as it was, Crazy Diamond did produce two memorably gemlike central performances.
Buscemi’s watery, world-weary eyes were filled throughout with a convincing confusion of sympathy and desire for the deeply damaged Jill. Knudsen, in turn, vamped it up magnificently, filling the empty space in Ed’s heart with noirish promises of adventure and unconventionality.
These were performances that left everything else – including a quietly sympathetic turn by Davis – feeling surplus to requirements. Even the ending, in which gutless Ed was ditched triumphantly by Sally and Jill, failed to pack the intended sardonic punch. But as a shining example of how star power can transcend even the thinnest of scripts, this would take some beating.
Louis Theroux: Dark States ★★★ Electric Dreams: Crazy Diamond ★★★