‘Snowfall’ and its big dilemma over drugs
BILLED as a story about the Los Angeles origins of crack-cocaine, FX’s engaging, yet depressing 10-episode drama Snowfall is about the numerous ways in which the drug trade recalibrates and eventually rots the morals of the people who engage in it.
This is a theme that Snowfall and nearly all such drug-supply sagas in film and television have in common, asking a viewer to relate to the conflicted, all-too-human and ultimately murderous choices that get easier and easier to make when the deals go down, the money flows and the triggers are pulled.
John Singleton, the Boyz N the Hood director who is Snowfall’s co-creator (with Dave Andron and Eric Amadio), opens the series with a Technicolor paean to his South Central neighbourhood as he remembers (or imagines) it to be in the summer of 1983, before the rise of crack: a tranquil setting serenaded by R&B and early rap songs that pulse from boomboxes, a world filled with boundless sunshine, good neighbours and ice cream trucks.
It’s here, with this blissful “before” shot, that Snowfall could most use a disclaimer or some sort of helpful caution that you should view the series entirely as a work of fiction. Not “based on” not “almost true” and often not anywhere near truth, except in the way that make-believe can achieve a convincing verisimilitude.
Snowfall needs to come clean as a story, and not because it treats South Central as a paradise on the precipice of being lost (because surely, to some, it was). Of Snowfall’s three parallel story lines, the one most in need of a disclaimer, I think, is a plot that all but connects the emergence of crack to a supposed CIA effort to sell drugs to raise money for arms for Central American rebels trying to overthrow communist regimes.
Snowfall zeros in on a semirogue CIA agent, Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson), who is still stinging from an earlier mission failure and now acts on indirect orders to deliver arms to Nicaraguans, using a cocaine surplus to raise cash. (Or something like that.)
Perhaps only seasoned media critics can still recall the 1996 investigative series in the San Jose Mercury News that first reported such claims, or how The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times poked so many holes in the Mercury News’ findings that the paper had to go back and re-report its facts, a great number of which didn’t hold up.
In writing Snowfall, Singleton and his colleagues sought out expert advice from CIA sources, and Singleton has said in interviews that he knew there was not enough evidence to support Snowfall’s version. But to him, it feels true (the CIA, he told USA Today, “knew (cocaine) was being brought over, and looked the other way”) and, in the TV business, feeling true usually matters more than being true.
No one, after all, has advertised Snowfall as a documentary. Same goes for The Americans, another FX drama set in the 1980s that spins great and sometimes barely plausible thrills out of Cold War plotlines that use historical fact merely as a suggestion and nothing more.
In the past two decades, as television rose to prominence on a wave of high-quality storytelling and acting, the shows began to take on subject matters that were closer to truth than wild fiction. It’s sometimes too easy for the TV version to supersede the facts.
In a lawsuit filed in LA recently against FX and the producers of the network’s excellent miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan, 101-year-old actress Olivia de Havilland claims that the series misrepresented her character.
The lines between fact and fiction in 2017 are blurry enough, are they not? If you’re going to revisit and fictionalise some juicy story out of the past, it wouldn’t hurt to remind people that it’s all a big, beautiful lie. – The Washington Post