Though the film’s title and story loosely resemble that of Abel Ferrara‘s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, according to Herzog, it is neither a sequel nor a remake; its only commonality is a corrupt policeman as the central character. Nonetheless, the director of the original Bad Lieutenant film, Abel Ferrara, expressed dismay that the Herzog film was being made. Both Bad Lieutenant films were produced by Edward R. Pressman. (wiki)
The Fall of the House of Usher is an American gothic horror drama television miniseries created by Mike Flanagan. All eight episodes were released on Netflix on October 12, 2023, each directed by either Flanagan or Michael Fimognari, the latter also acting as cinematographer for the entire series.
Loosely based on various works by 19th century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise-unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the genius COO of the pharmaceutical company, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, and Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: Thailand, India, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Afghanistan, Nepal 1963-1976.
“The Serpent is a British crime drama serial developed by Mammoth Screen and commissioned by the BBC. The eight-part limited series is a co-production between BBC One and Netflix. It is based on the crimes of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who murdered young tourists from 1975 to 1976. The series stars Tahar Rahim in the lead role as Sobhraj.”(wiki)
I wanted to post this 1970s exploitation style limited series – since it offers a particular sinister spin on the whole European or let’s say Euroamerican attraction towards the ‘fabled’ East. The East has been both admired and vilified (as exemplified in the previous podcast). The fabled and most of the time ‘rich’ (ik resource and labour force) lands of the Orient were coveted by colonial masters, each imperial power carving their own dominion and competing with each other with great brutality. The fabled East was pitilessly plundered (read about the original corporate raiders) and watched from afar with greedy, coveting eyes by the Western/Euroatlantic world entrepreneurs since Cristóbal Colón (who let us not forget tried to forge an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, and thus brake Portuguese spice monopoly). Since the hippie Flower Power revolution and anti-colonial liberation movements, various Western seekers started pouring in to Asia from the Beetles to Hollywood adepts of Maharishi Osho. It is important to realize that the 1960s where a backdrop for the ramping up and brutal US intervention in the Vietnam War, the vortex of Maoist Cultural Revolution as well as the 1968 student revolts. The 1970s saw the start of neoliberalism, the Oil Crisis and wage stagnation in the previously prosperous North, as well as start of a long Soviet-Afghan War (where the US started supplying weapons in its support of its anti communist Mujahideen factions). It was also the start of a very gradual liberalization of China under Deng Xiaoping that escaped the ‘shock doctrine’ that would hit Russia smd much of the Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. South Asia, Nepal, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia were crisscrossed by a multitude of rag-tag seekers. What they did not not expect is a serial killer.
Jenna Coleman as Marie-Andrée Leclerc
There is a connection btw the maligned horror sub-genre of slasher movies and the high-class serial killer genre (all the subsequent ones starting with Silence of the Lambs), continuities that have been remarked upon by movie critics (Natural Born Celebrities: the Serial Killer in American Cultureby David Schmid). The Serpent does not seem to follow either, and his outlier position as an international tourist hunter on routes of the Orient also marks him as peculiar. He does not fit easily with the usual US celebrity killer either.
French actor Tahar Rahim as Charles Sobhraj
Sobhraj is good looking playboy of mixed French, Indian and Vietnamese origin. He is surrounded by beauty and gems. He is constantly code-switching and socially mobile. He moves from the rich aristocratic Paris jewel buyers to the gutter life of heroin addicts. He never makes a secret of his own felt entitlement for his crimes as a price for suffering racist abuse as a half-caste during his childhood and so seems to avoid any culpability.
There is this constant combination of jet set glam, trash and stylishness – all the trappings of an exaggerated Playboy 1970s lifestyle. Almost every scene is full of it, from cocktails to vomiting afterwards. Disaster befalls all the seekers and tourists that fall for the Sobhraj scam. And his scam appears chintzy has a fake gold glitter, yet always seems to work. Poisoning is the preferred method – and there’s an almost predictable nauseating unwinding of tourists victims first enjoying, their new-found paradise to end up fucked up with horrific physical consequences after that. Such collapse is in total contrast with their purported aim – seeking spirituality and escape from Western commercialism and consumerism. There is a very dark and sarcastic turn of events to this series – where free hippies, young adventurers and hapless pleasure seekers rub elbows. All manners of seekers fall prey to Sobhraj (played excellently by French actor Tahar Rahim), again and again. They do not even manage to start their journey for Enlightenment because there is Sobhraj introducing them to an ugly very physical bodily reality, making them puke their souls out. I know it sounds kinda vicious and I tell ya it very much is.
Maybe it is just me or somehow I find completely ridiculous all the Wuhan Chinese COVID conspiracies – while none actually find a target in the actual global jet-set. In our pandemic imaginary – there is nor dark bio weapon conspiracy nor ablame to be attributed to the global tourists flying first class and cheap flights well before COVID became a thing. A group that most probably became the first super spreader wave, but also most likely contributed to the huge yearly carbon costs of the global flight fleets. There is a definite link between an increasingly connected world and a tourist infrastructure that somehow permits such easy transport. Mutating viruses find it easy to hop on the world tour, with lifestyles & vacation choices unwittingly facilitating such zoonotic spill-overs from their point of origin whether we like it or not.
The Serpent series encapsulates this double-edged reality of tourism – as a permanent tourist trap victim and also ubiquitous hard currency provider for the local neo-colonial economies that became dependent on such hard cash revenues. This is maybe the most disturbing 1970s legacy – a touristic avalanche that has continued to flow towards cheaper & less and less ‘secure’ territories.
The horror that awaits is dressed up enticingly, it has a TV familiarity, or Vogue cover style and grows on a hedonist-narcissist substrate that belies all those spiritualistic quests for the mysterious Orient. There is apparently no overarching ideology behind these heinous crimes and tourist assassinations (no terrorism, no religious fanaticism, no patriotic or nationalistic dogma). In the end, one can say it is just about money, hard cash in an economy that will soon be ruled by plastic money (credit cards). Sobhraj is also a new type of entrepreneur – a sociopath happy to show off and at the same time live at the margins, between identities. He’s living off the dreams and dissatisfaction of tourist, stealing foreigner (mostly Westerners) identities and switching between Paris and Bangkok centers with great ease.
One can offer retrospective rationalization or even attribute a thin veneer of justice or an overall vague anti-Western sentiment, yet at the same time, these poisonings happen just because it is possible, just because people with money actually seek out cheap thrills and an escape from Western mainstream culture conformism. He (the Serpent) poisons his victims with dysentery drugs (in one eps) and then offers to help them, to them even more sick and eventually get rid of them when they are of no use to him. There is of course also a detective story or a Dutch journalist that nobody wants to listen to initially and slow dawning of the fact that he might have a point about all the disappearing tourists. There’s also this greater neglect and actual disdain for the victims by the very governments and countries they fome from. All in all it is an incredible fusion of glam trash, geopolitics, sexyness, tourist haterizm and new age 1970s hell.
Gibney’s style is quite gonzo, yet also influenced by the Bunuel The Exterminating Angel approach that refuses a reductionist, simple analytical perspective and offers a more experiential one. I am tempted to say that pain -and tremendous suffering cannot be just measured – especially when it’s about the left behind & especially since it exists as such a vast scale. Pain has been coupled with blackouts with all those images of unknown worn-out people that rescuers just try to revive or try to inject in order activate their bodies again and again. It is impossibly sad but also important to face this reality. Probably this will be the definitive documentary on Big Pharma and specifically the so-called pain epidemic in the US. It is really a close look at how things got out of hand and how the slow creep of ever more powerful and addictive pills got legally distributed, prescribed and paid by health insurance companies producing some of the most successful IPOs at the stock market and undoubtedly the profitable businesses on this planet. One cannot ever ever imagine the level of craziness and impetus of pushing (better said dealing as in drug dealing) that 21st century Pharma has revved up. There is infinite growth and there is infinite painkiller growth.
First importantly to understand that initially what seemed a good solution – a transition from traditional very brutal mental health therapy in the 1950s – shock treatment and lobotomy regulars in asylums at the time to a more humane, chemical (also say alchemical in tune with the Alchemical Cookbook movie) had much to offer. What started as finding a viable & more effective pain relief for terminal cancer patients that suffered from chronic (or constant) pain – that lead to some groundbreaking discoveries such as long release/extended release medicine ended up being readily available pipeline for anyone ache or no ache, with terrible consequences for the everbody. The 4h long investigation details the way regulatory institutions and a few health professionals strove without much success to warn everybody, shut down producers and try and bring health justice to the people that have been overwhelmingly blamed (the fault lies with you the patient, the addict, the lab rat). Many died because of this readily available and very profitable pill production. Since the developement of anestethics, there has been huge resistance, generally unjustified since doctors really believed patients should suffer or that bodies get purged by suffering – yet the current sitution is at the opposite pole. Pain has been transformed into No 1 enemy, entire clinics, methodologies, pain scale assesssments and pain lecture circuits (including lobbies & pain clinics) have been mushrooming. The result was exponential, the more available the more potent these pills became. Also big ignorance, or willful ignorance to what was happening not only in the private industry labs but also on the streets, the way ppl started circumventing, trafficking and how addicts in turn organizing their own DIY rings and local networks. The reality is much worse than the largely dystopian and conservative vision of Brave New World – in that pharmocracy is still largely highly patented full of patent trolls with no R&D investment.Oxy and the rest did encourage a maintenance of status quo, yet with no equilibrium steady state in view but a continuous disequilibrium, of heaped vulnerabilities latched on and gamed by systems that rarely recompose or manage to protect a majority smashed by decades of neoliberal depredation and legislative loopholes.
What is important is that is also makes clear that this is just one sequence of the story – of opiates and traditional opiate derivatives from poppy that was grown since antiquity. Once industrialized and processed opium became a weapon to open up new markets and balance out imperial trade deficits, most famously and disastrously (for China) during the Opium Wars it became an essential part of modern medicine. Those wars that European imperial powers forced on others in order to make them accept the very lucrative opium traffic in exchange for silver bullion had huge consequences. Generally when the Opioid crisis is mentioned, there is a sort of amnesia regarding the laissez faire economics and open door policies that basically got millions of Chinese addicted to opium traded by the British from the Indian Raj. China tried to fight and destroy these shippments of drugs, but the result was war and gunboat politics as well as territorial concessions by the Chinese, a shameful situation that lasted till 1990s in the case of HK.
One memorable aspect is the whole sales aspect of Pharma (Perdue or otherwise), in my experience one of the most surreal and most brash examples of marketing anywhere, in any industry, including tobacco or arms deals. There is this sequence of training videos for internal use – tactics destined for sales reps ob hip hop rap lyrics, aimed at those that are supposed to convince doctors trough any means (including honey traps or regular bribes etc) that they should continue over-prescribing or increase the dosage. It almost reminded me of Bulgakov based movie Morphineby Aleksei Balabanov with the slowly depedent provincial doctor in Siberia increasing his dosage in order to keep others supplied and face the horrible situation. This in turn has been feeding other more potent drugs in a feedback loop that also ramped up heroin use addiction. The whole is just the alchemy of hell that somehow manages to inundate all sectors, all ages and all problems, especially the Mid West section, former mining towns, rust belt, Appalachia etc
Nothing is a conspiracy because, as always legislation seems to be written in collusion with the makers, where Pharma representatives meet in restaurants with FDA to draft laws around the distribution and safety of these medication. Emails and papers made public speak volumes, yet they always arrive too late. There is also the important art collecting and philantropic aspect of the Sackler family (sponsors of Tate, Smithsonia, Museum of Natural History etc Guggenheim), that denied all responsibility. What I like about Gibney that he does not focus or zoom in just on the founders, of the particular details of the Sackler clan, but takes a broad look into lots of other corners and examples that are not so easy to tie down. Interestingly (for me) is the emphasis on “passion”- in the sense that it truly seems to be a some sort of addiction going on with the founders or CEOs as well. It is easy to demonize Pfizer and just latch onto colorful vaxxer imagination, but it is harder to represent or imagine the vast legal production and pill mill explosion that does not need a virus or an epidemic, or CDC approval, only just incentives by vast amounts of in-flowing money and expansion from cancer patients into new territories and unfettered free access to new bodies.
Everything what they make is with “passion”, and the quote from Sackler Sr about Art and Medicine I find magical in its imbecile purity and mantra like appearance. It has lots of insiders talking, sales reps that where scapegoated and somehow spilled over all that information about whole logic (dare I call it corporate philosophy), of how things actually worked in practice not just on paper. How did this long term persuasion exercise continue and how distributed it got till the end or how hard it is to actually separate state institutions from private interests. Gibney does not exculpate the Sacklers, yet he zooms in order to widen the net and this I appreciate. Revolving doors, people joining the enemy camp happen all the time, at the same time, there is also some sort of permanent watchdogs of the industry, there is also enduring scrutiny by people who are not anti-science or anti-medicine or anti- pills per se, but regular almost barfoot (like the Chinese countryside dr) health soldiers, local family doctors or ex DEA employees on a crusade against Big Pharma. Like always corporation prefer to settle out of court, pay fines (that are merely symbolic in most cases) and never admit wrongdoing.
TimeSpace Warps 