Kira Mouniakov

In 8 films, ZEWEED celebrates the century-long, complicit, heart-rending and passionate relationship between the silver screen and smoking. A retrospective to broaden your perspective…

Reefer Madness (1936), or how smoky Hollywood turned cannabis into a diabolical substance

In Hollywood, it was tacitly acceptable to smoke a joint; most film workers were completely high from time to time. Yet on screen, the few films of the period dealing with the substance were fearsome, exaggerated pamphlets. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, a major anti-herbal campaign had invaded the sensationalist press, and was eager to attack the 7th art. As early as 1933, one production after another began to depict marijuana as an absolutely demonic substance. It was against this backdrop that a Christian religious community commissioned director Louis J. Gasnier to make the now cult classic Reefer Madness (Stupéfiants in its French version), originally intended for screening in schools. In Reefer Madness, a group of teenagers meet a cannabis dealer who, in turn, makes them smoke their first joint. The consequences are horrific and unimaginable: one runs over a pedestrian and, wracked with guilt, loses it all, ending up neurasthenic in an insane asylum; another nearly gets raped before being accidentally shot by her hallucinating boyfriend; yet another beats the dealer to death with a truncheon, while the last is plagued by a fit of spasmodic, uncontrollable laughter, before throwing herself out the window over adultery. That’s enough to give you an idea of the mood of the film and the extraordinary power that Hollywood screenwriters, probably stoned and in the throes of paranoia, gave to cannabis. In fact, in the 1970s, the film seemed so excessive that it became a cult classic. It became a midnight movie classic, alongside films like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977).

Activism: 0/5
Red-eye reduction: 5/5
Societal impact: 5/5
Film quality: 1/5

Easy Rider (1969), or how the hippies blew a new, heady and devilishly profitable wind into the movie industry

In a city like Los Angeles in the late 1960s, being under the influence of the hippie movement was nothing out of the ordinary, and you’d have to imagine that guys like real estate agents practiced Hatha yoga, led wild sex lives and were fascinated by such notions as past lives and astral travel. And yet, on the screens, there’s nothing new: stoned, late at night, always the same Westerns with John Wayne or the faded commissars of Felony Squad. So the release of Easy Rider was a realignment of the planets between Hollywood and its viewers, a minor miracle. The idea was simple: Dennis Hopper, a still only partially famous actor who had long been banned from the studios, received a phone call from Peter Fonda proposing “a road trip with two guys, motorcycles, sex, dope and rednecks in pickup trucks who shoot them up”. For a derisory sum, the son of the head of Colombia Pictures produced them. Shooting was chaotic: the script was only partially written, as their script doctor had left the company; Dennis Hopper, who had just been dumped by his wife, was high all the time and kept insulting the technicians; almost every scene was improvised; and, what’s more, Jack Nicholson was the only performer who knew his lines. Yet by the end of the shoot, they were convinced of the masterpiece. At Cannes, the film was a resounding success and, despite a lukewarm reception from American critics, Easy Rider exploded at the box office to become one of the most profitable films in cinema history. For the first time on the silver screen, marijuana is portrayed as a means of subverting the gaze, of opening up new perceptions; it is no longer merely dangerous but emancipating, creating an existential trip, allowing for all manner of formal and sensitive audacity in the editing. Easy Rider became the cult film of a generation.

Activism: 4/5
Red-eye reduction: 5/5
Societal impact: 5/5
Cinematographic quality: 4/5

Taking Off (1971), or how to teach worried parents a lesson about smoking pot

Buoyed by the success of Easy Rider, Hollywood producers abandoned studios and big-budget films in favor of young, subversive directors. Among them was Milos Forman, enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave, freshly arrived in the United States after escaping the bloody repression of the Prague Spring in 1968. He has already made three films with innovative narratives and irreverent tones. Taking Off is his first American film. Shooting began in the summer of 1970 in New York: wild casting, minimum budget, no stars, no barriers, no hairdresser, no make-up artist, no dressing room, no trailer. We follow fifteen-year-old Jeannie, who has run away from home to live with a hippie singer, and then her parents, who search for her and wander the streets of baba-cool New York in a three-piece suit and Chanel suit. Folk ballads and comical, satirical scenes follow, culminating in the climactic moment when a group of darlings are given a proper lesson in joint smoking. With Easy Rider, Taking Off laid the foundations of the new Hollywood. This generation of American directors, inspired by the New Wave and Italian neo-realism, would make a succession of revolutionary films, from Altman’s M.A.S.H. to Coppola’s Secret Conversation and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, that would clean up the representation of American society, while delighting the big studios because they cost so little to produce and made so much money. Little by little, the discourse of these young directors faded, digested by giants such as Warner or Fox, and the smoke of the joint disappeared, carried away by the icy winds of the failure of ’68, Nixon, Giscard or the Manson family, before the spectator finally woke up for the bad trip that was to be the 1980s.

Activism: 3/5
Red-eye reduction: 4/5
Societal impact: 4/5
Cinematographic quality: 4/5

Midnight Express (1978), or how to traumatize a generation of teenagers over cannabis

Ten years have passed since Dennis Hopper’s wild ride: the end of a dream, an enchanted interlude. Nixon has come and gone, the punks are singing “No Future”, the soixante-huitards are depressed, and the last flower power terrorists live hidden away like cockroaches. The worst is yet to come: Reagan, the golden boys and their convertibles, and the toughening of sentences in the courts… The “War on Drugs” is in full swing and, like heroin, cannabis has been designated America’s public enemy number one. It was in this global climate that British director Alan Parker decided to adapt the testimony of William Hayes, a young American who almost spent 30 years in a Turkish prison for having tried to leave the country with two kilos of cannabis, before managing to escape in circumstances that remain unclear to this day (by swimming, by boat, with or without the help of the CIA…). The screenplay was entrusted to Oliver Stone, who, as we now know, wasn’t always going to do things by halves. The overdramatization of the script gave rise to a misleading but striking image of Turkey, which Stone and Hayes themselves would later disavow. The prison is Dantesque, full of caverns and parallel tunnels; most of the Turks wear fez, which is a bit like putting top hats on 1970s Frenchmen; the guards are extremely cruel, often oiled and always adept at rape. So many racist clichés that the film was banned in Turkey until 1993. And yet, with its brilliant, innovative soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder and its tragic, existential power, the film was to leave its mark on the collective unconscious of a generation; a strange subliminal warning of the terrible punishments that pimply teenagers can expect when they smoke their first joint.

Activism: 3/5
Red-eye reduction: 4/5 
Societal impact: 4/5
Cinematographic quality: 4/5

Friday (1995), or how black exploitation launched the inexhaustible vein of stoner films and rehabilitated the image of marijuana.

After the vacuum of the 1980s, cannabis made a comeback in the 1990s. Clinton had just been elected; the law had been relaxed and, within a year, California would be the first state to legalize pot. At the same time, hip-hop was taking off to such an extent that some rappers were becoming huge media personalities, regularly appearing in films. Such was the case with Ice Cube, a founding member of N.W.A. who had already appeared in Boyz n the Hood – one of the first dramas to depict ghetto violence head-on (the film would go on to inspire Kassovitz’s La Haine in 1995). Ice Cube wants to do it again, but this time with a film of his own. He wanted to chronicle Compton, beyond the sometimes stale and sensationalist image of gang violence; it would be a comedy, a stoner movie. The pitch is simple and will become an inexhaustible classic: two hedonists (here, Ice Cube and the later famous Chris Tucker), one of whom (Ice Cube) has just been fired, spend the afternoon together smoking joints on their sofa. Add to this a disruptive element (it could be a gang of super-villainous Nazis who mistake you for someone else, or a big slab with a fast-food joint as a quest for the grail, or being outright hunted by KGB psychopaths…), and the two buddies owe 200 bucks to a drug dealer with a disturbing haircut who threatens to shoot them twice in the head if they don’t pay him back by tomorrow. This is followed by a succession of hallucinatory encounters in the ghetto, funny, often tender, always edifying, making the film a zany but sensitive portrait of South Los Angeles. For the first time, cannabis is portrayed in the cinema in an unconcerned, light-hearted way. Friday would pave the way for dozens and dozens of other stoner movies.

Activism: 4/5
Red-eye reduction: 5/5 
Societal impact: 4/5
Cinematographic quality: 4/5

The Big Lebowski (1998), or how the Coens made a detour into cannabic comedy

In 1998, the brothers’ reputation was well established: since Blood Simple (1984), they had been multiplying their cinematographic prowess, between implacable thrillers and macabre comedies, creating an unprecedented vision of the US, populated by magnificent losers evolving in nightmarish, Kafkaesque plots, until they won the Palme d’Or in 1991, with the Hollywood and introspective Barton Fink. Over the past few years, the Coens have been developing the adventures of Jeff Dowd (a nebulous L.A. producer and former anti-Vietnam War activist who, in the 1960s, served a short prison sentence for his protest exploits), an alter ego of Dowd’s, with the difference that he doesn’t play softball, but bowls – a much more epicurean sport. To play him, they chose Jeff Bridges, who seems to have been the Dude all his life. This cult character takes shape through a series of tasty details, starting with the too-small bathrobe he carries everywhere, his enormous consumption of Moroccan-style rolled joints, his obsession with White Russians and his habits at a famous bowling club where, throughout the film, he meets up with a gallery of hilarious energetics, including his best friend Walter Sobchak – a synthesis of hippie and gun enthusiast. But his dolce vita is soon disrupted by a conspiracy-like misunderstanding that has all the makings of a paranoid binge, involving neo-Nazis and a ball-eating ferret, an artist perched on a swing doing action painting with a particularly vaginal accent, or a gloomy philanthropist tycoon in search of his young second wife, whose kidnappers seem to have cut off a big toe that she had just carefully varnished. The Coens’ stoner movie, with its overtones of a Chandler novel, has become so mythical that a religion has been created to venerate the Dude and his way of life: Dudeism.

Activism: 1/5
Red-eye reduction: 5/5 
Societal impact: 4/5
Cinematographic quality: 5/5

Pineapple Express (2008), or how the stoner movie became as pop as a pair of Converse shoes

Almost half the states in America have legalized cannabis; capitalism has finally realized that the green stuff is more than profitable. In France, the law has been partly relaxed, and smoking a joint is no longer the exclusive preserve of young babas or old fringeheads. Most teenagers smoke between classes, and uptight darlings smoke their little “pétou” as if they were enjoying a glass of burgundy. This is the backdrop for Pineapple Express, the umpteenth stoner movie since the genre exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet Pineapple Express will go down in history as a vintage film. Seth Rogen plays a young bailiff, smoking joint after joint, hooked up with a chick still in high school, and best friends with his regular dealer, played by the eternal stoner: James Franco. Everything’s going smoothly, until one day, when Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), after a trip to pick up the famous “Pineapple Express” (a variety of cannabis with particularly strong effects), witnesses a murder committed by a gangster and a corrupt cop, just as he’s about to make a seizure. He is spotted and flees, leaving behind a joint of the famous strain. He takes refuge in his dealer’s house, but the two murderers, thanks to the joint, easily track them down. And so begins a hilarious, baroque chase in which the two best friends discover their many hidden talents and the strength of the relationship that unites them. In the U.S., the film was so successful that it dethroned the latest Batman movie at the box office.

Activism: 1/5
Red-eye reduction: 5/5 
Societal impact: 4/5
Cinematographic quality: 5/5

Inherent Vice (2013), or how to end this list with a final karmic trip

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon, a master of postmodern American literature with a particularly loose, psychedelic style, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is like a labyrinth in which it would be good to get lost. L.A., 1970s: Doc Sportello, a charismatic detective played by Joaquin Phoenix, smokes joint after joint and swims in the murky waters of an evil karmic plot with disarming relaxation. Cannabis gives Sportello a kind of sixth sense, and the plot moves forward, hallucinated, always on the edge between paranoia and extreme lucidity. For the purposes of the investigation (whose logical reasoning still eludes us, even after three  viewings) a gallery of strange, exuberant characters follow one another, like apparitions in the fog of a dream or an opium addict’s cabinet. : Jewish real-estate tycoon adhering to Arian fraternities, Thai masseuse with a talent for sleuthing, cocaine-addicted dentist, member of a heroin-selling consortium, John Wayne-style cops (ultrasensitive but Nixonian), and a heady ex-girlfriend as distant and impalpable as the clouds… Once finished, the film leaves us with the astonishing feeling of a devilishly logical whole, but as mysterious as a sequence of ideas after pulling too hard on a joint. Like some of the paths taken by David Lynch’s films, these detuned scenes seem to fit together more like bodies than ideas: sensibility prevails over logic, intuition over deduction, matter over structure, and so the whole seems incredibly organic to the viewer. In short, rarely has a film captured the feeling of being high so well, and rarely has cannabis seemed so poetic.

Activism: 4/5
Red-eye reduction: 5/5 
Societal impact: 1/5
Cinematographic quality: 5/5

By Bartholomé Martin