‘I don’t know if I can make any more films, and that worries me. There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin?’
This is what declared Danish movie director Lars Von Trier to the newspaper Politiken a few days ago. He was apparently drinking a bottle of vodka daily, and this was helping him to enter a ‘parallel world’ necessary to create his movies, according to what he said… So, he has been making all these movies under the influence, drunk or high? This may explain all these nightmarish scenes in ‘The Antichrist’, one of the most awful and disturbing movies I have ever seen. But now that he is sober, he believes he can only produce ‘shitty films’. Well, I am not a fan, his parallel universe is certainly not mine and makes me so uncomfortable that I don’t expect to step a foot in it any time soon, but this is beyond the point, is he right about this eternal question, does artistic creation require booze and drugs?
To go back to his examples, we won’t certainly know for Jimi Hendrix because he was still using many substances when he died, but the Rolling Stones? They are still touring, making music and they are certainly not using and drinking as they used to, now that they are in their 70s. Lars Von Trier’s attitude is actually dangerous and just a lame excuse to go back to any drug or alcohol if his next movie is not the critical success he expects … Looking at the perversity haunting his movies, it’s very likely that Von Trier doesn’t care about the influence he may have on young artists, but should we perpetuate the idea that drugs are necessary for creation? ‘The sex, drug and rock & roll’ is hard to kill, it’s an old myth, which certainly has some foundations, as I am well aware that my personal collection of books and CDs are full of art created by people who were under the influence of something, but there is a very serious responsibility at perpetuating this art-drug connection. How many of these authors, musicians, and artists are also dead, and how many died at a young age? Plenty of course.
After the publication of his autobiography last year, Keith Richards admitted he has cut down on the hard drugs, sticking to weed and wine, but he has also declared that heroin helped him artistically, looking at his drug days as some sort of experimentation: ‘I was very interested in what I could take and what I could do. I looked upon the body as a laboratory – I used to throw in this chemical and then that one to see what would happen; I was intrigued by that.’ There was an article in The Guardian a few years ago which was rehashing the same idea, ‘Can rock & roll exist with a sober Keith Richards?’ and it made me cringe… Someone like Keith Richards, or Iggy Pop, or Ozzy Osbourne – or any other aging and surviving rock & roll star who has abused drugs and alcohol for years – should be very prudent about what they say in public. Because they are still alive, these guys should consider themselves very lucky, they probably had some strong genetic predispositions, as most of people following a Ozzy Osbourne or Lemmy Kilmister diet would probably be dead after a few years.
However, when you look at all these rock stars, now that they are much older, they all have cleaned up! And they all went through the same story, they may have abused drugs when they were young but they cut down when the toll on their body and brain became too much… does it mean their creative career is over? Hell no! Ozzy Osbourne is totally clean and sober these days and has the honesty to admit he is puzzled at how he has survived 40 years of abuse, and think he would have not survived without the help of his wife Sharon. Iggy Pop is now drug-free, and has a very healthy lifestyle with a regular workout regime that centers on 40 minutes a day of qigong, a series of movement and breathing exercises akin to tai chi. So Ozzy may have invented the legendary Black Sabbath while on drugs, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges may have never been the same without all the drugs, but now that they are clean, they are still touring and rocking and… more importantly, alive, this si what matters! Nick Cave had never been so productive while sober, with a booming music career (even two with the band Grinderman), film scripts, novels… Trent Reznor went to rehab in 2001 and was totally subscribing to the drug-rock & roll myth: ‘I said I couldn’t be creative without [drugs]’. he told Canadian website Dose in 2007. ‘Really, I was afraid to give up drugs. Once I did, once my brain started working again, it dawned on me that I didn’t turn to drugs for creativity. I just tried to make myself feel not so terrible about myself. That’s why I did it. In the end, the drugs were crippling. They killed any bit of art that I had in me.’ Bowie got clean in the early 80s, he gave up on cocaine but has admitted to have ‘unbelievable holes in his memory, along with his mind being like Swiss cheese, and suffering emotional damage.’ However, he is still making great music in 2014, and he said it himself in an 2004 interview: ‘So many people find it fashionable to say you couldn’t write those things if you weren’t on drugs and all that. I just doubt that’s the truth at all, because some of the best things I wrote in that period I had already cleaned up.’
At the end Lars Von Trier is totally wrong, he may run out of bad ideas for his disturbing movies, but he should not blame it on his sobriety, there’s something very sad in believing and perpetuating this myth, it’s a dangerous game and I don’t want to lose all my future favorite artists.
