Smashed and Wrecked and Gone
I was in narcotics anonymous in about 2005, and a chick who called herself Angel came in and said ‘I’m really struggling to stay off drugs at the moment, so I just watched Smashed and Wrecked and Gone until the sun came up.’ Those are three Buffy episodes in a row in season 6. Like, an addict who was in pain was finding these episodes so useful, they were an integral part of her program at the time.
So yeah, some of the best and most honest cultural work around addiction is in a teen vampire show. Go figure. I’m just midway through Smashed, Wrecked and Gone and I can’t help wondering where ‘Angel’ is now.
She changed her name to Willow after a month or two, announced it in a meeting. Someone else said, ‘Well, you know what happened to Willow,’ and the whole room in unison said (spoiler alert), ‘She became a goddess’. At the time, everyone was watching Buffy in addiction land.
I wouldn’t mention Angel/Willow due to the anonymity clause, but NA names come and go, and it’s been nearly 20 years since then. Whatever her government name is, I hope she’s OK.
Also, the massive slew of vampire content spawned by Buffy — Twilight and its companion series Fifty Shades, Charmed, What We Do in the Shadows, True Blood — do heroin addicts need to watch them? What’s their cultural heft? Personally, I would argue that it varies, and some of these shows are ontologically massive. Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows is one of the most useful cultural reference points in a decade. Someone says, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ and you say, ‘Bit of a Colin Robinson,’ and they know exactly what’s wrong with them.
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Back to Buffy, coming back and watching it again, all these years later, I’m seeing that we have two simultaneous addiction metaphors running, without much discussion between them? Buffy’s been in heaven and got ripped out of there by her friends, which is a great metaphor for early recovery. And Willow is in the most flagrant metaphorical heroin use, going to the rundown house where someone knows a guy who can do amazing things. When someone knows a guy, things are bad.
What’s weird is that in recovery, I’ve hung out with several iterations of the guy. Because I love a festival. And it’s really interesting to watch the guy. He has to be both quiet and loud — you gotta attract the people with money who want to get off, and also not attract the cops. You have to be attractive, like, you have to draw people to you energetically.
Whenever you’re observing someone, they’re observing you back. I feel like I give off this most godawful clunky clean person energy. The addicts in addiction and I — we have a weird relationship.
In reality, when you’ve got a friendship circle where one person’s in early recovery and another person’s in the downward spiral, they talk about it. They can’t not. I’ve tried to be friends with people who’ve left recovery and gone back using, and you can’t, there’s a static friction between you when you’re in the same room. You’re on two different paths, you can’t stay together. You’ll end up screaming at each other.
But in the show, they’re curiously parallel. One’s doing one thing, the other’s doing another and because they’re stuck in different metaphors — heroin is ‘heaven’ in one, and ‘magic’ in the other — the characters have nothing to say to one another. Also Buffy’s cross-addicted and acting out sexually (we’ve all been there, sweetie), which is, you know, what happens.
I guess, changing tack, that my other query about writing this world this way, is that using such a heavy heroin metaphor for magic is, how is this going to help socially in an environment where every church mom in the midwest is already thinking your show is a conduit for the devil, and that their children’s souls are in peril if they watch an episode with a vampire in it? ‘Oh, haha, you religious types are so extreme also magic is heroin and if your kid has a sage stick, they’re going to end up in the gutter with a needle in their arm.’
Question mark.
