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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
4 pages in length. Director Scott Kalvert's interpretation of Jim Carroll's book entitled The Basketball Diaries illustrates how drugs are all too often employed as a pinch hitter when life gets too hard to handle. Leonardo DiCaprio's performance of a promising Catholic school basketball player who - through a chain of temptation and bad choices - finds his life spiraling down at a pace faster than he can contemplate; heroin becomes the only thing that allows him to cope - or at least he believes this to be true in his distorted thought process, a pseudo-reality embraced by myriad adolescents caught in the grips of teen angst. At the core of this film is the obligatory lesson that drugs are not the panacea for what ails. Bibliography lists 4 sources.
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4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: LM1_TLCBBallD.rtf
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performance of a promising Catholic school basketball player who - through a chain of temptation and bad choices - finds his life spiraling down at a pace faster than he
can contemplate; heroin becomes the only thing that allows him to cope - or at least he believes this to be true in his distorted thought process, a pseudo-reality embraced
by myriad adolescents caught in the grips of teen angst. At the core of this film is the obligatory lesson that drugs are not the panacea for what ails.
"This drug scare tactic was adapted into many Hollywood social problem films, exemplified by a film such as Otto Premingers Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and it is
still prevalent in the 1990s as evidenced by films such as The Basketball Diaries (1995) or Trainspotting (1996). While these films may or may not include the semantic trope
of cinematically visualizing the drugs effects, their syntactic meaning (drugs are bad) is usually foregrounded by the decision to focus their narratives on hard addictive drugs such as heroin or
cocaine" (Benshoff, 2001, p. 29). The high associated with opiates like heroin impairs the brains ability to register pain, anxiety and desire
while at the same time enhances an artificial sense of contentment. As Jim becomes more and more addicted to the drug, he is less and less able to deal
with the reality of everyday life and often hides away in the false security of the endorphin-like response to his fix. Seemingly attractive to adolescent viewers, this artificial state
of being soon sheds its appealing demeanor by transforming Jim into a thieving, lying, killing machine who will stop at nothing to make his next score. This aspect, in
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