The Panic In Needle Park

Drugs are bad. Heroin is bad. People yell a lot when they are on this drug. This is the gist of Al Pacino’s first major role in The Panic In Needle Park. It has more substance than that. I’ll get around to that soon.

I decided to watch this movie after I became enthralled with the stand-alone episode of Girls entitled ‘The Panic In Central Park’. Two reasons for the attachment;
 1. The story is every girls dream. You see the dude that broke your heart, he wants you back, you wear a sparkly dress and dance, you leave him in the end.
 2. The story was so well crafted that it made me respect the character I cannot stand in any capacity the most; Marnie.

Being an avid fan of the show, I have always hated Marnie and have been known to skip through sections of episodes where it is just her making up some bullshit, selfish, white girl philosophy to the disgruntlement of anyone around her. The girl does serious skulls.

“Marnie is a piece of shit” was my basic motto in life.

This particular episode of the series focuses solely on Marnie. I was about to skip it until a few minutes in, her ex Charlie turns up. Played by Christopher Abbott, Charlie has manifested into the person that Marnie nagged him to be but to a sad extreme. He is gruffer, isn’t trying too hard to please anyone, has beefed out and has developed a Brookyln accent. Dat boy is dangerouzzzzz.

Charlie and Marnie go on this epic hang out in New York where they re-ignite the flame that they once had that always seemed inconceivable to viewers. They eat spaghetti, they dance, they fall in the water. This is what dreams are made of, Hilary Duff style. Except, pretty early on we realise that Charlie is a drug dealer and that he is doing drugs throughout the episode. #Heartbreak. What the fuck happened to Charlie?

How exciting my existence has been these last few months will boil down to what I am about to tell you. That episode gave me deep feels and I was still thinking about it three days later. I went heavy deep and started to think about the way I treat people and blamed myself for all of their bouts of sadness because of the dickhead things I may have done.

It got much. Too much. Then I got over it. I.Woke.Up.Like.This.

A few months down the track to now and I decided to watch the film that inspired Lena Dunham to write this magnificent piece of television; The Panic in Needle Park. It follows a stint in the life of Bobby (played by Al Pacino); a heroin addict, small time criminal and drug dealer in New York City.

Bobby meets a fairly naïve, whimsical and directionless woman named Helen and they fall in love. Eventually, for whatever reason, Helen shoots up heroin for the first time and then becomes an addict too.

As the film progresses, the two protagonists seem to depend on each other just as much as they depend on the drug. Their relationship with one another is just as toxic as their addiction to heroin and in some parts you are left wondering if they would be better off dying together or living their lives out apart from one another, but still addicted to heroin. This is the dire situation that the characters take us to.

Much like Marnie and Charlie’s, the relationship between Bobby and Helen is one that I never understood. There is no effort made in the film to show Helen would fall for a junkie like Bobby. Despite small musings from Helen about her broken relationship with her mother,this doesn’t seem to appear too much of a void for her to fill it in with a wayward and destructive soul like Bobby.

But hey? What am I to know about why people do what they do? I eat a chocolate bar a day because I give no fucks and maybe Helen didn’t either. It is what it is.

On a technical level, the cinematography in the film is supreme. There is a shot where Bobby sneaks in to see Helen at the hospital and the frame is set up symmetrically against the corner of a wall. Bobby walks into the shot and breaks up the frame, showing his disruption in an otherwise orderly world. Clever m8.

Real scenes of heroin addicts shooting up feature in the film that, alongside Pacino’s flawless and raw acting debut, adds a sense of realism to this otherwise American New Wave canon of a film.

Furthermore the realism of this film, coupled with the replication of the story for contemporary audiences in Girls, brings about the notion that it is likely that somebody you know is a drug addict. It provides layers of humanity to an issue that strips those affected of being recognised as a valuable human in society.

Unlike the Girls episode, where Marnie “got woke” and bailed on Charlie as soon as she found his needle, The Panic In Needle Park is just a super downward slope of neither Bobby nor Helen getting their shit together and being decent humans. They just drag each other around like Xena dragging Gabrielle’s body in an act of unwarranted “fuck you’s”.

In one scene, Bobby finds out that Helen is sleeping with his mate in return for drugs so he hits her. But then two seconds later he’s all good with letting Helen prostitute herself out to strangers so that they can both score. And Helen is cool with the beatings and the exploitation too. She’s a bloody infuriating and passive individual that, in ways, seems to be looking for an excuse to be sullen all the time.

In contrast, Girls doesn’t allow Marnie to be passive to Charlie’s drug addiction. Lena Dunham would in no way create a weak female character, no matter how idiotic Marnie has been throughout all five seasons of the show.

As the film goes on, Bobby and Helen’s situation just gets worse. Any glimpse of hope that you might see from them is immediately shut down from them constantly muttering shit, overdosing and sitting in the park doing nothing.

When Bobby and Helen buy a puppy in a bid to become better people with responsibilities, you just know that that puppy is going to have a sad ending as soon as they hop on the Staten Island ferry back to Manhattan.

Fuck. My. Life.
Fuck Bobby’s life and fuck Helen’s life too.

In the end, I just wanted to scream at them both. The final scene of the film ends with Bobby and Helen walking away from prison together upon Bobby’s release. You see, Bobby went to prison because Helen snitches on him to the cops to get herself out of trouble. He is pissed (naturally) but as the film fades to black it looks like the two of them will get back together again. SMH X 1MIL.

It’s like Bobby and Whitney, but less paparazzi and no intense embrace and no limo. It’s like when Paris Hilton and Millsy from Australian Idol banged; just uneventful and a joke basically.

And as I waited for the bus to my sisters house outside one of the seven methadone clinics in Frankston, I saw a Bobby and Helen and I wished for once in my life that Marnie would appear.
 Sometimes, you surprise yourself with your own thoughts ey.

What did we learn from this?

• Stay away from heroin.
• Stay away from people on heroin.
• Al Pacino was a babe when he was just starting out.
• Even if someone is babe don’t be with them if they are into shooting up heroin.

Catch.