Wasted: Performing Addiction in America

Heath A. Diehl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472442376
• eBook ISBN: 9781317000211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Departing from the scholarly treatment of addiction as a form of rhetoric or discursive formation, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America focuses on the material, lived experience of addiction and the ways in which it is shaped by a 'metaphor of waste', from the manner in which people describe the addict, the experience of inebriation or his or her systematic exclusion from various aspects of American culture. With analyses of scientific and popular cultural texts such as novels and films, scholarly or medical models of addiction, reality television, TV drama, public health and anti-addiction campaigns, and the lives of celebrities who struggled with addiction, this book recovers the sense of materiality in which the experience of substance abuse is anchored, revealing addiction to be a set of socio-cultural practices, historically-contingent events and behaviours. Exploring the ways in which addiction as an identity construct, as a social problem, and as a lived experience is always and already circumscribed by the metaphor of waste, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America advances the idea that addiction constitutes a site of social control beyond the individual, through which American citizenship is regulated and the 'nation' itself is imagined, demarcated, and contained. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, cultural and media studies, performance studies, sociology and American culture.

PART I Representing Wasted Metaphors

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547633-1

Chapter 1 Writing Belushi/Performing America: Addiction, National Identity, and the Cultural Mythos of “Waste” in Wired¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547633-2

1 A previous version of this chapter was presented at the Battleground States American Studies conference at Bowling Green State University in February 2013.

Belushi: Woodward. I used to do that guy.

Angel: Now he’s doing you.

Belushi: What do you mean?

Angel: He’s gonna be your biographer.

Belushi: My biographer? Bob Woodward??? I’ll go down in history.

Angel: Yeah. He gonna do for you what he did for Nixon.

Belushi: Nixon?

Angel: Gonna call the book Wired. Gonna trash your good name, hemo, from here to …

Belushi: I’m fucked.

—Wired (1989)

Larry Peerce’s biopic about comic John Belushi, titled Wired (1989), includes a key scene in which Belushi’s agent (under the pseudonym Arnie) attempts to persuade Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward to write the late comic’s biography. Part of Arnie’s pitch involves the form which Woodward’s research should take: “It’s not an article. It’s not even a series of articles. It’s a book. Belushi’s a book. ‘Cause it’s not just Belushi’s story. It’s a story about America.” There is one chief reason to doubt the historical veracity of this conversation—namely, because the “real” Belushi’s agent, Bernie Brillstein, eschewed any association with Woodward’s project under threat of legal action (hence Woodward’s use of a pseudonym). Nonetheless, the fact that this line is reiterated twice within the script of Wired—once tellingly in the final, climactic scene that takes place at Belushi’s deathbed—suggests that Arnie’s somewhat lofty analogy between Belushi’s life and the mythos of America performs an important function within the diegesis of the biopic.

In Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (2010), Dennis Bingham asserts that the biopic is centrally concerned with “dramatiz[ing] actuality and find[ing] in it the filmmaker’s own version of truth” (10). Following Bingham’s logic, I would suggest that this line asserts itself as “the filmmaker’s own version of truth” in Wired—that is, the central thematic conceit that simultaneously unites the events of the film (as much as the events of Wired can be considered “united”) and focuses the viewing experience. What, though, is the “version of truth” that Peerce asserts about Belushi in Wired? What link(s) does the film draw between Belushi and America? To what particular “story of America” does the film liken Belushi’s biography? And how does (or, Does?) one “story” lend insight to the other? Of particular relevance to the current study: How does Wired address the problem of Belushi’s addiction? How does the film frame that problem as a uniquely “American story”? And what, in the end, does Wired have to say about the experience (both material and ideological) of being wasted in America?

I would suggest that, in Wired, Belushi’s biography functions as a national allegory regarding America’s troubled relationship with addiction—that is, the film at once stands as a “[displacement] of language,” or as “a way of saying one thing and meaning another” (Tambling 6). The diegesis of the film simultaneously concerns itself with two narrative threads: one, Woodward’s research process that preceded the writing of the film’s source text; and two, Belushi’s own life-after-death journey through key moments in his biography. Within the diegesis of Wired, the filmmakers use this dual-narrative structure as a means of actively demarcating the contrasts between the subject of the biography (that is, Belushi) and the biographer (that is, Bob Woodward) and it is through these contrasts that the film articulates its “own version of truth” regarding the experience (again, both material and ideological) of being wasted in America.

As the son of Albanian immigrants who, in life, enjoyed a meteoric rise to superstardom unparalleled among any of his contemporaries, Belushi immediately fits the bill for an American Everyman defined principally by his ambition, his hard work, and his self-reliance. Yet within the diegesis of his own biography, Belushi is cast as an antagonist—as the chief adversary both to Woodward and to himself. To Woodward, Belushi represents an enigma to-be-unraveled through meticulous and probing research. To himself, Belushi represents his own worst demon: a willfully self-destructive force bent on moral and physical ruin. Woodward, by contrast, represents America and, more specifically, the classic American Dream mythos. Whereas Wired represents Belushi as addiction incarnate, Woodward is viewed as The American Patriot—the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist whose dogged pursuit of Truth and Justice previously allowed him to break Watergate wide open and, in Wired, enables him to understand why Belushi died and, of equal importance (at least in the film), what addiction “means” within the context of 1980s America. Both the print and the cinematic versions of Wired, then, layer onto the tragic biography of John Belushi a narrative of fervent nationalism built squarely on the shoulders of the “true” American Everyman, Bob Woodward (arguably the protagonist in both texts), and modeled closely on the classic American Dream mythos, first articulated by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America (1931). Woodward’s research allegorically mirrors the compulsive acts of surveillance and policing that actively imagine and simultaneously create the body politic and, as such, the film suggests that the metaphor of waste is deeply imbricated in the operations of American nationalism. In this respect, the metaphor of waste is at once a metaphor of containment that actively “ferret[s] out” and isolates the addict-Belushi as a “socially deviant” Other—one whose identity and behaviors must be “feared,” “vilified” (Alexander and Roberts 3), and ultimately displaced (all forms of ideological and emotional containment) in order to maintain the sanctity of the nation.

Bob Woodward's Wired: A Brief Production and Reception History

Wired (the biography) began several months following Belushi’s death, in the summer of 1982, when the late comedian’s sister-in-law, Pamela Jacklin, approached Washington Post reporter, Bob Woodward, and “suggested [he] look into” the “many unanswered questions surrounding John’s death” (Woodward 9). Jacklin was acting on the instructions of her sister, and Belushi’s widow, Judy—as Judy told Rolling Stone reporter Lynn Hirschberg in September 1984, “[Woodward] was my idea” (37)—who saw Woodward as “someone you can trust” (37), thanks in large part to his ground-breaking reporting (with Carl Bernstein) on the Watergate scandal. For his widow, Belushi’s death was shrouded in mystery; as Judy (Lucinda Jenney) explains to Woodward (J.T. Walsh) in the film adaptation of Wired, “There’s so much confusion …. He didn’t shoot up. I knew my husband and he hated needles. A doctor got out a needle, he would run from the room. How could he have died from a needle?” Not only did Woodward boast of award-winning skills in investigative journalism, but also his reputation as the “Watergate sleuth” (Colby) would—Judy and her sister, Pamela, felt—provide the “name” needed to gain entry to the insular worlds of Hollywood show business and Los Angeles law enforcement to procure the answers to the widow’s lingering questions (Hirschberg 37).

Although Belushi “was not a natural subject for [Woodward’s] reporting,” which to that point (and since) had(/has) “concentrated on Washington stories (Woodward 9), the two shared a common history, both having grown up—albeit six years apart—in the same small, Midwestern town of Wheaton, Illinois. In the introduction to Wired, Woodward explains that his curiosity about the unconventional project encouraged him to meet with Belushi’s widow, Judy, on two separate occasions that summer—first, in July in New York City, then, three weeks later on Martha’s Vineyard; these interviews would become the springboard from which Wired would be launched. At the tail end of the introduction to the book, Woodward identifies the key research questions that he sought to answer through the countless hours of interviews that he conducted with Belushi’s family members, friends, and associates: “Belushi could have been, should have been, one of those comedians whose work was measured in decades, across generations. But it wasn’t. Why? What happened? Who was responsible, if anyone? Could it have been different or better? …. Could success have been something other than a failure” (12)?

Even before Wired was published in early June 1984, the book was eliciting harsh criticism and sparking controversy in many corners of public life. At the heart of the controversy was Judy Belushi and her many questions about fidelity—that is, the accuracy with which Woodward represented “the short life and fast times of John Belushi” (the subtitle for the book that, in some respects, already points to the bias with which Woodward was charged). Ever since Judy read portions of an advance copy of the book, she has maintained that “[t]he man in Wired is not the man I knew” (quoted in Hirschberg 35). She has taken issue with the focus of the biography; as she revealed to Rolling Stone reporter Lynn Hirschberg in September 1984, Judy “had … hoped for a sympathetic biography. Instead, she got 432 pages of cold facts, the majority of them drug related and ugly” (35). She has taken Woodward to task for his superficial portrayal of her late husband (for example, “I loved John because he was warm. He was a very likeable person. He had a terrific presence, and Woodward missed all that.”). She has criticized the tone of the book as biased (for example, “I had expected the sadness in the book, but I thought it should be balanced by joy, the joy John had and the joy he brought others.”) and has labeled Woodward’s methods unethical and manipulative (for example, “He manipulated me. He essentially raped my memories. My mental image of John—which was very strong—was stolen and used as the main character in Bob Woodward’s novel.”).²

2 Judy Belushi’s criticisms of the one-dimensionality of Woodward’s portrayal of Belushi have been echoed on multiple occasions by disinterested book reviewers with no immediately discernible personal stake in Belushi’s legacy. Stanley Booth of the Times Literary Supplement, for instance, contends that “Wired is an honorable but ill-advised attempt to apply a technique that has worked for Woodward before. He has pieced together hundreds of interviews to arrive at an acceptable version of facts, too many of which related to bad or unmade films and grubby drug transactions. In the end we are left with the gloom but without the comedy that characterized Belushi’s short, fast life” (269). In a similar manner, Norman Snider of Maclean’s concludes his review of Wired by suggesting that “Woodward’s wearying account of Belushi’s short and desperate life will have to suffice until a more talented biographer comes along. The reader gets the distinct impression that the story would have fared better in the hands of a writer like Hunter S. Thompson … who has a good sense of life lived out on the edge. With the stolid Woodward in charge, the reader feels none of the exhilaration of all those wild nights—just the sodden exhaustion of the morning after” (54).

Judy Belushi, of course, was not alone in her criticism of Wired, though for the past three decades she has been the loudest and most vocal of Woodward’s detractors, at least with respect to Wired. Three days after the book was published, Belushi’s friend and Blues Brothers collaborator, Dan Aykroyd, called Wired “[e]xploitation, pulp trash” (quoted in Hirschberg 37) in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Like Judy Belushi, actress-director Penny Marshall admitted to feeling “manipulated” by Woodward, adding, “If he had said he was writing a book about John Belushi and drugs, no one would have talked to him. What would have been the point? John had bad habits. He died” (quoted in Hirschberg 42). Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts was more pointed in her criticism of Woodward, calling the journalist a “star fucker” and “an exploitative scum-monger” (42). Similar comments were echoed by actor and Belushi pal Jack Nicholson, who called Woodward “a ghoul and an exploiter of emotionally distraught widows” (37)—interestingly, a critique that finds its way, in slightly modified form, into the mouth of the Belushi character in Peerce’s filmic adaptation. (As Belushi confronts Woodward on his deathbed: “[S]tay away from my old lady. That’s what you’re waiting for. You vulture. You fucking bloodsucker. That’s what you want. ‘I Watched Bluto Breathe His Last,’ told by Bob ‘Pulitzer’ Woodward. And then I snaked his old lady.”) Perhaps one of the least emotionally-charged reviews of Wired hailed from author Tanner Colby and was published 29 years after the initial publication of Woodward’s biography. Colby is the co-author (with Judy Belushi) of Belushi: A Biography (2005)—a book whose genesis Judy Belushi explains as follows in her introduction to the book: “So why now am I diverting my energies to another ‘John project’? …. [B]ecause I once mistakenly gave the key to John’s story to the wrong person, and this was a chance to get it right” (Introduction).³ In “Regrettable,” Colby raises critical questions regarding Woodward’s professional ethics and credibility, asserting, “The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure of journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to cover secret meetings about drone strikes … you have to stop and shudder.”

3 In September 2013, news broke that the Belushi Pisano/Colby biography was being adapted for screen with a projected “spring 2014 shoot in New York.” In all of the subsequent press releases about the project, the persons involved in writing, producing, and making this film implicitly but very self-consciously craft an image of this film as the anti-Wired. Although the project is, as of this writing in May 2015, still in pre-production, it will be interesting to see how (or even whether) the resulting film treats the late comic’s addictions (Kit).

In response to much of the criticism that Wired has received, Woodward has hidden behind a very carefully crafted façade of objectivity. In the initial pages of Wired, Woodward marks the origin of the factual information contained within the biography, noting: “All the information in this book comes firsthand from witnesses or records” (10). As the controversies regarding accuracy and fidelity heated up—at one point, Judy Belushi charged, “People claim [the book is] all facts. It’s not all facts. It’s a bunch of people’s opinions and memories put forth as facts” (quoted in Hirchberg 35)—Woodward stuck very closely to his objectivity defense. As he revealed to Hirschberg, “I think the facts loom so large in this book that they outweigh any analytical comments I might have made. The facts told a tremendous amount. And that’s part of what this controversy is about: seeing and accepting those facts” (38). For Woodward, the facts surrounding Belushi’s untimely death were so self-explanatory that the biographer could forego any form of editorial commentary in Wired, a technique for which Woodward has often been taken to task in his journalism.⁴ And Woodward holds that it is precisely the unsettling nature of these self-explanatory facts that prompted Judy Belushi’s criticisms. As he told Hirschberg, “John Belushi died of drugs. And it’s awful and it’s sad and it was preventable. All but the ending was written. Judy said it many times. But she didn’t see the ending or know when the ending would come. And when it did come, she wasn’t there. I showed Judy the ending. And that’s what this is all about. I showed Judy the ending. It’s that simple and that complicated” (41).

4 For example, a writer for Kirkus Review writes that in Wired, “Woodward offers—without shape, depth, or viewpoint—the dankly depressing, morbidly detailed life of John Belushi,” concluding that “Woodward seems to have no idea what’s involved in turning bare facts (or reconstructed dialogue) into a satisfying biography. So the result here, though scrupulously documented, is a dreary, empty chronicle, with enough real substance, perhaps, for a New York magazine article” (Rev. of Wired).

Woodward in Adaptation: Larry Pearce's Wired

Promoted almost from the very beginning of its production history as “the film Hollywood didn’t want made,” Peerce’s Wired boasts of an origin story as convoluted and controversial as that of its source text.⁵ According to most accounts, Woodward began trying to sell the film rights to Wired as early as 1984, the same year that the biography originally was published. Although threats of blacklisting and, in at least one instance, physical violence by Belushi’s friends, relatives, and associates kept many prominent Hollywood producers from investing in the project, Woodward eventually sold the rights to his book in 1985 and, over the next four years, the project was inundated with unparalleled casting, production, publicity, and distribution problems that, at every turn, nearly ended the project before its cinematic release. Wired was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1989 and opened to a wide release in August of that year.

5 Nina J. E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: On Being Wasted in America
• Part I Representing Wasted Metaphors
• Part II Staging Wasted Histories
• Part III Performing Wasted Lives
• Conclusion: On Being Wasted in America—Redux
• Bibliography
• Index