Desperate Lives (1982)

Bo Peep is dead!

I suspect historians look back on the 1980s as a rich period for the study of moral panics. Satanists, child molesters, pornographers, and, perhaps most importantly, drug dealers were lurking around every corner. If Ozzy Osbourne didn't get your kid, you could be damn sure some scumbag drug dealer was just waiting and ready to destroy little Johnny's or Mary's lives. Lock them up and don't let them go outside!!! 

Desperate Lives is a 1982 TV movie that represents peak 1980s drug panic. It revolves around a guidance counselor, Eileen, that begins working at a high school and quickly realizes that drug abuse is rampant. By the way, I won't spend a lot of time differentiating between drug use and abuse in this review, but I will note that this movie recognizes no distinction between the two at all. In this movie's world, any use at all pretty much puts you on a one-month ticking clock toward diving off a cliff high on angel dust. 

Our heroine Eileen tries to take up the cause of stopping drugs, but the other teachers, counselors, and administrators are deliberately indifferent to the problem. The film suggests many of the teachers are probably just "dopers," too. While Eileen struggles with the indifference of teachers and the bad attitudes of students, she takes a liking to a particular student, Scotty, who reminds Eileen of her brother back in Tennessee. Eileen makes Scotty her personal case, but Scotty is in too deep. Not only is he using, but he's been pulled into dealing by the slimy Ken (played by Sam Bottoms), and he learned it all by watching his sister, played by a young Helen Hunt in her Afterschool Special career phase.

The film is really just a series of episodes of drugged out kids ruining their lives as Eileen, played by Diana Scarwid, moralizes and tries to get the audience to understand just how much they should be panicking. If the movie were to be believed, high school has become one wild den of iniquity where there's almost no learning going on, pretty much no adult supervision, and drug use nearly everywhere you look. Frankly, at this high school, the DEA could have set up a field office. 

The whole point of the thing is to serve as propaganda to scare the hell out of adults and make them understand that they had better buy into the War on Drugs (and the need for such a war) or they were going to lose their children to PCP. It's patently ridiculous, of course. As a movie experience, this thing is almost worth recommending because you are almost sure to laugh.

The writing is awful and acting wooden. There are plenty of lines that will likely make you laugh (the heading at the top is one, but a personal favorite is when Eileen describes the school as "a retail outlet for the Columbian Connection"). Characters come and go - the sleazy drug dealer that is the villain of the first half of the movie disappears for the final act (drugs - or is it community indifference? - are the real villains here).

As an experience in the vein of, say, Reefer Madness, you could do worse than to watch this on a weekend evening with some friends (frisk everyone to make sure they're clean, of course - no dopers here).

As funny as it can be, I can't quite ignore just how much damage propaganda like this and the moral panic that it helped drive have done on a societal basis. One in four prisoners in the entire world is locked up by the United States. More than two million people are in jail, many for drug offenses or collateral damage of the drug war. I could go on and on. 

I realize, of course, the irony of moralizing about all of this in the midst of a review of a film calling out its overly moralistic tone. I get that I run the same risk as the film of looking hyperbolically self-serious and self-righteous. Letting it go without comment, however, would be easier to accept if the message of this film didn't still resonate in some very powerful places to this day. It's a little too easy to let it go as harmless trash not to be taken seriously, but it certainly was begging to be taken seriously at the time (and as a kid of the 1980s, I can say, remarkably, tripe like this was taken too seriously at least in some corners).

We can laugh and enjoy the irony now - for those of us that get the joke - but let's not fully lose sight of the fact that this is a film, no matter how dated and silly it might seem now, with a political agenda. And that political agenda, remarkably, still holds a lot of sway in some very powerful places. Have fun; just be aware. OK, kids?

Screened via Warner Archive Instant.