Last month at the Tribeca Film Festival I went to a movie called "Keep the Lights On" that was particularly devastating. The film follows a filmmaker and a writer who meet on a phone-sex line and embark on a nine-year affair, but one's drug problem (predating the relationship) continually interrupts their happier times, culminating in an intervention and a long, torturous separation. Again and again, the drugs get in the way. Early in the film, the addict (played by Zachary Booth) is unafraid to do drugs in front of his new lover, who he has invited over to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, but does so with a wink, because people in publishing love to gossip, he says.
Publishing seems no more gossip-prone than other occupations, but the remark passed through the fourth wall for anybody in the audience. "Keep The Lights On"'s writer-director Ira Sachs has openly admitted to the fact that the relationship chronicled was his, and this is his story. His ex's account, the 2010 memoir PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT AS A YOUNG MAN, portrays Sachs as "Noah," the patient and considerate boyfriend whom drugs make peripheral.
To be clear, Bill Clegg's memoir covers only snippets of the relationship, concentrating on the last binges that presaged the visit to rehab that stuck (there were others). There are also scenes from Clegg's childhood breaking up his already slim memoir with hazy recollections of growing up. I didn't realize before I started it, but I came to the memoir looking for some shape of an answer. "Keep the Lights On" shows the circumstances of trying to live with someone who is an addict, but it doesn't address how this man becomes an addict.
PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT doesn't answer the whys of Clegg's addiction, but it doesn't seem fair to hold the book accountable for it. That it feels false, though, the text has to answer for. I don't doubt that it happened as he said, to the extent that his memory allows, but I found his account of the fall suspiciously clean, occasionally even elegant. In an excerpt I first read in New York magazine, Clegg is bound for the Berlin Film Festival to support "Noah," only to get sidetracked by the desire to get high a few more times, causing him to miss his original flight and a few after. (This incident appears in "Keep the Lights On" from Sachs' perspective, looking around nervously on the red carpet at the point of a career triumph.) The details that stick out are markers of paranoia -- at one point Clegg imagines himself being followed by "Penneys" who have all boarded the plane intending to arrest him in another country -- and, alternately, the extraordinary accommodations Clegg can make for himself in order to continue using. The first-class tickets and hotel accommodations are collateral damage, and he doesn't "enjoy" them by any sense of the word, but there's an unstated luxury in being able to cloak one's addiction in these scenes.
Is that because I have been so taken in by the cultural idea of the crack addict that I couldn't focus on the turmoil and toll that intensive drug use has on Clegg? I would define that idea like this: "Crack addicts are poor, often African-American, unable to hold down a job and tolerating extremely poor living conditions, who use to get away from their misery about their lives in some sense." Clegg is the cofounder of his own business, well-dressed and affluent, none of which makes him less of an addict nor makes his drug problem more serious. Is it any less depraved just because it takes place at the Gansevoort Hotel instead of a stranger's apartment in the Lower East Side projects? (Clegg goes to both of those as he spends out some $60,000 in his bank account on crack, vodka, escorts and hotels. The number sticks. What is the function of that number? How does it fill into what we know of his addiction, and his personality?)
PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT follows its narrator into a dark place, but these details throw off flares that are somehow intended to illuminate that picture. In the end, I found myself asking: which is worse, to be driven by an addiction that ruins everything in your life that you care about -- or to be the person who loves the addict, doesn't know how to help him, and watches him self-destruct?
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