She was some kind of a Mushroom: GO ASK ALICE (1973)

It's a heavy trip, being addicted to 'drugs.' In the case of the 1973 TV movie version of the 'anonymous diary' GO ASK ALICE it's a mix of coke, uppers and downers, but mainly--weirdly enough--LSD. Moron says what, now? Do you know how hard I tried to be addicted to LSD in the 1980s? It's impossible. Those of us who pushed it wound up in many a detox, AA meeting, church pew, and psych ward, but there's nothing addictive about it, and the idea of junkies shaking and scratching as they turn tricks to pay for their next LSD hit is ridiculous. Heroin or speed or coke, sure. LSD and DMT are whole other ballparks, but these are clearly the drugs of choice in GO ASK ALICE. There's no mention of heroin, and when she's introduced to speed it's in pill form, which is the same thing as an upper, i.e. amphetamine, which she'd been taking long before that. So what the fuck?

I remember certain scenes from this film from when I saw it for an elementary school health class in the seventies: Alice (Jamie Smith-Jackson, who's excellent) in her cool hat, blowing off her nerdy high school friend to hang out with the cool kids; Alice and her druggie runaway friend on their knees in some twisted sadomasochistic game run by an older couple to make the girls beg for capsules of some drug, which I hope is not acid. Can you imagine wanting to do acid with skeevy adult perverts?

For all that though, this sadist flashback scene has some extra heavy grotesque resonance, like a promo for a dark drive-in film ALICE's target audience was still too young to see. But as with the drug references it's very (intentionally?) muddled. What pill does the creepy sadist have in his hand? What sick game is he proposing in his muffled voice, and why does one girl lunge at him while another spins around and races into the other room screaming? The effect is unsettling - as if the film is deliberately trying to upset and confuse us while making the crimes depicted impossible to duplicate, scrambling the details to an almost surreal David Lynch-esque degree (Lynch's idea of the dark sex-and-drugs underbelly of TWIN PEAKS, for example, has a similar after school special-run-amok lack of logic).

And I remember the scene where she walks in on her boyfriend with his other  girlfriend or a boyfriend, and so steals his money and grabs a bus to San Francisco with her Kay Lenz-ish friend. And I remember her outburst at a drug counseling group when a fellow addict seems to be enjoying his tales of glue-sniffing just a little too much (and then he offers her something called "a mixed bag"). I have also thought about what she said in that scene at my first AA meetings. In fact, remembering this scene kept me out of AA for longer than it might have otherwise. The grainy TV movie image of her walking away triumphant from the myopic addict circle was my badge of resistance against AA's cult reputation. 

This time around, a mere 30 or so years later, seeing it again last night on DVD, what do I notice? The relentlessly awesome music, William Shatner's crazy falling-off mustache and those deliberately vague, gray areas--the bait and switch way you can't tell if Alice walks in on her boyfriend with another woman... or a man? (see below) My fellow schoolmates argued over that for months!  Watching it now I can't help but think it's deliberate, to muddy the waters.

What Alice Sees before leaving

What we see after Alice leaves

One area this ambiguity and deliberate fogging device works (to promote childhood playground discussion perhaps of what really happened?) is family dynamics: The parents are oblivious to how zonked the kids are at Alice's birthday party, and they even give them champagne. Later they prove blind to Alice's pain, and dismiss her real concerns about druggie reprisals (after she rats out a tweaked fellow babysitter) with blithe speeches about standing up for oneself.

The result: someone doses her soft drink while babysitting (we're tipped to her being drugged when Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" starts playing on the soundtrack while she's still feeding the baby) and you know how the rumor goes about babysitting on acid. Alice locks herself up in a closet to resist the temptation--always overwhelming in acidheaded blond babysitters--to expose their unwitting infant charges to extreme doses of microwave radiation.When she comes to her hands are all bandaged from trying to claw through the tomb of the closet door, Poe-style.


But for all that--the parents aren't the bad guys, which is sooo 70s. Parents were expected to have their own lives, and help their kids best they can, but not become dicks about it, or get all micro-managing and helicoptery.

In the end Alice's trip to Wonderland here is too vaguely sketched not to notice; she's passed a soft drink at a party - and something else, with the words "button button - who's got the button?" said as a toast as they put the white cap-like object in their mouths. She notes in the diary voiceover it's the first time she felt beautiful, once she let go and symbolically died. Then later the next day after waking up late she writes that she won't do that ever ever again; she had a good experience, but enough. Seconds later her new boyfriend calls so she's off and running - doing coke a few short scenes later and hooked on a regimen of her mom's tranquilizers, "mixed bags" -- uppers and downers -- (though not speed apparently, since she does that for the 'first time' later). The confusion over what drugs she's doing might not be in the book, but i wouldn't be surprised. not that I doubt the novel's authenticity, just that THIRTEEN did it better.
 

Oh and can you believe that's Robert Carradine, above, as the sleazy druggie boyfriend? Awesome.

In the end, for all its vague twisting and avoiding the gritty details - GO ASK ALICE is fascinating as a cultural touchstone seen by nearly everyone my age when we were kids. It's the movie that taught us to fear psychedelics as much as heroin, coke, pot, etc. And it taught us that adults knew less about drugs than we did. Looking back it's clear the writer doesn't know what she's talking about. Yet ALICE still works - the performance from Jamie Smith-Jackson is spellbinding - she goes through so many changes so fast she barely seems like the same person, and there's no quick short happy ending for this girl, just one trial after another. But Alice endures, even thrives, finds herself... moving along - like the Airplane song goes, she is some kind of a mushroom, and so is the film surrounding her --both have adapted to thrive even in mounds of parental misunderstanding, hysteria, misinformation--in short, shit.

For if drugs were legal, she wouldn't be having these problems. Kids will always be snickering jerks to parents - but if the parents have the drugs, not the kids, snickering is not an option.

The thing is, if you take some acid and have a beautiful, spiritual experience, the next time you visit the suppliers you'll believe them when they say heroin and coke are even MORE beautiful. You trust the dealers over your parents since your parents are clearly just grasping at straws, trying to warn you off something they don't themselves understand but probably could really benefit from as far as escaping their plastic fantastic delusions. If you're taught to think all drugs are bad, then all drugs become good once you have even one good experience. If psychedelics and pot were legal, a whole new shift in the drug war would take place; the scummy leeches like Alice's boyfriend would be down to just the nasty ghetto shit like crank to make their living. But as long as you make spiritually transformative chemicals like DMT, psilocybe and LSD illegal it's like you're giving a bunch of sleazeball Manson-types the powers of Jesus and then wondering why no young people are snoozing through your grandma's church. Go ask Alice, I think she'll know you played yourself in trusting the sneakiest, most unreliable drug dealer of all, America.