A Film Canon

Traffic is bookended between two television miniseries - the 1990 British miniseries that served as inspiration, and the 2004 American miniseries that it spawned - but, unlike either of them, it's relatively disinterested in providing any linear narrative connecting drug production, distribution and consumption. Instead, Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan organise their narrative around all the multifarious attempts to monitor drug use - administrative, judicial, military, medical, therapeutic, familial - making for a film that's more interested in tracking than developing character, as well as a distributed, rhythmic fusion and resolution of narrative strands that occurs largely as the moment at which surveillance overlaps, and figures who felt they were in a position of observation end up finding themselves observed. On the one hand, this produces the sense of second-hand sight, of seeing images that have already been seen, that's been a hallmark of Soderbergh's directorial style, in one form of another, ever since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and constitutes his own very original take on documentary (and there are cameos from a wide variety of actual Republican and Democratic politicians, as well as cameos from actors that are so brief, fleeting or incidental that the actors are effectively there as themselves, if not playing themselves). On the other hand, it dovetails the monopoly on drugs into a monopoly on information - and informants play roughly the same role in the film as drug dealers - suggesting that drug dealers aren't merely enabled by intelligence, but that they're a source of intelligence; or, rather, that their product opens the user up to the ambient pulse and proliferation of intelligence, information as a medium without a message, just as they open up surveillance, leaving the user wide-eyed, with nothing to see,  high as an unimaginable and unvisualisable aerial shot. It's at this point that drug use and drug dealing start to coincide, making for an ensemble drama that replaces Robert Altman's pot-fused, hazy ambience with a bleached, washed out oblivion that lies somewhere between cocaine and prescription medication. To that end, Sodebergh and cinematographer Peter Andrews bleach and color code the various narrative strands - and, while this does simply help to follow a film that's driven more by information than anything else, it also opens up the Mexican border as the linear narrative the film's given up trying to achieve, the war that's been lost. From that perspective, the Mexican border exists in two different incarnations - nostalgically, or at least wistfully, as something that can be seen, or witnessed in a classically sublime mode (and there are several scenes shot on location at the actual tollgate); and, secondly, as the harsh, tobacco-filtered light that is used for the Mexican narrative, and that transforms Mexico into something as ominpresent and impossible to witness as the sun. At one level, it's a vision of the United States revolving around Mexico - anywhere out of Mexico's ambit is shot through with arctic, galactic austerity - but it feels as if Soderbergh's refusal to let us squint our way towards some kind of separation, or differentiation - it's a film that defies squinting, that has already done as much squinting as possible for you - is part of a more radical project; namely, to present Mexico as a 51st state, or even to fuse Mexico and the United States into some new country, available cinematically, or at least digitally, if not yet available politically - the cartelocracy whose ambient, porous intersections rhythm and drive the film.