Abstract
Recently released HBO documentary Meth Storm, directed by co-filmmakers and brothers Craig and Brent Renaud, opens with a high speed chase along a stretch of rural Arkansas road. The chase is headed by state troopers and DEA agents in pursuit of José, a suspected member of a drug dealing Mexican cartel. After some struggle, his red Toyota runs into a ditch, causing the car to flip over. “Get on the ground!” troopers yell before they apprehend the shaken man. A text card reads, “Over the last decade law enforcement has virtually shut down American Meth production … Into the void have rushed Mexican Cartels Flooding the US with a cheaper more pure Super Meth called ‘ICE’.” The documentary is set in Van Buren County, Arkansas, and José’s arrest is part of DEA Operation ICE Storm, executed in 2014 and headed by soft-spoken, yet determined DEA agent Johnny Sowell.
While documenting police efforts, the filmmakers also capture experiences of those arrested—local meth users. They follow the lives of the Converse family, headed by longtime meth user Victoria. Also filmed at length are sons Teddy, caught in a cycle of arrest and incarceration, and ‘Little’ Daniel, dismayed by his unemployment and plagued with bouts of paranoia. Veronica’s husband, who is suffering from diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver, and non-user daughter Maggie, who is often driven to occupy the role of family caretaker, are also featured. From police to policed, the filmmakers seek to present an honest portrayal of meth in the county. As co-filmmaker Brent Renaud stated in an interview with Rolling Stone, “We set up a dual-narrative, where both sides show what it’s like from their perspective and challenge stereotypes” (Killelea, 2017).
Despite this call for authenticity, as art historian John Tagg (2009) reminds us, documentaries remain situated within a discursive, cultural, and political context; they constitute framing, interpretation, and perspective, generally within formations of state control and governance. Meth Storm therefore captures and frames moments within the larger US drug war while also being, in a sense, shaped by it. As such, the filmmakers draw from—and potentially challenge—an already established methamphetamine imaginary which, as Travis Linnemann (2016: 5) puts it, “encompasses the many ways in which methamphetamine mediates the social world – how individuals imagine themselves and their relations to one another through this particular drug.” Produced in literature, television, news, and film, this overarching imaginary has predominantly supported decades-long US drug war policies by depicting meth users as violent and police as heroic responders to drug-related issues. Does Meth Storm challenge this imaginary, ultimately rejecting the stereotypes the filmmakers speak of? Does it oppose the larger drug war in which it is situated? Given the representation of police and users in the film, I am not so sure.
Take the meth user, often depicted as an abject subject. This depiction generally occurs, for example, in anti-meth campaigns like Faces of Meth and in news coverage of violent meth offenders. In an early scene, the local sheriff introduces the Converse family while employing a before-and-after mugshot comparison of meth use and corporal decay so popularized by the Faces of Meth campaign. He instructs the viewer to “look at the picture of Veronica [in] ‘08, then ‘09, and then look at her in 2011,” directing attention to her diminishing appearance. In a later scene, the camera follows a paranoid, blade-wielding Daniel searching his backyard; at one point he ominously stares into the camera, revealing his violent potential to the viewer. Surrounding such scenes include cheap beer, junk food, and broken down cars. Matt Wray (2006) refers to these as constituting stigmatypes: stigmatizing stereotypes of rural poor whites. The force of stigma is evident in several comments uploaded to the official documentary trailer, referring to the characters as the “epitome of trailer park trash” or claiming that “[a]ll these meth heads are pieces of shit” (HBO, 2017).
The meth imaginary also renders the rural as at once idyllic but now in a state of decay. Mapping meth throughout the county, Victoria rides passenger while pointing to meth consuming households in the area, confirming that “9 out of 10 people around here are meth heads.” Here, Van Buren County comes to stand in for rural USA—a place held hostage to meth. In contrast, a later scene covers DEA agent Jonny Sowell fishing at a secluded nearby river with his nine-year-old son in company. Refreshed, Johnny confirms, “It’s nice out, isn’t it?” as they walk to the fishing spot. Once settled, he speaks to the camera, “When he was smaller we’d be in a restaurant and he’d be like, ‘Dad, those people are on meth over there.’ How you used to always talk about how they’d do their mouth and they had bad teeth, usually.” Johnny continues, “The only thing you can do is talk to your kids, tell ‘em how bad it is and try to stay away from ‘em.” This parenting moment, nurtured in the secluded rural setting, offers a striking contrast between the idyllic rural and the ravaged, between the meth user and parent/police.
The documentary cuts back to the action in the following scene—Johnny is now waiting in his car during a sting operation. The film is filled with such scenes of police work, often following a general progression. After a sting, military-outfitted agents storm a suspect’s trailer. Once apprehended, the face of the arrested is often blurred, creating a sort of double-edged sword: their identity is concealed, yet they take on a sort of faceless “Other,” a stand-in for a plurality of meth users. Once in custody, police dig through belongings and apply onsite kits to identify meth. An officer informs, “If it [the substance] turns dark purple, you got methamphetamine.” Materializing color, the property incriminates the arrested. At the prosecutor’s office, police stage a trophy shot of retrieved guns, drugs, and money, smiling as they confirm the state’s ability to capture and seize (Linnemann, 2017). In the aforementioned interview, co-filmmaker Graig Renaud argued that, given the caring nature of Johnny, the “film shows a very good example of community policing.” Yet, these scenes invoke only the most militant of drug policing.
Although most arrests shown are of locals, the operation is not about local meth production. Rather, as on-screen text reads, it aims “to turn low level drug dealers against their suppliers and trace the Meth back to its source in Mexico.” This affords a bit of a shift: there is no concern over volatile clandestine meth labs, now “solved” from previous domestic policing efforts. Such international distribution is not new, however: meth has predominantly come from abroad. This, shaped by discourses of drug cartels and terrorism, has previously been used to justify massive counterinsurgency efforts. In Mexico this includes the 2007 Mérida Initiative and 2011 Mérida II. Although police and users in the film contend that Mexican meth is coming to Van Buren County “by the truckloads,” the filmmakers show only a single arrest of a suspected drug cartel member, that of José. And after his arrest a disheartened Johnny admits, “Even though we work these cases, these large cases, the Mexican cartel, when we arrest somebody, they just send new people within a few days to take their place. It’s never ending so far.”
And this is an important reoccurring point: while efforts continue, the police have an air of pessimism. Johnny confides that after 25 years of enforcing drug laws, “No matter how much we do we just can’t get a control of it.” Watching his son play baseball, Johnny points to a volunteer resident who sought recovery after arrest. He, however, recognizes him as the exception: “Wish we’d seen more people that we knew and arrested change their life like he has but it’s a small percentage; very few people are able to beat that addiction.” This dismay around drug war efforts is coupled with a larger discussion of job loss. Johnny lists the devastation wrought from Walmart’s leave, while Daniel confirms he “wouldn’t fuck with dope at all if [he] had a good job and everything.” An arrested man asserts: “All I was doing was trying to make rent money … I wasn’t trying to be no kingpin.”
Yet notions of deindustrialization or failures of the drug war are not fully embraced—the drug war remains. In his final scene Johnny confirms that they will indeed trace drugs back to Mexico with even more arrests; the camera holds onto his determined face. A following scene: Victoria cries after receiving a phone call regarding Teddy. He is in jail again—the drug war got him, not the drug. The dual narratives end at the same point: a carceral limbo—more arrests and more disappointment. It is emotionally exhausting, a fetishistic disavowal (Linnemann, 2016) that continues to disregard political and societal complicity in drug war violence while ignoring alternative possibilities and movements of resistance. Upon initial viewing, I took the “storm” in the title as referring to the storming qualities of meth, perhaps abstracted from social relations. If, however, the title refers to Operation Storm, then it speaks to a series of sociohistorical processes that are imagined, produced, constructed, and challenged. While the film is worth the watch, and I commend the filmmakers for capturing in-depth and at times quite critical perspectives, I hope viewers keep in sight the ongoing challenges made against the drug war, in rural Arkansas and abroad.