SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: The first thing you notice about The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki’s follow-up to last year’s Reagan but the intuitive sequel to his Sundance prize-winner, the military history Why We Fight, is that the pulsing, expertly edited opening montage reminds you a little of the opening of The Wire. Images of an urban, criminal ecosystem—the drug dealer, the drug user, the beat cop, the arrest, the lawyers, the politicians, the courtroom, the prison cells—establish the feeling of the world we’re about to enter. In this case, it’s the deeply troubled world of the United States’ so-called War on Drugs, but like many of the system-busting docs at Sundance this year, The House I Live In is ultimately interested in showing us the ways we are all implicated in microcosmic patterns of dysfunction.
The second thing you notice is that Jarecki has chosen to insert himself into the film. The director’s doleful narration only grows more grating as the film’s 110 minutes drag on, each stilted announcement of a personal revelation about the futility of harshly punished drug offenses promising another 10 minutes of its redundant illustration. Though it features copious interview footage with Wire creator David Simon, which can only be good, I’m not sure The House I Live In contains enough new or surprising information to justify a feature—certainly not one of this length.
'What drugs haven’t destroyed the war against them has," Simon says, and indeed he has created several landmark series to prove it. The only time I felt a little bored or disconcerted watching The Wire was when I remembered how little dramatic momentum there is, ultimately, in setting up a fat drug bust. What will it actually change? Do I even agree with the premise?
Jarecki comes at these questions from a number of angles, most notably a personal one. He has tracked down the nanny who helped raise him in tiny New Haven, Connecticut, a black woman originally from Virginia, to ask her about the way drugs and drug offenses have affected her life. Nannie, as she is named, lost a son to drugs, and has family members and friends who have served the disproportionately punitive sentences judges are required by law to hand out. The House I Live In is most engrossing when it traces the history of those laws, exposing a moral stance on drug use stoked by vote-baiting political candidates looking to appear heroically tough on crime.
More provocative is a history of drug demonisation rooted in racial bias: Opium became illegal when the American government needed a way to imprison job-stealing Chinese workers; cocaine became the drug of black farm workers when they too were taking too many white jobs; same with marijuana and Mexicans a few decades later. In the 1980s it was crack, largely portrayed in this country as the drug of the inner city black, despite the fact that most drug users of all varieties are overwhelmingly white.
So why are American prisons filled with young black men, many serving multi-decade sentences for getting caught with a small amount of drugs? Today the answer has more to do with class than race, and an entrenched prison economy where cops get bonuses for drug arrests, communities are supported by supermax prisons, and politicians flex their muscles by making us afraid of drug users who on the whole are desperate people trapped in desperate lives—deserving of social and political compassion, in other words, not isolated cells. Now that poverty is hitting whites as hard as other ethnicities and crystal meth is devouring the Midwest, filling prisons with cornfed, laid off Iowans, the class argument has become manifest.
The House I Live In ends with a tortured holocaust analogy sure to please conspiracy theorists. It’s a somewhat unnecessary extreme, given that film’s most powerful weapon is also its most subtle one—the number of entrenched players (from cops to lawyers to prison guards and circuit court judges) willing to indict their own livelihoods. In them there is hope for a return to reason. A system is fueled by money but made of people, and as a fellow outsider once noted, the American people will always do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.
