One critical voice in the local discussion of the HBO documentary “Heroin: Cape Cod, U.S.A.” worries about the film’s possible impact on business. Won’t the influential expose of our heroin problem sully our pristine, bucolic image and cause people to think twice before vacationing and spending their tourist dollars here?
At first that complaint seemed frivolous to me. How can we be concerned with profits when lives are being wrecked? If the movie has a chance of saving lives, if only by calling attention to the epidemic, it’s got to be a good thing, right?
Not necessarily, according to this perspective.
One of the problems with the film is its determination to combat the cliché that heroin is a poor, black, inner city plague by showing that its happening here on bucolic Cape Cod too. The Cape is characterized mostly with shots of beautiful scenery and there is little attempt to explain socio-economic factors in our seasonal economy—lack of jobs, unaffordable housing— that may be contributing factors to the epidemic. (It’s not all the overprescription of painkillers).
Cape Codders need to know about the opioid epidemic among us. But yes, there is the irony that if the local economy is made even worse by the reputation we get in this film, that could presumably make the epidemic even worse.
No Comments