181 CHRONICLESnexploitation inevitable. Like the aristocracy or the verynrich—or like “true” artists for that matter—they had to benrepresented as a special breed marching to a drummer thatndid not beat for ordinary mortals and blessed with the moralndispensations proper to special breeds. So the term “movienstar” has become a metaphor for an enhanced form ofnexistence, thereby making its contribution to the generalnuneasiness about the consequences of the public morality.nPerhaps that morality really is a conspiracy against thenpotential for a life lived at peak intensity; perhaps thenequivalence of glamorous achievement with unconventionalnconduct implies a standard of honesty and courage thatnrebukes the pusillanimous hypocrisy of the rest of us.nIt is not hard to see why the argument that it has a specialnobligation to censor its treatment of drugs makes Hollywoodnuneasy. It senses, of course, that more than the censorshipnof drugs is at stake. Hollywood as a role-modeling institutionnis ‘ulnerable to a variety of complaints, each of whichnposes the possibility of outside censorship or more insidencensorship than it likes to think about. Many of thesencomplaints stem from the antiestablishment bias whichnHollywood shares with literature, drama, and the artsngenerally. This bias involves the convenient conventionnthat the best and most profitable films are likely to be thosenthat counter (when they do not expose as fraudulent) thennormalities and pieties of bourgeois life.nWhen established stars bring their glamorous selves tonroles in such films, it is easy for them to have the effect ofnendorsing antiestablishment attitudes and conduct eennwhen the films themselves do not. Paul Newman’s sinceritynabout the menace of role-modeling drug-abusers cannot bendoubted, but what would he say about the role-modelingnpower of himself and Robert Redford in movies like ButchnCassidy and the Sundance Kid or ‘The Sting, in whichnconduct conventionally recognized as criminal is presentednin a favorable light, not simply because of the way thenmovies are made but because of the established star-povernthe actors bring to it? Noting this inevitable consequence ofnthe star-system, a modern Jeremy Collier might suggest thendraconian corrective of a production system in which allnparties involved are always utterly anonymous—the resultnbeing “pure” movies rather than movies that build on onenanother, like chapters in the ongoing biographies of thenactors and auteur-directors.nThere is another reason, however, for Hollywood’s uneasinessnwith the drug issue—a reason that is notnHollywood-specific. Drugs are by long-standing reputationnnot only liberating agencies but the natural enemies ofncensorship. It is quite possible to believe that some drugs donsome people a lot of damage but to believe at the same timenthat drugs are truth-revealers, that, to use Aldous Huxley’snphrase, they open “doors of perception” which repressivenauthorities would like to keep closed. This means thatnultimately, if often precariously, drugs are on the side of thenarts, particularly when the arts are valued more for truthtellingnthan for aesthetic excellence. It also means thatndrugs are on the side of pornography, which, since thenMarquis de Sade set up his adult bookstore in the Palais-nRoyal early in the French Revolution, has continued tonoppose all bourgeois censors with a liberating countermorality,nsometimes so persuasively that the pornographernnnis identified as a true artist living intrepidlv on the frontiernbeyond which is the domain of the forces of life.nThe list of 19th- and 20th-century writers whose work hasnbeen to a significant degree associated with drugs is impressive:nGeorge Crabbe, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge,nNovalis, Edgar Allan Poe, James Thomson, CharlesnBaudelaire, Francis Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,nand William Burroughs. Of course, some of thesenwriters have testified to the delusions and horrors ofnaddiction—for instance, Coleridge, De Quincey, Baudelaire,nand Burroughs. At the same time, there is a substantialnbody of critical and scholarly literature that exposes thenreligious, psychological, philosophical, biological, medical,nand social misconceptions that have attended thendiscovery and use of laudanum, hashish, opium, mescaline,nheroin, LSD, PCP, cocaine, the arious designerndrugs, and ecstasy (MDMA) as means of making morenendurable the deprivations and sufferings attendant onnhuman consciousness. All of this literature would seem tonadd up to a resounding endorsement of Kafka’s observationnin “The Great Wall of China”:nYou can hold back from the suffering of the world,nyou have free permission to do so and it is innaccordance with your nature, but perhaps this er .nholding back is the one suffering you could havenavoided.nBut as Kafka and the Baudelaire who wrote The ArtificialnParadise knew, few people are willing to run the risk of thisnparadox. There is e’ery reason to beliee that the search fornthe perfect drug—consciousness-expanding, loe- andnhealth-enhancing, reality-revealing, one-world-creating,nnonaddictive, and safer than aspirin—will continue apace.nThe search is one consequence of the acceleration ofnUtopian expectations in our post-Enlightenment world.nRepeated frustrations are no more likely to end the searchnthan the fear of venereal disease is likely to result innuniversal asceticism.nIt is interesting to see the part that drugs played in AldousnHuxley’s thinking about the possibilities of Utopia, particularlynsince much of the last part of his life was spent in anHollywood environment. Drugs get a bad press in the 1932nBrave New World, in which the drug “soma” is a dehumanizingnmeans of control, as well as in the 1934 After Manyna Summer Dies the Swan, in which the randy 17th-centurynFifth Earl of Gonnister and his mistress have managed toncheat time for two centuries by eating carpgut, a drugnequivalent. Up to this point, as one might expect from thenauthor oiThe Perennial Philosophy (1945), Huxley is on thenside of Kafka and the classical pre-psychedelic mystics.nBut with the 1954 The Doors of Perception (had thensouthern California episteme finally got to him?), Huxley’snfirst experience with mescaline revealed to him that thingsnas they are, as “Adam had seen them on the morning of hisncreation,” are hidden from us by the eliminative censorshipnexercised by brain, nervous system, and sense organs. Thennin 1952 came Island with its depiction of Pala, an idealncommonwealth in which a crucial element is the nonaddictivenmo^sfta-medicine made of toadstools—-“the realitynrevealer, the truth-and-beauty pill” that makes possiblen”boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning”n