Obviously
on a project where you're
comparing two films, there should be a basic similarity in plot and
theme
between the two, and your job in the essay you write would be to show how those
linking
elements are treated differently and why this is so. The two films I
suggest for comparison both
deal primarily with substance abuse and obsessive
behavior among young adults.
The first is Love
is the Drug (also known as Addicted to
her
Love), from 2006, directed by Elliot Lester. During the summer after
graduation
from an elite private school in the LA area, Jonah (John Patrick
Amedori), who is something of a
nerdy social outcast at school, becomes
obsessed with his classmate Sarah (Lizzy Caplan), a
glamorous girl who is
part of an in-crowd of kids heavily into drugs. Sarah, her boyfriend Troy
(Jonathon Trent), and their friends Lucas (D.J. Cotrona) and Erin (Jenny Wade),
encourage Jonah
to steal drugs from the pharmacy where he works. Jonah gains
their supposed friendship by doing
this for them. Though Sarah has no
interest in him beyond friendship, Jonah imagines that he can
eventually hook
up with her. At a party, he buys roofies from a dealer and gives them to
Troy,
who is already loaded from cocaine and other drugs he's been taking.
Troy overdoses and dies.
Jonah, now that Troy is gone, manages to persuade
the (apparently) grieving Sarah to spend a
weekend with him in Tijuana. The
encounter goes horribly wrong, however, and Sarah demands that
Jonah drive
her back to California in the middle of the night.
SPOILER
ALERT:
Jonah's thefts at the pharmacy are exposed, and Lucas discovers that
Jonah was the one who
supplied the roofies that killed Troy. Jonah makes a
last-ditch effort to escape and to persuade
Sarah to run off with him, but
she wants no part of him, and Jonah stabs himself to death in
front of
her.
The second film is Contracted
(2013),
directed by Eric England. In this thriller/horror film,
Samantha (Najarra Townsend), whose
relationship with her girlfriend, Nikki
(Katie Stegeland), is faltering, attends a party where a
man called BJ (Simon
Barrett) slips roofies into her drink and rapes her. Samantha soon begins
developing the symptoms of a strange sexually transmitted disease. Her mother
(Caroline
Williams) believes Samantha has relapsed on drugs, while Samantha
is desperate to hide from
Nikki the fact that she had an encounter with a man
at the party (even though it was
non-consensual). Samantha's condition
worsens over a period of three days; she deteriorates
physically but doesn't
go to a hospital, because she doesn't want Nikki to find out what has
happened. In the meantime, Samatha's friend Alice (Alice MacDonald), who is in love with
her and
thus wants Samantha and Nikki to break up, reveals to Nikki what
occurred at the
party.
SPOILER ALERT: In a fit of rage,
Samantha murders Nikki when Nikki
coldly rejects her, then murders Alice,
attacking her like a vampire. The illness has caused her
to go insane, in
addition to destroying her physically. Having no one left but Riley (Matt
Mercer), a young man also in love with her, Samantha gets together with him, but he then
flees
in horror when the extent of her illness, which is a parasitic
infection, is revealed during
sex. Samantha, in a state of agony and madness,
her face and body deteriorating and disfigured,
drives off in her car and is
stopped at a roadblock, where her mother has joined the police to
find her.
The film ends with Samantha, now a zombie-like killer, lunging at and attacking
her
mother.
These are two films that deal very differently
with the same basic
themes involving drugs, sexual obsession, and the theme
of the Other. You might begin a
comparison by citing the similarities between
Jonah and Samantha as outsiders and their
predicament in trying to achieve
love and acceptance, which in both cases goes horribly wrong.
Also, what do
both of these films say about our culture and its specific concerns as they
have
developed over the past twenty years or so?
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