In spite of the sudden spike in nostalgia for the decade in popular culture, the ‘80s still represent that period during which we, as a species, accelerated our descent into the dystopian abyss of neoliberal globalized capitalism and its concomitant social malaise, wealth stratification and environmental catastrophe. It was the decade of Reagan and Thatcher, outsourcing, broken-windows policing and the government-sponsored crack epidemic. Both versions of the ‘80s—as the carefree decade of mindless, ignorance-is-bliss recreation and as the inflection point of neoliberalism as the new normal—are present, and often in competition, in the semi-autobiographical MDMA. These dueling conceptions of the ‘80s keep the otherwise conventional and too-happily-ever-after character study tense and worth watching.
MDMA traces Angie Wang (Annie Q.) during her freshman year at a fictionalized version of Stanford University in 1984. Angie is a hard-partying, high-achieving student plagued by one massive problem: she is quite poor and tuition is quite expensive. Being intelligent, industrious and just a little too easily tempted by rule-breaking, Angie decides to manufacture tablets of ecstasy in the lab where she works as an assistant. Not only does this secure her financially to continue her studies, it generates a great deal of notoriety and social credibility for her.
But this is not a simple story of a talented genius on the losing side of an unjust economic status quo using her singular abilities to break bad and screw the system. Even though MDMA features a few montages of the protagonist, in lab clothing, creating a neon-colored banned substance, Angie-the-student is not Walter White, nor is Angie-the-X-dealer Heisenberg. Angie is not a social outcast, instead making fast friends with her filthy-rich blonde roommate and easily hooking up with the campus stud (and supposed Olympic-swimming hopeful) months before she begins concocting ecstasy tablets. As a prospective underworld kingpin—and MDMA makes clear that Angie was wildly successful at moving her product in the local area—Angie is disorganized, reckless and easily ripped-off.
Things quickly implode for Angie and her nascent ecstasy empire. MDMA shifts, with alarming rapidity—so much so that the viewer will be left wanting more details—from a story of joyous metaphorical middle-finger-to-the-unjust-establishment anarchism to one of tear-saturated personal redemption. And not just for Angie: several of the film’s characters get full arcs where they are allowed to fuck everything up and then come back to fix it.
This is where MDMA induces eye rolls. The script was written by the real-life Angie Wang (who also directed) and it is just a bit too Disney to have much interest for most viewers, especially given the hard edge honed in the film’s first half. Almost everybody gets a happy ending after going through the classic screenwriting character arc of winning the audience’s sympathies, pissing away those sympathies through some heinous act and then winning the audience all over again through making good as a person by overcoming whatever defects caused the heinous act. This climatic finish where everyone gets a hug and each plot point is completed with a smile feels artificial and, more importantly, is just plain boring.
What redeems MDMA is the way it plays the ‘80s of the zeitgeist—ugly clothes, terrible music and kids in over their heads—against the actual historical ‘80s of social decay, exploding costs of living and oppressive systemic racism. Wang uses the former to critique the latter in a clever, and much-needed, way. It was the ‘80s, after all, that begot the end of unionized manufacturing jobs, the student debt crisis, mass incarceration, the corporatization of the media and the highly polarized and stratified US society of 2018. MDMA, rightly, does not want us to stop celebrating the decade in our culture, but it also wants to make sure we avoid remembering it through rose-colored glasses.
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