Traffic By Steven Soderbergh: Film Analysis

In his film, Traffic (2000), Steven Soderbergh provides a detailed critique of the US Government’s method in the war on drugs of stopping the supplier. In doing so, Soderbergh highlights the US Government’s lack of concern with providing treatment for drug addicts. He allows the life of the new leader of the war on drugs, Bob Wakefield (Michael Douglas), to serve as his mouthpiece against the attacking the supplier method of the drug war. He accomplishes this by flipping the drug war stereotype of a drug addict, poor African-American, into having Wakefield’s daughter, Caroline Wakefield (Erika Christensen), be the film’s representation of drug addiction. Moreover, Soderbergh shapes certain elements/stereotypes of the drug war to fit his agenda of displaying the problems with going after the suppliers without accounting for the demand. For example, Soderbergh fictionalizes actual historical events in Mexico to highlight its corruption without providing a palate cleanser of morals within its society to convey a
Soderbergh further conveys his want for controversy with having the scene of the African-American male drug dealer taking advantage of Caroline in her drugged-out state. In this scene, he has a representative of the main victims of the US government’s drug war, an impoverished African-American, rape the innocence of the American society, a wealthy white girl, to symbolize drug addiction being a problem without the boundaries of class division. Soderbergh use of an African American drug dealer in the scene coincides with Nekima Levy-Pounds article’s, “Going Up in Smoke: The Impacts of the Drug War on Young Black Men”, argument of the drug war targeting African Americans