The 'Fuck It!' Principle: psychoactive drug use in contemporary British Film

Rogers, Matthew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9935-2879 (2026) The 'Fuck It!' Principle: psychoactive drug use in contemporary British Film. In: British Popular Culture(s) 2026, 8th-10th July 2026, Falmouth University.

Preview

Slideshow (Slides from a paper presented at the British Popular Culture Conference in 2026) Presentation - The 'Fuck It!' principle - psychoactive drug use in contemporary British Film and Television.pdf - Presentation Download (58MB) | Preview

Abstract / Summary

This paper seeks to build upon a nascent research interest that explores how British filmmakers employ on-screen (or implied) depictions of psychoactive drugs use as a plot device that both establishes and destabilises a nationally specific logic within the storyworld of their films through the deliberate development of an expanded cinematic syntax, which positions the audience within an indeterminate, corporeally-inflected, spectatorial position. Proposing a linkage between specifically British on-screen depictions of drug culture, and an intoxicant-specific somatic responses to the readings of scenes of drug culture inside the minds (and bodies) of an audience suggests a correlation between the actions of other embodied forms of film spectatorship, such as horror (fear), comedy (hilarity), pornography (arousal), by positing that scenes of drug culture and drug taking induce what could be described as a ‘contact-high’ within the spectatorial pleasures of the audience.

The embodied psychological state of the central characters of many British drug inflected films often appears imprecise, muddled and does not always conform to strictly to a rationally held understanding of the best interests of self (akrasia). Characters in many British, drug-inflected films explore (through drug use) the dichotomy between that which they know to be in their best interests (enkratia) and that which they know is not in their best interests (akrasia) as a miraculous device to arrive at a state of self-awareness and fulfilment (eudaimonia) which is being contemporaneously described in this research as the specifically British ‘fuck it!’ principle. The conditions for this, (admittedly) superficially described, akrasia-tic type of decision making appears to be dominantly specific within British cinema and feels specific to nationally-framed, social, and more specifically, class-based cultural determinants as they auto-impact the physical bodies of
those experiencing them.

View Record (staff only)