When Jordan Belfort—played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting—wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Lamborghini that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to quaaludes (and money, and cocaine, and sex, and giving motivational speeches) has rendered him not just a metaphorical monster but a literal one. He lunges at his pregnant wife and his best friend, played by Jonah Hill, and equally high; he smashes everything in his path, both with his body and with the aforementioned Ferrari. He gurgles and drools and mangles even monosyllabic words. He’s Frankenstein in a polo shirt.
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But what of the movie’s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun?
Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some?
Often prescribed to nervous housewives, a quaalude was something between a sleeping pill and a sedative. First synthesized in the late fifties, by 1965 ’ludes were being manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. The name “quaalude” is both a play on “Maalox,” another product manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., and a synthesis of the phrase “quiet interlude”—a concept so simple and often so out of reach. Just whisper “quiet interlude” to yourself a few times. Seductive, no? It’s the pill in the “take a pill and lie down” directive thousands of Don Drapers gave their Bettys.
Of course, housewives have children who grow into curious teenagers, and medicine-cabinet explorations led the children of boomers to discover a new use for the drug. Most sedatives are designed to take you away within fifteen minutes, but—as Belfort explains in a lengthy paean to ’ludes—fighting the high leads one into a state almost universally described as euphoria. “It was hard to imagine how anything could feel better than this. Any problems you had were immediately forgotten or irrelevant,” said one person who came of age when ’ludes were still floating around. “Nothing felt like being on quaaludes except being on quaaludes.”
William James thought the world was made up of two halves: the healthy-minded, or those who could “avert one’s attention from evil, and live simply in the light of good … quite free of one’s melancholy self,” and the sick-souled, or morbid-minded, “grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath.” In the end, to be of morbid mind is, according to James, the better option—the harsh realities the healthy-minded cheerily repel “may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” Still, it’s not easy, being a sick soul. James is one of the first persons to pop up in a search of “neurasthenia,” the catch-all term for those who suffered from nervousness, exhaustion, and overthinking in the nineteenth century.
Maybe William James needed a quiet interlude. Maybe something like a quaalude, something that makes you feel like yourself without any of the stress of actually being yourself, can be, for a healthy mind looking to spice up a Saturday night, something that enhances dancing and drinking and sex and honesty. But for someone like Jordan Belfort—whose desires beget more desires until he isn’t sure whether they’re real or if he’s wanting just to want—quaaludes were probably more an occupational necessity than a recreational getaway.
by Angela Serratore, Paris Review | Read more:
But what of the movie’s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun?Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some?
Often prescribed to nervous housewives, a quaalude was something between a sleeping pill and a sedative. First synthesized in the late fifties, by 1965 ’ludes were being manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. The name “quaalude” is both a play on “Maalox,” another product manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., and a synthesis of the phrase “quiet interlude”—a concept so simple and often so out of reach. Just whisper “quiet interlude” to yourself a few times. Seductive, no? It’s the pill in the “take a pill and lie down” directive thousands of Don Drapers gave their Bettys.
Of course, housewives have children who grow into curious teenagers, and medicine-cabinet explorations led the children of boomers to discover a new use for the drug. Most sedatives are designed to take you away within fifteen minutes, but—as Belfort explains in a lengthy paean to ’ludes—fighting the high leads one into a state almost universally described as euphoria. “It was hard to imagine how anything could feel better than this. Any problems you had were immediately forgotten or irrelevant,” said one person who came of age when ’ludes were still floating around. “Nothing felt like being on quaaludes except being on quaaludes.”
William James thought the world was made up of two halves: the healthy-minded, or those who could “avert one’s attention from evil, and live simply in the light of good … quite free of one’s melancholy self,” and the sick-souled, or morbid-minded, “grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath.” In the end, to be of morbid mind is, according to James, the better option—the harsh realities the healthy-minded cheerily repel “may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” Still, it’s not easy, being a sick soul. James is one of the first persons to pop up in a search of “neurasthenia,” the catch-all term for those who suffered from nervousness, exhaustion, and overthinking in the nineteenth century.
Maybe William James needed a quiet interlude. Maybe something like a quaalude, something that makes you feel like yourself without any of the stress of actually being yourself, can be, for a healthy mind looking to spice up a Saturday night, something that enhances dancing and drinking and sex and honesty. But for someone like Jordan Belfort—whose desires beget more desires until he isn’t sure whether they’re real or if he’s wanting just to want—quaaludes were probably more an occupational necessity than a recreational getaway.
by Angela Serratore, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: The Quaaludes featuring the DT’s album cover, 2011.
