“Money isn’t real.” That’s the advice Fred Jung, played by Ray Liotta, gives his son George in the 2001 crime drama biopic Blow. Though more workmanlike than visionary in its execution and more of a noteworthy mid list film than a classic, Blow has an abundance of wisdom to share about human relationships, be they between family members, friends, business associates, or the sexes and generations in general.
In case you haven’t seen it, Blow dramatizes the tragic life of George Jung, who came from humble roots to become the highest-ranking American member of the Medellin drug cartel.
After seeing his blue collar father work his fingers to the bone for years, only to go bankrupt, a young George vows to avoid the same fate by any means. By cultivating contacts in the late 60s Los Angeles drug scene, he makes his fortune running marijuana from Mexico to Boston.
Despite making thousands of dollars a day, George isn’t satisfied. His increasingly risky behavior, foremost of which is a bad habit of trusting the wrong people, earns him his first stint in prison. There, George meets a Colombian drug trafficker who teaches him all about cocaine.
Upon their release from prison, George and his former cellmate Diego – based on real-life drug kingpin Carlos Lehder Rivas – secure an agreement with Pablo Escobar which makes them the cartel’s largest American importers.
Business booms throughout the mid 70s to early 80s, during which time George amasses a small empire worth $60 million. The honeymoon crashes to a halt when Diego learns the identity of George’s LA connection and promptly cuts him out of the business.
George goes straight and tries his best to be a good husband and father, but a joint FBI-DEA raid on his 38th birthday party turns him into a fugitive. Another stretch in prison leaves George stripped of his wealth, his family, and his pride. George’s fumbling attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter while planning one last coke smuggling job end with him receiving a twenty-year sentence. The movie notes that his daughter never visited him in prison.
Jung’s life was a tragedy in the strictly literary sense. There’s little question that George deserved the punishments he received, especially in light of the mayhem he helped the Medellin cartel unleash. His tragedy lies in the fact that he set out to accomplish his dreams and ultimately failed, but gained wisdom along the way.
St. Augustine wrote that the purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others. What lessons can we take from George’s life?
On the macro level, George personifies the ravages visited upon American culture by the Baby Boom generation. He extracted vast wealth while causing grave harm to his fellow countrymen and his own progeny without paying heed to the consequences. When called to account by a federal judge, his only defense was stating that he didn’t feel what he did was a crime. He even quoted Bob Dylan lyrics.
Now George is gone, and his once-great fortune with him. Not one penny remained for his Gen Y daughter to inherit.
But every reaction is caused by a prior action, and George’s Greatest Generation parents offer ample explanation for his solipsistic hedonist worldview. George’s mother is portrayed as a hyper-hypergamous gold digger who leaves his father whenever the family suffers a financial downturn, only to come crawling back each time. Even her relationship with her son is purely transactional, as she displays by complaining about how his unsavory profession reflects on her after ratting him out to the cops.
Not that George’s dad, whom he idolizes, entirely escapes blame. While touring his son’s multimillion-dollar mansion and fleet of classic sportscars, the elder Jung reveals that he knows about George’s criminal enterprise but condones it since it makes his son happy. After all, the father says, it’s George’s life, and he has no say over it.
Yet the viewer is left speculating that, had Fred Jung exercised some say in his son’s life, George might not have been languishing in prison while his father died and his daughter grew up without him.
One instance in which Fred putting his foot down might’ve saved his son a world of pain was George’s ill-omened marriage to a rival cartel officer’s ex-fiancée. Despite his stated fear of ending up in a transactional marriage like his father, that’s exactly what George does. Except his Colombian Boomer wife takes the step his Greatest Gen mom couldn’t and leaves him for good when he loses it all.
Which he does when his wife rats him out to police. If it’s true that you marry your mother, George is among the most extreme cases on record.
Either way, George’s mother and wife illustrate one major way in which the Boomers changed society – specifically for men. Fred Jung failed the hypergamy game but only had to endure moderate public embarrassment and confinement to the wage cage. Going broke landed George Jung behind bars and lost him custody of his child while saddling him with alimony payments.
That penchant for trusting the wrong people wasn’t limited to George’s love life, either. As mentioned above, confiding in Diego – against Pablo Escobar’s warnings – cost George his coke empire.
Escobar knew what too many men these days never learn: People who are ruled by their passions cannot be trusted. Their pledges of loyalty may even be sincere, but since their decisions aren’t subject to reason, they will act on emotion and rationalize their betrayal after the fact.
Almost every dramatic implosion of a once-promising counterculture operation results from those involved ignoring that hard truth. Anyone who runs any type of organization would do well to eject people who lack sufficient prudence and self-control.
One thing George’s dad got right was that his son would have excelled at any business he tried. The skills that made George a drug kingpin are the same that could have earned him a fortune importing luxury goods or trading stocks.
“Money isn’t real.” It took George 42 years to learn what his father meant. It’s not that money isn’t important. In fact, it’s necessary. But money has no value in and of itself. Its real worth is the goods it grants access to – and the most precious of those are the intangible benefits of starting and providing for a family.
With the Boomer economy dead and buried, finding the best (legal) business that matches your skills and dispositions is no longer optional. It’s rapidly becoming a necessity.
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