Screenwriter Will De Los Santos could just as easily have left us twitching in confusion– lingering pathetically like a doomed insect — vibrating anxiously to a slow death on sticky yellow fly paper, but only minutes before he turns out the bleached lights on Spun, he gives us a glimpse into the soul of a speed junkie. He knows the soul well. It's his own.
The revelatory scene represents a common practice for the film about a youngish crowd of losers hooked on a drug commonly known as crystal meth. In it, The Cook (the drug manufacturer – hence the name – and played by Mickey Rourke who surprisingly does some acting) reveals to his downward spiraling assistant and our protagonist, Ross (Jason
Schwartzman doing something reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate), a memory from his childhood. Ross is of course asleep.
His mother found some puppies that he had brought into the house and as she was drowning them she looked over to the boy, full of potential, and said, “I wish I could do this to you.” BANG. There you have the makings of a junkie.
Sitting in the theatre, I said to myself, “Finally, now I can understand why the characters I have been watching ravage their bodies and brains with a chemical slop that constipates, manipulates, sterilizes, and victimizes them to the point where it becomes difficult to recognize a human being under the scabbed, oily skin and lightless eyes.” They have given up on actual life – whether from a crisis within the context of their own lives or simply because they are diseased emotionally, spiritually, or mentally, and this is the alternative reality they have chosen.
The scene represents an anomaly in the making of Spun that prevents it from accomplishing something that was within its grasp