Spoilers for Netflix’s Painkiller are ahead. If you haven’t streamed the limited series on the 2023 TV schedule, you can watch it now with a Netflix subscription.
Right after Painkiller’s disclaimer is read, the Netflix series opens with a fire alarm going off in a massive mansion and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” playing in the background. This unique opening is how we are introduced to Richard Sackler, the man who led the charge to get OxyContin on the market and in the hands of anyone he could. It’s also what we hear the very last time we see the antagonist played by Matthew Broderick.
As I watched the series, I was really struck by how it began and ended with Broderick’s Richard Sackler by himself, in his mansion, with a fire alarm going off and the lyrics “hello darkness, my old friend,” playing. It was incredibly thought-provoking, and to me, it signified the loneliness this guy might have felt having made all this money but simultaneously caused an insurmountable amount of pain. The show’s director, Peter Berg, had a similar thought as he started out his explanation about this choice by telling CinemaBlend:
If you study up on Richard Sackler or other folks like Richard Sackler, who figured out how to make a whole lot of money by attaching themselves to a very lethal product, in the case of Richard Sackler, it was basically heroin in the form of OxyContin. He made billions and billions of dollars, he has paid fines which really don't amount too much to him or to the family when you're looking at how much money they have.
This book-to-screen adaptation is based on Barry Meier's Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic and a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe called “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” and it follows the rise and consequences of OxyContin. At the center of the story is Richard Sackler, who worked to distribute and sell the drug. He made billions, as Berg said, but the drug has also caused lots of addiction and death.
Thinking about the weight those consequences might have on someone, Berg explained why the opening and closing scenes show us how Sackler could have felt about what he had caused. The Friday Night Lights creator said:
[He] has to look at himself at the end of the day, in any eyes in the mirror, and he's all alone. And somewhere the sounds of those hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives, those screams have to be there. And for us, the alarm that you hear in the beginning and the end is perhaps representative of what you think someone who's made his money off of human blood like that might be hearing. Maybe not? I don't know.
Based on Berg’s comments, it seems like he wanted to illustrate how Sackler might have felt when he was alone and had a moment to contemplate the consequences of his actions in that massive house. To me, the alarm signified the persistent calls to put a stop to the selling of OxyContin on such a mass scale, and the Simon & Garfunkel song alluded to how this guy had acted in a way that left him all by himself. It’s a illuminating and fascinating choice, and opening and closing the show that way really made me think about what Richard Sackler did, and how much pain this drug has caused.
If you want to see if your interpretation of these two scenes matches Peter Berg’s, you can stream Painkiller now on Netflix.
