Damn but you made a mess of things, waking up now in late afternoon, bleary and a mess, to reach with shaking hand for that warm foam-crusted highball on your nightstand, swilling it down before the gag reflexes can kick in, before you can get sick from the pain of hangover, and then floating through another blackout day. Delicious until blackout. Then... waking up again, a messier mess of things, blearier, shakier hand, for that warm... wait where the fuck is it?
Not a warm foam-crusted highball, nor even a half-finished beer, or snootful of wine, nothing. You fall out of bed, the gag reflexes kick in, and there you are, crawling towards the toilet with head bowed low. But sixteen hours of nonstop dry-heaving later, after the intervention, with the stay-at-home plan detox plan, maybe a pilfered Xanax to keep the D.T.s at bay, what then?
The movies. They can guide you home.
There are no-nos for hangover or detox recovery movies:
NO: gross-outs: eating, bodily humors
NO: bugs, jungles, tropics
NO: Cruelty and ugliness
NO: Loud sudden shocks, screaming, banging on pots, or playing harmonica
YES: Sexual heat, with good rhythmic second chakra breathing (realigns the dilated nerves towards pleasure rather than pain - it only takes some breathing and imagination)
YES: cold climates, snow, ice (think of the cool of the bathroom tiles on which you slept last night, to be close to the toilet for le vomi)
YES: Youthful love and tragic romance (you're very emotional)
YES: people talking in low, conversational voices
YES: the sweet freedom of immanent death (allays your guilt re: trashing today through yesterday's revelry)
But all things in their place. (PS - I've been sober since '98, but believe me, I've forgotten more about hangoversssh thann...)
1. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969)
Dir. Peter Hunt
The main thing here that's good for alcohol-poisoned penitent is the length of the film and the cold atmosphere: the frozen, snowy on-location Alps, raced around in by hard-to-shake bad guys in pursuit of our boy Bond--Lazenby, who's dull but not obnoxious, so it's quite all right. The trip to Blofeld's mountaintop lair is itself an amazingly cohesive journey, from car to helicopter to cable car, up, up, up. And then some girls girls girls and Telly Savalas laying out his big plan, cigarette in hand. And then down down down, via cable car, skis, one ski, ice skates, car, and on and on. By now you're pulse will be slowing and the relative leisurely composition of the first half of the film will ease you into the hair-raising second half. Bond is a comfort when detoxing, but nowhere near as comforting for the alcoholic in recovery than when sheathed in snow and supported by Mrs. Peele herself, Diana Rigg..jpg)
2. TITANIC (1997)
Dir James Cameron
See above for importance of cold - and as with the previous entry, length is an important thing. You need long movies, because being without a movie to watch or something to do is terrifying. Loneliness or the terror of being dragged out to another ritzy club are always beckoning. Also, your heart is like those icebergs, melting now with remorse, and other things. I saw this in the theater the day after New Years Day, which I spent getting royally sick as my girl tried to get me to stop booze cold turkey. She wouldn't even give me no weed! It would have helped with the nausea. That bitch. But the next day we went to see TITANIC and leaving the theater I could barely walk, my dilated nerves and heightened volatile emotions were so carried aloft in the grandeur and sweep I was a sobbing mess. I loved it. It's got everything a good hangover movie needs: ice, love, and in-the-moment live for today-no tomorrow philosophy. I could have done without the framing device... but hey. I guarantee that if you're in that dilated nerve ending brutal hangover state, the movie will work too, and now you can FF-right past that framing device opening with Bill "I never let it in" Paxton, if you want, though you won't have the wherewithal, so just SUCK IT UP!
3. I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1944)
Prod. Val Lewton
You wouldn't think a movie set in the Caribbean would fit this bill, too hot and sweaty, but this isn't the 'real' Caribbean. No one sweats here; it's a Caribbean of the mind--all shadows and palm trees, cool and dry and cool as a bone --and full of windy mystery as experienced through the eyes of a smitten nurse (Frances Drake).I love that no one raises their voice ever, especially Frances Drake, a few screams aside; I love the spiderweb latticework shadows of potted ferns and porch struts and harp strings, and through it all blows a gentle insistent leaf-rustling wind - which builds to a thrilling, satisfying chill in the midnight through-the-cane field walk with two zombies, wind calling them through skull sign posts and dry cane stalks. When we were young, brother and I watched this and Cat People nearly every night on a back-to-back tape for an entire summer, the fan roaring in front of the TV, amazed how well such apparently slight 'everything to the imagination' films like these could hold up under such heavy repeat viewing. I watched it again recently and was floored about how so little happens, and so quickly, like a half-remembered dream, and the beautiful opening with the Canadian snow outside the window and a Frances Drake voiceover; and the end with a local black wise man's voiceover on St. Sebastian, offering a prayer for the dead. Where did that guy come from? We don't see anyone with that voice, but it works - he's St. Sebastian himself, perhaps... either way it's as soothing and lovely as a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice for breakfast.
4. NADJA (1994)
Directed by Michael Almereyda
This was made by someone with a clear love of the genre, as it's structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, DRACULA'S DAUGHTER with shades of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, and BLOOD AND ROSES (i.e. CARMILLA). It's full of beautiful black and white film compositions, with occasional lapses into pixelated imagery culled from a then all the rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera (they used an audio cassette instead of a videotape). With a bad hangover you wont mind the blurriness of these stretches, which add a dreamy surrealist patina, and the rest of the film is de-gorgeous (a phrase we used back then, as Deee-Lite was pop queen of NYC night life). I couldn't get more than 45 minutes into the overbaked unoriginal pomp of Jarmusch's overpraised ONLY LOVER'S LEFT ALIVE but this film really knows its classic horror movies and has some interesting things to say, with great Gothic shots that wondrously fuse the downtown grit of NYC and the lighthouse expressionism of the old world. Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) is weary of her jet set life and longs to love her latest victim, a girl wth a great East Village apartment. The cast is gorgeous, and soothing to the eye, unlike, say so many mumblecore types, these people are both gorgeous yet intelligent, witty yet not snarky. And hangovers can be soothed by the beauty of Galaxy Craze as Lucy--a kind of mix of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy circa HIGH ART. There's also the beautiful Martin Donovan as Harker, Peter Fonda as a hippie Van Helsing, and Jared Harris, surprisingly punk rock sexy young, as Nadja's weird brother. It's clear in every frame that the Gothic expressionistic blood of Karl Freund, and the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the downtown cool of Abel Ferrara all flow through Almereyda (his contemporary adaptation of HAMLET remains my favorite film version.) I even like his 1998 film THE ETERNAL (Aka TRANCES), a weird Irish bog mummy tale that plays out like a hybrid SHINING-SZAMANKA coupled to that old Bram Stoker chestnut, filmed by Hammer in the 60s as BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB with a smattering of STRAW DOGS. It's not as good as NADJA, but Walken has a field day as a crazy uncle. See it once you're smitten with NADJA, since it's on Netflix Streaming... and also good for a hangover.
 |
| Galaxy Craze --- |
5. SPRING BREAKERS (2013)
Dir. Harmony Korine
6. THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957)
Dir. Douglas Sirk
Like Harper is a grim sequel to The Thin Man which was a sequel to The Big Sleep (i.e. Nick and Nora are what happened after Marlowe married heiress Vivian Rutledge), so The Tarnished Angels can be imagined as a sequel to those 30s MGM barnstormers, with Robert Stack as the Clark Gable daredevil pilot, and Jack Carson as the Spencer Tracy gone to ground, then there's Dorothy Malone, so smoking hot and well lit that you join the crew of leering sleazebags at the carnival that pay to watch her parachute down in a fluttering skirt. It's based on a Faulkner story and you will believe Rock Hudson can act as he plays a tipsy reporter smitten by Malone and in quiet awe of Stack's daring, but Stack needs flight "like an alcoholic needs his drink," and when his plane crashes he pimps out his wife to get a new one.
The flight races are spectacular, some truly amazing barnstormer flying going on. It's in black and white Cinemascope, a rarity in itself, but you eventually get sucked in, especially with a decent DVD transfer, which you can get via the TCM Archive and maybe nowhere else. Expensive, then, but worth it... even if you come away from it all feeling a bit down on life as a whole, you're sure one thing - these three leads show so much power they all but crack the film apart. The best scene occurs with Stack and Malone crashing on Hudson's floor and couch. He comes home a bit drunk, Carson is asleep and there she is awake and whispering to him, Sirk's gorgeous lighting shining through her white nightgown as she spreads herself along the couch, and it's so hot you almost pass the fuck out. Looks like we're... closed for the evening. I'd give Stack a plane too, and so would Rock, if we could have Malone in this film --and we hate ourselves for being so vile, and so does she. But damn... it just makes her all the sexier. That and the whispering and the live-for-the-moment all make it an ideal hangover movies
7. ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
Dir. Victor Heerman
8. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
It's regal, it's lovely, it's grey and blue color schemes soothe the spirit and of course Cary "no mother, they didn't give me a chaser" Grant. He soothes, too, just by being in nearly every scene, as does his grace in being seduced by wily agent Eva Marie Saint. Even the bad guys never shout but rather speak in silken whispers. The only loud behavior comes from Bernard Herrmann's aggro score. And it's long, too. Time enough to uncoil your misery. Tomb enough, eye. Lay on.
9. MACBETH (1948)
Dir. Orson Welles
I'm partial to this film from days of watching it over and over drawing pangs of solace from Macbeth's inconsolable guilt, his sense of letting ambition and his wife's poison words (she's the demoness in the bourbon bottle) draw him farther and farther into the morass. This is the movie for when you're trying not to think about the horrible mess you made of your night, and nervous system. Unlike Olivier's Shakespeare adaptations, there's no stifling air of soundstage no audience-theater silence - and now thanks to Olive's Blu-ray you can see the dirt on the stage sky - the vast cavernous set--with jagged mountainsides fresh from Republic westerns, like a spirit world, neither indoors no out, neither onstage, no off, with the thick atmosphere seeming to breathe and thrive, even when the Scottish brogues are so thick you can barely understand a word... but who cares? You can savvy enough to be moved and to have your emotional state of remorse and guilt reflected in great Elizabethan poetry, and Welles' voice is a constant chakra-rooting comfort. His Macbeth is as still as the night and as absolving as an Epsom salts bath.
_01.jpg)
10. THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)
Dir. Frank Tuttle
Veronica Lake is a great salve for any hangover, with her soft dream-like voice it's like she's deliberately trying to not wake up the people sleeping in the back room (when I was a child my dad kept us quiet at the grocery store by telling me there were people sleeping in the back -- I always think of that when seeing Lake's movies). Her chemistry with Ladd is palpable and the feeling of being pursued by laws and fears is sublime enough to make the endless coincidences and deux ex machinae more than bearable. -- and topping it off, the great Laird Cregar as the most silken of villainous stooges, his whole elegantly large form trembling at the thought of the violence he must inflict on his captive brings it all into perspective; it's just another night after all... you'll live. (See: Veronica Lake Effect).
 |
| Erich Sez: When in doubt, pick quiet, dark movies. |
See also the good folks at Modern Drunkard, who originally published my Guide to the Bender article (later reprinted in Daedalus Press's Decadent Handbook), and who have lots of great film reviews. Of course anything by W.C. Fields is golden, particularly INTERNATIONAL HOUSE and NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. There's also THE THIN MAN, APOCALYPSE NOW, and of course, I would imagine since again I got sober before it came out, but GHOSTS OF MARS. One look at this great, terrible, magnificent film - and I knew.
Mars, in the company of Natasha Henstridge and her stash of 'clear.' What better place to drink through the day? Come on, you Martian motherfuckers!