Note: This post is not for the weak. It's bleak. It's too real. It goes to dark places. Parental avoidance is advised. There are fun movies about drunks, high-functioning boozers like Nick Charles and WC Fields, which we drunks love whether or not they're sober, and there are movies ABOUT the reality of being a drunk, which we drunks do not, as they hit just too damn close to home. It's not 'fun' to be reminded of just how 'unfun' the end was (if we're sober) or will be (if we're not). That's why I avoided DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES for so long - it's not fun. Jack Lemmon + director Blake Edwards equals, you'd think, a high-old time, Billy Wilder-ishly named characters like Alana Sheboygan staggering down tenement halls in their sexy linens to get ice and bumping into the sailor from Nantucket, etc., and it's that expectation that makes it so damned uncomfortable. Booze is a complex issue, so essential to higher mammalian social functions, that we get positively genocidal without it. And it IS funny, I don't care what your sponsor says. It just helps to be on the inside of it, where the warm fuzzy deafness i.
Generally even non-drinkers can all be amused and a little envious of the 'high-functioning alcoholic' - some of us have no will power and some of us just have weak systems, addiction is--in the end--a disease brought around by a combination of depression, access to alcohol and genetic predisposition which makes alcohol the ultimate in self-medication. We didn't even know what we were missing until that first drink hit, and the clouds parted, the sun shone for the first time, like Dorothy walking out into Technicolor OZ. How can she go back to sepia Kansas after that? She can't. Once her gratitude fades the mundane grind of her flyover state life kicks back in. Only knocking back some corn liquor from Hickory's still (that funnel on his head in Oz clearly denotes that inside his hollow chest is fermenting sour mash) gets her shoes to at least glow red, the blue to fade into the sky, the trees and fields to turn green. But then, when it wears off in the heat of the next morning's chores, not only is the color gone, but the sepia tint looks muddier, the aspect ratio screwed up, the commercials endless and shrill, the evil Mrs. Gulch's dog-hating machinations that much more demoralizing. You better believe Dorothy would be tumbling back o'the shed to Hickory's still again, asap, soon as Auntie Em's back is turned. A few years pass and Dorothy has to go rehab, but Aunty Em can't afford it. So we all know what happens next. Everything's up to date in Kansas City, including the brothels and AA still only four years old in 1939.
Thanks be to whatever higher power you choose, the Wizard, Auntie Em, or just the Emerald City door knocker, AA is everywhere today and Dorothy would find a whole new kind of half-color Emerald awaiting her in the smells of Kansan church basements and coffee and (formerly) cigarettes,
In fact, during my slow inexorable slide towards the rubber room I've realized every step of my journey is reflected within a series of films that, held end-to-end, just might help me, you, or some sick and suffering, poor bedeviled soul on fire with thirst, figure out just where they're at, why, how, and who they should and shouldn't emulate, how they'll know whether they should try and stop on their own, or if it's just too damn late to worry. So read on, holy drinker. See where you're at, where you've been, and where you're headed and what it's like now as we examine the cinematic alcoholic scale:
1-5 EARLY STAGES
(slurring to sodden - the damage is still reversible without medication)
LEVEL 1. Scintillating
William Powell as Nick Charles
THE THIN MAN (1934)
Dir. W.S. Van Dyke
He's who we most want to imagine ourselves as if drunks, able to solve crimes while hosting dinner parties and always buddies with the biggest rogues and hottest girls while still able to hobnob with the upper crust and knockabout with the lower dregs. Watching the entire series a few years ago on New Years' Eve (see: Notes from the Class and Alcohol Struggle), it was saddening to see how even mighty Nicky couldn't quite keep up the pace, laid low by MGM's prudery (they give him a son instead of a refill--so saintly music is cued) and--the coupe de gras, wartime rationing and the insistence that class distinctions and reckless imbibing were no longer 'American.'
Telling Moment: SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN, Nick hears Nora shake a cocktail from across the busy NYC street where he's reading the race results to Nicky Jr., alerting him it's cocktail hour and time to come home. I can vouch from experience that almost supernatural sensory perception is no exaggeration.
Telling Moment: SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN, Nick hears Nora shake a cocktail from across the busy NYC street where he's reading the race results to Nicky Jr., alerting him it's cocktail hour and time to come home. I can vouch from experience that almost supernatural sensory perception is no exaggeration.
LEVEL 2 - Hilarious
W.C. Fields in Everything
"Don't think it's hard to swear off drinking. It's easy. I've done it a thousand times."He'd crack up probably if he ever landed in a dry county but he's functional and fun, seldom slurring and always in control. He's the drunk we dream of being when we're ready to give up on ever being sober again. He never winds up compromised (puking or passing out) in a way that would put his boozing in a bad light. Fields' hands don't shake, in fact his dexterity and eye hand coordination is almost supernatural.
I modulated that Fields quote above for meetings because, saying no to a drink in the morning, aware of the terrible toll, like a mounting credit card debt with gangster level interest, is something I used to do a thousand times before breakfast. After that level of willpower, after swearing it off the thousandth time that morning, who wouldn't deserve a drink?
LEVEL 3: Existentially Debauched
Terence Stamp as Toby Damnit
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1966)
Dir. Frederico Fellini
This is the beginning of the end, when the dark portent of death first appears, usually as a recurring face at parties who you're never quite able to make it across the room to talk to, or who just rolls his eyes and evades when you confront him (or her) about it in the parking lot. (which may remind you of the previous story in this trilogy, William Wilson, but let's face it... Poe liked to take a drink and was clearly the Level 3 writer personified). You start to look pale and bedraggled - you're in the zone of rock stars before they either die or get haggard and bloated (or sober). You can still quit but there's no one within a square mile around you who's not an enabler. How demonic and ghostly they look through your death mask haze! Ironic too, that the more horrified you become the more alluring the women seem to find you, and the more demonic they subsequently appear. The whole mating courtship thing becomes stripped of all its magical glimmer, leaves only a kind of bleached skull grin of want, the world around you becomes a grim cavalcade --humanity as blood-bag-wearing skeletons beckoning you forward into hell.
LEVEL 4: Falling Apart
Robert Mitchum as J.T.
In EL DORADO (1966)
Dir. Howard Hawks
John Wayne returns to the town where friend Robert Mitchum is sheriff when he hears he's been on a nonstop bender for a mere six months because of "a girl." Wayne and "Mississippi" (James Caan) concoct a vile mix of purgatives and stomach coaters that act as a kind of organic Antabuse to sober him up - and after a few days and a bath he's as good as new. He's even ready to drink whiskey again by the coda. Oh, to be this guy again, Erich mused as he gleefully loaded it into this DVD player for the zilionth time. Alas, Erich's problem had advanced much farther down this list before he even discovered EL DORADO.
Let's not forget that the main difference between all these drinkers might not be control so much as biology and habit. If you're relatively sober most of your adult life and then something happens like a girl who was "no good" gets off the stage, or you find yourself famous and surrounded by glad-handing moneymen and women into you just because you're known, your first round-the-clock drinking bender might derail you altogether.
On the other hand, most of us only get a few dozen benders before we turn into pickles as the analogy goes. And once you're a pickle, you can't ever be a cucumber again. And from here on in, that pickling starts.
--THE BREAKWATER MEDIAN--
This is where it stops being comical and starts to be scary. You can still stop without medical aid, but there's no easy way down without time, water, and/or a spiritual awakening an intervention. Friends, eye-hand coordination, verbal coherence, sanity, and money all melt away and trying to drink moderately is like jumping out a high-rise window and expecting to fall only one story," as the well-meaning sobesky brother puts it in LOST WEEKEND. This is the point where the cucumber becomes the pickle, and having pickled, can never be a cucumber again. The addiction has taken root.
LEVEL 5. The Shakes
Dean Martin as Dude
RIO BRAVO (1959)
RIO BRAVO (1959)
Dir. Howard Hawks
With Mitchum's JT in EL DORADO, alcoholism is treated as 'redeemable' as in he can drink whiskey again once the danger with Ed Asner's hired gunman and has passed we don't get that kind of coda for Dean Martin. But JT's bender was six months. Martin's in RIO is a two years bender. Trading on Dino's boozer persona, he's seen as a gunslinger good guy who was Chance's deputy until a no-good woman rode into town on the stage and left him a wreck. We find him, in the opening, creeping into back doors of saloons like a mangy dog, fishing silver dollars out of spittoons to buy enough whiskey to get him safely back into the gutter before the DTs kick in.
Note that while his sobering follows a similar arc to JT's (with a bath scene played for laughs that shows a vulnerable mix of catharsis and rejuvenation and that "he has a lot of friends"), Dude's is played much straighter and direct. He's not the main character so checking in with his fidgeting and sweating in the Presidio heat is like watching a man slowly come apart at the seams.
LEVEL 6: the 'moment of clarity'
Lee Marvin as Kid Shelleen
CAT BALLOU (1965)
Though played for laughs, there's a very real pain in Marvin's eyes that lets you know just how bad of a shape he's in. The similarity in dress to Martin in RIO BRAVO says it all. If there hadn't been a Joe Burdett issue to sober him up for (or who knows, a few weeks after the credits run), Dude might have gone back on the bottle, gone a-roaming and hiring his gun and contributing to his own legend until... there you go. Let's face it, Marvin won the Oscar for CAT cuzza one scene, and it might be the best illustration of the joys and perils of alcoholic benders ever in any movie, comedy or drama. I mean the bit that ends with that line by Cat's father, "I never seen a man run through a day so fast." Shelleen arrives at the ranch a hungover bleary mess, but sensing an easy mark hits up the old man for some fire water eyeing the targets he set up to demonstrate his aim on, and the old guy realizes it, "you'd like a drink more than a kick in the head," wouldn't ya? A huge swig later and he's filling them with confidence as he fires perfectly, seems to inhabit a cool sober bravado facade (almost like he's back at level one, the Nick Charles charmer) and then finishes the pint, throws it into the air to fire at it, but misses and by the time it lands, he's a wreck again. This is about right for this dangerous level - the one right before the point of no return. And Marvin, a lifelong drinker and no stranger to black-outs and bad choices (including falling victim to clinging enabling women), nails it perfectly.
LEVEL 7: Sandbags off!
Ray Milland as Don Birnim
THE LOST WEEKEND (1945)
Dir. Billy Wilder
Putting Don at level 7 is actually a bit arbitrary as Don's alcoholism runs the gamut, a greatest hits of degradation, anchored as it is by two things: one being he starts the film more or less sober, albeit in 'white knuckle' city and the other that he's got no money: his brother and his girl are both conspiring to get him out of the city for a week of fresh air, and they know too well that with a twenty in his pocket he'll sneak off on a spree. He fakes them out by sending the pair off on a music concert without him, so he can relax and get his head clear before the train leaves, and then luckily and amazingly, the maid comes for her week's money, hidden in the sugar bowl, like manna. But of course expecting that a pair of bottles or a trip to the bar will be enough is foolhardy. Within a few scenes he's stealing money to pay bar tabs at strangely swanky joints and his weekend odysseyThis was the movie where Max and I rented it one weekend at LBI and we both knew this movie was really about me, because this had my number right down to the neighborhood haunts, struggling writer 'career,' and hunched walking style. I hadn't yet had the DTs, but I'd hallucinated plenty as a college psychedelics advocate, so was pretty sure that the bat-mouse hallucination wasn't quite 'right' but yet another failure on the part of live action photography to capture the kaleidoscope patterning of genuine pareidolia and third eye blazing. Also, you wouldn't see just one bat and one rat, you'd see hordes of them in geometric patterns, ala the pareidolia amok quality of a bad acid trip. (I later verified this).
Still, the theremin score is a good place to start capturing the buzzing and mounting panic and unease that comes with alcoholic withdrawal. Elsewhere things seem kind of cloying (the dance of the empty raincoats with the bottle of rye in the pocket (what kind of idiot drunk wouldn't have brought the rye into the concert with him, that's why it's shaped like that, son! For back pockets or the inside of a sport jacket to be snuck from during concerts and sporting games and etc).
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| When it's good it's fleeting |
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| When it's bad it's forever |
Further reading: X is for Xanax, that's good enough for X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes
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| Norman goes for the long swim in A STAR IS BORN (1954) |
--POINT OF NO RETURN---
At first, morning pick-me-ups are the exception not the rule: mimosas at brunch and the occasional A.M. Ale instead of cornflakes, but then, somewhere along the line, it becomes a habit, then a necessity. Your body rocks and shakes without it. Now you have no more than a half hour after waking up to drink something or you'll be retching and spasming all day. Why fight it? Heaven and Hell are before you. And Hell is the natural habitat, the base line, the zero point. Drink within the next and the day is heaven, don't and it's scalding horrible hell. Is there really a choice? Maybe if you're stubborn and masochistic you can last til... when? Lunch? When each minute is a scalding eternity, when just holding a cup of morning coffee in your hand, without spilling it, becomes an impossible dream, is the long road back really worth it? The far shore seems so much closer you could reach out and touch its skull reflection in the gossamer waters. 
Level 7 1/2: Early Check-out
John Barrymore as Larry Renault
DINNER AT EIGHT (1933)
Dir. George Cukor
As a fading Broadway A-lister, on the cusp of relic-hood and notoriously drunk and difficult to work with, Larry Renault is clearly modeled after Barrymore himself, who showed with this and the next year's TWENTIETH CENTURY that he could play on his own egotistical foibles with merciless savagery. Here his shakes continually threaten to rear up and destroy him as the busboy can no longer find bootleggers willing to accept his jewels and silver frames in trade, and the hotelier is demanding payment for an extravagant room he hasn't been able to afford in some time. In offing himself rather than stagger forward as a beachcomber and/or an eventual carny geek or duffer playing bridge with Norma's fellow waxworks puts him in a class Hollywood knows too well, the suicides, those who can't bear the combination failed career and mounting booze problem. He likes that Paula loves him but how can he respect her for it? He hates himself yet puts himself above all others, what we in AA call being 'the piece of shit at the center of the universe.' Loving her in returning is like pretending to love a shimmering phantom as he's already left the present and is still strutting the hall of mirrors past, setting the scene for his suicide as if lighting a hot set. Lock him in an upscale clinic with fading stars like Norman Maine (A STAR IS BORN) and/or lionized authors like Sterling Hayden in THE LONG GOODBYE or else let him take that long swim in peace. Either way, he's already gone. (As for me, I got lucky and was rescued by a colorized showing of NIGHT OF THE IGUANA Someone saved my life that night, or rather four wise drunkards did, all working in perfect harmony: Burton, Williams, Huston, and Capt. Morgan).
LEVEL 8: Acceptance
John Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew
BARTON FINK (1991)
Dir. Coen Bros.
A southern gentleman clearly modeled on Faulkner, Mayhew is the ultimate in Algonquin 'never meet your hero' types for Barton. Faulkner too was man who undoubtedly spent some time puking in the bathrooms of the big movie studios and having writer bungalow DTs while some cute assistant picked up after him like a tyrannical toddler. The Coens get all that stuff right and we all wish for (or maybe were lucky enough once to have) a Judy Davis to trail after us like a combination stenographer-nurse-lover-enabler.
At the same time we see the hell that such a place as Hollywood in its Golden Age really was, a juggernaut machine so vast and ever-moving that as a writer you could be unwittingly working on the script of someone else's dream the next bungalow over and not even know they're there, rewriting each other's work to fit the mercurial mood of hack directors too drunk to tell which end of the camera is up. Then again, when you're this far gone you live mainly for that ever-shrinking space between cocktail hour's blessed arrival and that moment when you realize you're too wasted to get out of your chair, let alone make it to the table read. Lucky for you, being alcoholic is just part of being 'eccentric' (like being a Communist before and during the War)/ Provided you had a good enabler, literary cred, a decent salary and safe space for your behavior (it's expected of Hollywood writers and where are they safer than inside the hermetic universe of a massive studio lot? No drunk driving tickets with chauffeured golf carts). Any farther and they're stuck in the drain's inescapable vortex, but here at least they are in orbit, like the doomed vessel in Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" they achieve a fixed orbit around the lip of mortality's terrible whirlpool.
That orbit is dependent on the loyalty of their enabler, their personal assistant /lover (Judy Davis here) and ghost writer who keeps them spinning like a magic show plate. Sure your plate skull will crack if it hits the floor - and it will. But in the meantime, entrance to this resigned--even peaceful-- level of boozing represents a certain tranquility in surrender, representing the moment of being sucked out to sea when the sight of land disappears and it no longer makes sense to struggle against the -current. If for whatever reason the enabler/helper or job abandons you, there's always level 7.5... We'll never know if the long swimmers had second thoughts out there caught in the undertow drag and sucked off towards the Far East. If they did, it's probably the cocktail hours from this level they thought of. No need to pawn typewriters or hustle fins from lady's purses when you're martinis are set up against the California sunset by indulgent seen-it-all entourages. Even your soiled pants are magically removed and laundered during your many black-outs. Oh what a life! What a dream!
LEVEL 9: Skull-eyed
Albert Finney as The Consul
UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)
Dir. John Huston
"I must drink desperately to regain my balance."
My favorite drunken pirate is, of course, John's brother Lionel as Flynn in the MGM 1934 TREASURE ISLAND, but after that, maybe, we have Geoffrey Firmin ranting about being Blackstone the Pirate while gallivanting through sun-bleached Mexico during the Day of the Dead festival, John Huston's camera relentlessly trying to make sure we get the parallel between his bloated face with the giant skull socket sunglasses and white suit, and the jangling wooden skeleton dolls and puppets on display along the dusty streets. Instead of a cute Judy Davis type, Geoffrey, a British consul on his last legs, has only his younger brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews) patiently plying him with 'cures' for alcoholism while avoiding guilty eye contact with Geoffrey's ex-wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bissett) with all the pervy subtlety of a Claudius creeping with poison eardrops through the royal garden, but it's not like we can do anything to escape his 'help.' We're past those breakwaters now (see level 8). It will be very hard to get along without an enabler or helper, someone to come home from work with 'the shopping' i.e. new bottles (it's not like we can drive, or walk, or even dial a phone, to get some on our own). It might be easier in a place like Mexico, where--as we see in UNDER THE VOLCANO-- public drunkenness is so common it's unnoticed and you can always find a handy beggar child to lean on or to fetch you un cerveza or bottle of tequila while you luxuriate amidst the white chickens any time of day or night.
We see his familiarity with the DTs when Yvonne his estranged wife suddenly appears out of the morning mist and he dismisses her as an hallucination, barely making eye contact as he rhapsodizes about an old lady and her chicken, totally not caring no one around him speaks English. Is Yvonne even real? I am not sure from what I read of the book that she is, but Huston does have his most success in that meter anyway, the interiority of a real man with an alcoholic-sized ego.
If a lot of Yvonne's ephemerality doesn't survive the trip to film, the impossibility of returning to normal, of sobering up and being able to make love to his hot wife again, et al is made all the more painful by his utter dependency on good old Hugh, who--with Yvonne--dresses him like an infant while he naughtily runs through the shower. It would have probably been more enjoyable had someone like Burton played the part, but Finney certainly does have the breadth and depth - he makes him too real ala Lemmon (below) while Burton wouldn't lose the glamor (ala Ray Milland in #7). The way he oscillates in a fluid motion between pathetic and absurdist, triumphant and pleading, bitter and humble, celebratory and shitfaced, adventurous and craven, scathing (in his judgment of the illicit lovers) and self-loathing (realizing his boozing drove them together), makes him seem like if Georgie Boy swallowed Martha during an extra act of VIRGINIA WOOLF, one set down in Mexico on a lurid second honeymoon with George Segal's part played by a James Fox-shaped soap-on-a-rope tied to a motionless buzzard.
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| Geoffrey, Johnny and--maybe- Yvonne |
If a lot of Yvonne's ephemerality doesn't survive the trip to film, the impossibility of returning to normal, of sobering up and being able to make love to his hot wife again, et al is made all the more painful by his utter dependency on good old Hugh, who--with Yvonne--dresses him like an infant while he naughtily runs through the shower. It would have probably been more enjoyable had someone like Burton played the part, but Finney certainly does have the breadth and depth - he makes him too real ala Lemmon (below) while Burton wouldn't lose the glamor (ala Ray Milland in #7). The way he oscillates in a fluid motion between pathetic and absurdist, triumphant and pleading, bitter and humble, celebratory and shitfaced, adventurous and craven, scathing (in his judgment of the illicit lovers) and self-loathing (realizing his boozing drove them together), makes him seem like if Georgie Boy swallowed Martha during an extra act of VIRGINIA WOOLF, one set down in Mexico on a lurid second honeymoon with George Segal's part played by a James Fox-shaped soap-on-a-rope tied to a motionless buzzard.
LEVEL 10 - Crackin' Up
Jack Lemmon as Joe Clay
THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (1962)
Dir. Blake Edwards
Dir. Blake Edwards
This tale of a couple torn down to their roots by booze was originally a teleplay in the early days of TV drama and it has that Stanley Kramer, pre-NETWORK Paddy Chayefsky kind of Barton Fink feeling, but for the film the pairing of director Blake Edwards and the movie's Felix Unger Jack Lemmon (with TV's Oscar the Grouch Jack Klugman) gives it a weird kind of comedy Billy Wilder-Neil Simon vibe, as if it intended to be THE APARTMENT meets SAME TIME NEXT YEAR but got derailed by strong drink. I never could see this movie all the way through, it's too real. I hated Lemmon's performance while I was drinking -- too vivid and uncomfortable --but my last relapse led me pretty damn close to his level of misery after his crackup and then it came on TCM while I was recovering and it stuck to my ribs like a kick from a combat boot. There's a great, harrowing bit in a tent at an auto camp wherein a freshly sober Lemmon tries to rescue his still-sick-and-suffering wife Lee Remick, who's surrounded by gin bottles and high as a kite, barely conscious, and Lemmon ends up relapsing. Done in real time, the lights of passing cars on the tent walls in the wind making their shared space seem to ebb and flow in an oceanic fog or else come tumbling down atop them.
In the next scene he's staggering through the camp trying to find more booze but the liquor store is long closed; he's desperate so tries to break in and winds up on the ground the proprietor sadistically pouring whiskey down onto his face (the equivalent of throwing the coin in the spittoon in RIO BRAVO). It remains unclear if Joe has the quick thinking wherewithal to stick out his tongue and catch it like snowflakes but I'm always cheering for him) and when he comes to, sponsor Jack Klugman is looking down at him. "What happened?" Joe asks.
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| Remick is great but I kept the focus on Jack here since it's men with the men, women with the women but don't miss I'LL CRY TOMORROW, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, ANNA CHRISTIE and 28 DAYS |
Lemmon is great in the benders though, capturing the staggering sideways mix of befuddlement and desperation that comes with latter stage alcoholism - when you're too fucked up to walk or talk or think but at the same time are about to go into convulsions from withdrawal - it's a terrible combination, the only way to stop the horror of the moment is to postpone it by more drinking, which since you won't remember it anyway never seems to happen -- the more booze you have the more blank space, like a snooze button. Sooner or later even the shitty 1/4 box of wine left in the garage from a party a year ago is gone, the alarm goes off automatically, and the pain resumes only moreso, and coupled to shame and confusion as you can't even tell what day it is or how much work you missed or whether you already called in sick or not. This part is sheer misery, for hours even days at a time, getting no better as the seconds tick by. So why do I remember it so fondly?
It's because alcoholism comes with 'a built-in forgetter.' And that forgetter is not employed by Lemmon's fidgety motormouth. The film being structured by scenes from an AA qualification of course ensures only the real low points survive but wasn't it the same in the LOST WEEKEND? Yet Joe Clay makes my skin crawl the way Ray Milland never could. Even broke and filthy, Milland had too much glamor hanging on him, so much we believe that he'd have two girls all into him - the leopard skin coat broad and the one who's just crazy about a lock of his hair who says things like "don't be riddick." (In this way, and in his avoidance of them, Milland's level is a reflection of level 3, the Toby Dammit demonic phase, and Lemmon's level a reflection of Mitchum's JT in EL DORADO). You can't imagine any broad swinging at Lemmon's high pitches, let alone a stone cold fox like Lee Remick. But that's show biz, and so I avoid DAYS like my life depends on me, because Lemmon's manic desperation is so vivid and intense it chills my blood for days afterwards. I feel the same thing under my crawling skin when I see in the shattered eyes of Sinatra in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM holding cell as he watches a fellow junky (who's been there longer) enter the throes of withdrawal, knowing with dreaded certainty that he's next if he doesn't get out of there and score soon. If I think about taking a drink now, and follow it through to its logical end, I know the end is here, if I'm lucky. If I'm not, there's always...
LEVEL 11: Last Call
Nicolas Cage as Ben
Nicolas Cage as Ben
LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995)
Dir. Mike Figgis
This is it, last stop on the line. There's no way out from here that doesn't end in the detox ward or the morgue. "I came to Vegas to drink myself to death," notes Ben to his last days lover Sera (Elizabeth Shue). Their doomed love affair is so touching, and Cage's performance is so raw and electric, I came home and starting pounding whiskey like he did for the next several weeks after seeing this in the theater, my girlfriend no longer trying to stop me, for she got the heroism of the 'non-interference' policy. At the time his decision seemed very strange, why he wouldn't want to 'go for distance' as we used to say, and pace himself long enough to see where his love affair goes, but now I get it. Stopping drinking at these advanced stages of boozing is like voluntarily leaving seven minutes of heaven for an eternity of hell. The best way I can describe it is via the hangover. Most of us, we get maybe a headache the next morning, drink a bunch of water, down a bacon egg and cheese on a roll with a coffee when we get to work, and by the end of the day we're more or less back to normal, or at least marginally better. At the Ben stage, if he hadn't drunk anything by five he'd be convulsing on his office floor. The hangover actually gets exponentially worse the longer he's awake and sober, like some unseen hand is slowly turning up a massive feedback volume knob until his whole body starts vibrating apart and the 'cracks' appear.
--DEATH or STEPS--
This last stage is a hard one to beat. If you get sober a whole different thing happens. A lot of the drunks on this list do get sober, and the relapse when old triggers come to play. And no matter how much time has elapsed, their disease is right there waiting for them, sort of like meditation - it doesn't matter how long ago you stopped, you pick up right where you left off. Unless you do relapse before the end of the movie, it's a whole different kind of story. Most of the ones at this lower level do not, Joe Clay aside with the grace of god, etc. It's hard to make AA sexy onscreen. AA keeps a low profile, for a reason. shout out to YES and Young and Wise, 79th street workshop, the old Regency Group, RIP. and daily reprieves. It's all just the one day man. Even if you make it 20 years, when the reason you quit in the first place is gone, what will become of thee?
LEVEL12: Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds
Clint Eastwood as William Munny, i.e. America
UNFORGIVEN (1992)
Dir. Clint Eastwood
Sometimes there's a man gets healed by the love of a good woman, be she a whore or a wife, or the lord. Sometimes she dies and then some brutalizin' sheriff takes umbrage with your hired gun vengeance or you just wind up trapped with your drunk brother's drunk girlfriend's drunk family over Xmas and can't find that emergency Xanax you packed and then you quit and afore you is a miracle. William Munny is sober 20 years but is talked into taking on a job killin' some guys what cut up a whore, or something, and when the lawman beats up Will's buddy to unto death, Munny relapses and it's like Popeye eating some PCP-laced spinach which is what it's like, really, when you relapse. Hell follows with him and he kills everyone in the bar hanging with the brutalizin' sheriff except the hirsute biographer (Saul Rubinek) who asks how he knew who to shoot first. "I was lucky in the order," Munny says. "I've always been lucky when it comes to killin'." Aint' that America? Eastwood makes sure we get the US flag waving behind him in the flames, for Munny is, in his 'luck' with killing and his terrible addictions, America. And when I too fell off the wagon after almost 20 years over Xmas while watching SUICIDE SQUAD, wasn't I, too, America? Now that I'm back (I lasted six weeks!) am I not, too, America? The new one? The one that, like Macbeth's Scotland, is afraid to know itself?
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That's why AA is there. Because when you're suffering it, there's nothing fun about it - it's only later, in hindsight, it seems heroic, romantic, even courageous, bitterly hilarious. You need to be reminded over and over it wasn't. If you live through it without winding up strapped down to a gurney screaming your head off as the minutes click down to your next Librium, then kudos. If you don't, how will the rest of us know if you're lucky?
For a meeting near you, check Alcoholics Anonymous online, and don't worry about whether it's a cult or not. Anyone who tries to make it one, or gets culty on you, is not AA-approved, no matter what they say. Skeevy dudes pretend they're some kind of AA representative to get with chicks. Hopefully a cool guy or girl is around to shoo them hence. No one 'represents' AA beyond what's laid out in the literature vis-a-vis the steps. Avoid pushy would-be sponsors who try to micro-manage your sobriety. Just go to meetings and listen, and blah blah, women with the women, Are we not men!? 'Hiccup!' Never let them push you into something you don't want to do, or take advantage of your weakness. Women with the... did I say that already? Shit man, I shouldn't have taken those blue things. Or I should have taken more. Progress not perfection.
On the other hand, if you can still drink, even daily, morning-ly, and stay 'high-functioning' - I say GO FOR IT! Any level below #5 on this list doesn't need to quit and go to AA, in my opinion. But once you're past the pickling brine breakwater, come dancing.