Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

On a blind date with her stepfather’s boss’s son Ken (a pre — Luke Skywalker Mark Hamill), he offers her a drink at a Popular Kids party, and, after token protest, she sucks one down. She is initially a hit; she loosens up, dances, jokes, sings in that movie-party way, where everyone suddenly gathers round to listen and applaud. But, after sneaking more drinks from the bar, she tips her hand when she becomes a sloppy drunk, shoving a plate of potato salad into a Mean Girl’s chest and barely able to stagger home to her horrified mom and stepdad. Mark Hamill/Ken gallantly takes the blame, and her parents, after an ostensible display of disapproval, shrug it off: “So, she had a little to drink. At least she’s not into drugs.” I agree with her parents; the applauding party kids, the appreciative gleam in Ken’s eye, were well worth whatever minor downside was created by a few belts. It isn’t as though she’s a heroin addict.

But the liquor store delivery guy gets wise and cuts off her supply; the housekeeper, the only adult who seems to offer her any understanding or solace, gets fired for “getting into” the family liquor, triggering a new source of guilt and despair; and Ken, watching Sarah at a beach party guzzle gin through a straw from a spiked watermelon like a starving piglet, is getting worried, realizing he has not, in fact, been the corrupting influence:

KEN

You don’t drink like a beginner, Sarah.

SARAH

Oh, come on! You make me sound like some major alcoholic freak. I don’t see any purple cockroaches climbing the walls. Look, I take a drink every now and then because it makes me feel better, makes all the hassles with my parents and the stuff at school go down a little easier. I don’t have to drink. I can quit any time I feel like it. I just don’t feel like it.

Exactly. No biggie. Sarah is called in to a conference with a guidance counselor and her mother for slipping grades, missing class, etc., but Mom is distracted, eager to accept Sarah’s lame Good Girl excuses, and I’m not worried, either. I’m just not getting the real peril, here. But Sarah is devastated to discover Ken has been dating other girls (she by now has fallen madly in love with his kind blue eyes, his cool truck, and his sweet horse); she polishes off a carafe of wine while babysitting a toddler and is found passed out on the couch. I have just begun babysitting, myself (conscientiously, of course — perhaps more so than the parents who leave their four-week-old baby in the care of an eleven-year-old girl who has never held a baby before), and I find this lack of responsibility disturbing. Her parents flip out, but primarily over how it will look , what people will think. And Sarah, out of tricks and rendered ironically invisible amid all this concern about “appearances,” finally confesses:

SARAH

Mom, listen to me. I’ve been drinking for nearly two years now. Almost every day. I’ve snuck booze from the house and I’ve stolen it from liquor stores. Who knows, I probably would’ve drunk rubbing alcohol if I couldn’t get my hands on anything else.

Still, she’s been keeping it together, hasn’t she? Her drinking seems more like, well, an edgy hobby. A bad habit, maybe a step or two beyond biting your nails or chewing your hair. But it’s off to a Therapist for family counseling. Mom’s in denial. Sarah’s only fifteen, she’s a Good Girl, it isn’t like she’s hanging out on Skid Row, etc., until the Therapist cuts through the shit:

THERAPIST

Seems to me that a fifteen-year-old who drinks every day has a lot to say that nobody is listening to.

MOM

Believe me, I’ve listened!

THERAPIST

But have you heard ? Kids develop alcohol problems like anyone else. Because they’re lonely or troubled or frightened. Booze helps them to live. To face social situations, to get through the day. And it works. For a while. And then it stops working. Because alcohol is a mean and sneaky drug. It giveth, and then it taketh away. And one day, you know, it’s going to kill you.

Lonely or troubled or frightened. . well sure, why wouldn’t she, why wouldn’t anybody like this magical elixir, then? I see all those empty sour-smelling glasses I help my mother wash after a wild bash, all those clinking bottles I gather up to put in the trash. The Therapist says “it works for a while,” but clearly the reward here is real and enduring; if it didn’t keep working, if it didn’t taketh away the loneliness or fear, why would adults keep doing it? It doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone, let alone killing anyone.

Mom refuses to consider Alcoholics Anonymous. Her child is not an alcoholic —gasp! — so why would she send her off to hang with a bunch of old winos?

THERAPIST

We’re a country of whiskey-heads. Sarah gets permission to drink every time she sees you and your husband hoist that old five o’clock pick-me-up.

But Sarah is skeptical of the scarlet A- for -Alcoholic label, too:

SARAH

If I was. . how could I tell?

THERAPIST

Well, you cross a kind of imaginary line. You begin doing things that are destructive to yourself and the people around you. And you recognize that, and you know.

Which actually reassures her, and me, given Sarah’s basic level of undestructive functionality (that babysat toddler was perfectly fine, after all). She goes to an AA meeting anyway, where she is startled to meet kids her own age, even younger. Yet Sarah still denies she’s an alcoholic . If I were , she tells another Teenage AA Girl, so what, I’d just admit it!

Of course you would, the Teenage AA Girl agrees with her:

TEENAGE AA GIRL

Nothing hard about admitting it. Except then you have to give up the booze. And Lord knows no dedicated, hardworking alcoholic wants to do that .

Sarah’s beloved, fuckup father reveals his lack of interest in her coming to live with him in his failed-artist-in-the-forest life; devastated by yet another rejection, Sarah now goes off on a desperate mission for booze, finally offering herself up to a gang of twentysomething guys if they will buy a bottle for her. This negotiation is the most painful thing in the movie to watch, so far, my first cringe, my first real glimpse of that warned-about peril. This is not good. Drunk out of her mind, Sarah steals Ken’s sweet horse, rides into traffic, and gets the horse killed, a scene I can watch only peripherally, feeling frightened and a little sick. Okay, we have entered the “destructive to yourself and those around you” phase. Her Therapist confronts her:

THERAPIST

You’ve crossed that imaginary line, remember?

SARAH

So do something! Help me!

THERAPIST

Look, you have a choice. You can sink into the bottom of a bottle of booze and drown. Or you can climb out. Now, I can’t make that choice for you. I can’t frighten or coax you into it. You have to do it alone. After that, there will be people to help you. I’ll help you. You know the words, Sarah. I can’t say them for you. I can’t believe them for you.

Mom insists the answer to all this mess is to simply forget any of this mess ever happened. Clean slate. Fresh start. Problem solved. But Sarah has finally had enough:

SARAH

Mom. I’m an alcoholic.