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

MOM

Don’t be foolish!

FUCKUP FATHER

Honey, we all got problems!

SARAH

I’m an alcoholic !

It is her epiphanous moment, her first step, it is the last line of dialogue; the final shot of the movie is her heading to join the Teenage AA Girl, who is waiting for her, and we are clearly meant to be left with both a lesson learned, and with hope: Sarah has made her choice, she has said the magic I’m an alcoholic words at last, the incantation by which all that angst will, somehow, be wonderfully rechanneled into a normal, stable, productive life.

But this is not what I am left with. Portrait of. . movies are not made about normal, stable teenage girls, after all, only about girls with problems. With distinction. Parents might listen to , but they do not hear unless peril raises its hand and yells Present! I should be appalled by all the deceit, by a fifteen-year-old girl prostituting herself for alcohol; I should be horrified by the brutal death of a sweet horse. And I am. This is horrible. But that degree of dysfunction and damage feels unimaginable to me, both implausible and unnecessary; no one I know has a horse, and my parents’ unlocked liquor cabinet is stocked for the Apocalypse. Sarah went about this badly, let it get out of control, is all. I want the distinction without the messy fallout, a manageable fairy dusting of Something Bad, and I see no reason why I can’t achieve this, why I can’t stay on the Good Girl side of the imaginary line, flirt but not dance with the demon, yet still have the problem . I want the problem. I want to be the problem, authentically visible and voluble, just for once.

So, after I watch this movie — which I watch alone in my bedroom, on my own little TV in my pretty, pink-canopied bed, my parents off somewhere — I get a juice glass from the kitchen and fill it to the brim from an open gallon jug of red wine I find in the liquor cabinet. I sneak it to my room — I am creating secrecy, subterfuge, although there is no one around to appreciate it — and force myself to drink it down, with my own medicinal grimace. I don’t like the thick, furry, vinegar taste, or the magenta toothpaste foam, afterward. I wait to feel something: A desire to sing or dance, a blossoming, a distinctive deepening of my soul, even a sighting of purple cockroaches on my pink bedroom walls, but it giveth me nothing. I merely get sleepy, and I go to bed. I try again the next night, and the next, for two full weeks. Nothing happens, nothing at all, and when the bottle is empty I throw it clinkingly in the trash without anyone noticing a thing. I contemplate opening another bottle, but I am unsure how to work a corkscrew. I sample other open liquor: Gin, vodka, tequila, Scotch, and find them worse than the wine. How do adults and disturbed teenage girls drink this stuff, anyway? I can’t keep this up for another fourteen and a half months, I realize. I feel like a failure, an unlayered, uncomplex, invisible girl.

And why would anybody bother to listen to me, I think, if I have nothing of perilous distinction to offer? But perhaps, I fear, so quietly I cannot even hear it myself, perhaps it is because I really have nothing of interest to say.

We meet The Lost Weekend ’s Don B. much like we met Sarah T., in media alcoholic res : The opening shot is a bottle of booze dangling from a rope outside an apartment house window, and thus begins director Billy Wilder’s bitterly noirish depiction of an alcoholic spiraling out of control. 34Don Birnam (played by cast-against-type Ray Milland, whose suavity meticulously disintegrates over the story’s three days, the black-and-white cinematography silvering his forehead sweat) has been ten days sober and is preparing to leave for a wholesome weekend in the country with his enabling brother ( with plenty of buttermilk and fresh well water to drink! his brother enthuses). But Don evades his brother and well-meaning girlfriend, Helen, to go on a mini-binge. He steals money from his housekeeper, buys two bottles of cheap booze, and stops at a bar for “one straight rye” from his Disapproving Barkeep, Nat. (I have never heard of “rye” as a drink and am initially confused it has something to do with the rye bread my mother buys at the Jewish bakery.) A theremin begins wailing, what will become our Pavlovian audio-marker for Don’s craving, his descent into hell. He bolts the rye, the shot glass leaving a glistening wet ring on the bar top, as he plots how to smuggle his bottles out to the wholesome country:

DON

What you don’t understand, all of you, is I have got to have it around. So I know I can have it if I need it. I cannot be cut off completely. That’s the devil, that’s what drives you crazy.

A second wet ring on the bar top, a third. Nat the Disapproving Barkeep counsels moderation, but the rye does its thing, inspires poetic loquacity:

DON

It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it? It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it to do my mind ? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. . I am one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo molding the beard of Moses, I’m van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I’m John Barrymore, before the movies got him by the throat. .

Back at home, his brother is finally furious: “I’ve dragged him out of the gutter too many times. . why kid ourselves? He’s a hopeless alcoholic!” (point: alcoholism as moral failure), and his girlfriend despairs: “He’s a sick person! It’s as though there’s something wrong with his heart! You wouldn’t walk out on him if he had an attack! He needs our help!” (counterpoint: alcoholism as physiological addiction). But Don has gone from loquacious to belligerent; he throws them out and blissfully pours himself another drink while an overhead close-up of his glass brings us swimmingly deeper and deeper into the oily glittering booze, right along with him.

Unlike Sarah T., Don knows full well he’s an alcoholic. First thing in the morning, he’s back at the bar, telling Nat

DON

I can’t cut it short! I’m on that merry-go-round, and I gotta ride it all the way, around and around, till that blasted music wears itself out. .

He should write a novel, he tells Nat, call it: The Bottle: Confessions of a Booze Addict, the Log Book of an Alcoholic. He flashbacks for us how, when Helen discovered his drinking, he tried to dissuade her from hanging around, but she is the archetypal loyal girlfriend, clinging to both denial and pragmatism — so what if he gets drunk now and then, she says, a lot of people do!

DON

Sure, the lucky ones, who can take it or leave it. But then there are the ones who can’t take it, and can’t leave it, either. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not a drinker. I’m a drunk. They had to put me away, once.

HELEN

After all, you’re not an embezzler or a murderer! One cure didn’t take, is all. There must be a reason you drink, Don! The right doctor could find it.

DON

Look, I’m way ahead of the right doctor. The reason is me, what I am. Or rather, what I’m not. What I wanted to become, and didn’t.

HELEN

What did you want to be so much that you’re not?

DON