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

A writer. Silly, isn’t it?

Ah, this is a Tortured Artist story, then! Echoes of Sarah’s father, popping open another shopping bag beer, dreaming. Don tells us he reached his peak at nineteen, the college Hemingway, a short story published in Atlantic Monthly and being considered a genius, all that promise, how he started a failed novel, then another and another, only

DON

by then, somebody began to look over my shoulder and whisper in a thin, clear voice, like the E string of a violin: Don Birnam , it whispered, it’s not good enough! Not that way. How about a couple of drinks, just to set it on its feet? So, I had a couple. What a great idea that was! That made all the difference! Suddenly I could see the whole thing, the tragic sweep of a great novel, beautifully proportioned. But before I could really grab it and throw it down on paper, the drinks would wear off, and everything would be gone, like a mirage. And then there was despair, and a drink to counterbalance the despair, and one to counterbalance the counterbalance. And I’d sit in front of that typewriter trying to squeeze out one page that was halfway decent. And that guy would pop up again. The other Don Birnam. There are two of us, you know. Don the Drunk, and Don the Writer. And the Drunk would say to the Writer, Come on, you idiot! Get some good out of that portable! Let’s hock it. Pawn shop on Third Avenue, it’s always good for $10. Another drink, another binge, another bender, another spree. . I tried to break away from that guy a lot of times, but no good. Once I even got myself a gun and some bullets. I was going to do it on my thirtieth birthday. Here are the bullets. The gun went for three quarts of whiskey. The flopped suicide of a flopped writer.

While I am enthralled by this speech, indeed hope to one day be such a tortured artist as this tortured genius Don Birnam, whose delicate sensibility grants a justifying glamour to his story, I do wonder: What if Don were a bank teller or mechanic? Would we be invited to sympathize with his struggle in the same way? Would a dentist or construction worker be given a dramatic monologue with the same rhetorical flourish? What happens to the alcoholic who isn’t a member of the Tortured Artists’ club, who isn’t “above the ordinary”? Do we devalue his struggle, his tortured soul? Simply dismiss him, label him a drunk ?

Back in present day, Nat counsels Don, well, maybe he should just go ahead and kill himself if things are so bad. But something about flashbacking, remembering Helen’s early faith in him, creates a fresh hope: No, Don tells him, I’m going to do it this time! I’m going to write!

And he rushes home to that portable typewriter, to a fresh page rolled in, to a close up of:

THE BOTTLE

a novel by Don Birnam

To Helen, with all my love

He stops typing. He stands up. He removes his coat, his hat. He wipes his silver-sweat brow. He paces. He lights a cigarette. Cue the theremin’s shimmery wail, enter the seductive, dancing devil. Don searches desperately for his hidden bottles, just to set it on its feet , until at last he spots the shadowy overhead glow of a bottle tucked in the ceiling light sconce and drinks himself to near oblivion. The next morning he rips his page from the typewriter, goes to hock it, but all the pawn shops are inexplicably closed. (A friendly Jew on the street informs him it’s Yom Kippur. Which Don and a general audience might not know is the Jewish Day of Atonement, but is surely a deliberate wink by Billy Wilder, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis.) Back at the bar, he begs for a drink, until Nat, disapproving as ever, pours one, just one, wisely intoning:

NAT, THE DISAPPROVING BARKEEP

One’s too many, a hundred’s not enough.

And the one certainly isn’t. Don hustle-flirts a Bar Floozy out of some cash (the lower-stakes male equivalent of Sarah T.’s whoring herself out), falls drunkenly down a flight of stairs, and lands himself in a hospital ward full of shaking, sweating, screaming men. Bars on the window, locked doors, a wiseacre Male Nurse who welcomes him to “Hangover Plaza! The Alcoholic Ward!” and warns of the oncoming DTs, the pink elephants and beetles Don will soon be seeing. . But Don manages to escape. He threatens a liquor store guy for a bottle of rye and back at home guzzles, gulps, swallows, belts, as the theremin wails. He spies not pink elephants or purple cockroaches, but a whiskery, beady-eyed mouse chewing its way at him through a hole in a living room wall, and now a bat , yes, a Halloween-style bat, all witchy flapping wings, swoops battily around the apartment, attacking the mouse as black blood trickles down the wall. Don screams and screams, in full-on delirium tremens frenzy.

He is saved by the loyal Helen, of course, whose leopard coat he steals and hocks, this time not for booze-fund cash, but for a gun. Helen finds the gun; why , she asks, why?

DON

It’s best all around! Don Birnam is dead already. . of alcoholism, of moral anemia, fear, shame, the DTs. .

Helen pleads he has so much to live for, his talent, his ambition (and her love, it is implied), when Nat the Disapproving Bartender deus ex machinas with Don’s typewriter, miraculously found by someone on the street. Helen insists this is a sign. Don is destined to be a writer, see? It is his purpose in life, see?

DON

Write , with these hands, and a brain all out of focus? I’ll be sitting there, staring at that white sheet, scared. .

She shows him the title page of his novel, The Bottle —see? He must write about that!

DON

About a messed-up life, about a man and a woman and a bottle, about nightmares, horrors, humiliations, all the things I want to forget ?

Yes , Helen insists,

HELEN

Put it all down on paper! Get rid of it that way!

Of course he can write the story, now that he knows the ending, the happy, happy ending! He can help so many people with his story! All he has to do is write it down (oh, that little part. .).

And Don envisions the finished book, yes, he will put the whole Lost Weekend down on paper, every minute of it! We pan out of the apartment — to notably non-theremin music — and return to our opening shot, of that dangling, suspended bottle, while Don wonders how many others out there are like him?

DON

Poor, bedeviled guys, on fire with thirst. . such comical figures to others, as they stagger blindly to another binge, another bender, another spree. .

It is nice that an appeal to Don’s empathy is what seems to work its magic here (clearly embracing the alcoholic label is not in itself sufficient for transformative epiphany), and equally nice it is limited to the last three sentimental minutes of the film, allowing Wilder to spend his and our time in shadows over sunshine. But this happy ending, like Sarah T.’s, seems tidy, tacked on. Is this, in fact, a “happy ending” for Don, or the first of several false starts, just one more cure that probably won’t take? Is empathy truly so motivating? Is the creation of art so effective and cathartic an exorcism? And if it is, then why does that not stave off the devil, why do artists become Failed Artist-Drunks in the first place?

I watch The Lost Weekend during my “Afternoon Movie” phase when I am twelve or thirteen, my after-school homework-delaying habit. I’m intrigued by the mostly bleak nihilism of Don’s story, but, as with Sarah T., there is a comfortingly unrelatable level of dysfunction, here; I have never seen adults scream about bats and mice during my parents’ wild bashes, hospital stays are for surgeries and broken bones, and Don’s middle-aged, male, 1940s experience is even further away from me than Sarah’s contemporary troubled teen-girlhood. I don’t really long to emulate, or recognize myself at all in this sad, tortured man. But I am still made uncomfortable and wary and tense watching this old movie over my cookies and milk; it disturbs and stays with me, and it will be a long, long time before I understand it is not because I see myself in Don’s messed-up life and despairing bedevilment — it is because I see my father.