BOOZE! Rate your drinking problem through these 12 progressively more harrowing movies.

There are fun movies about drunks like Nick Charles and WC Fields (which real drunks love whether or not they're sober) and there are movies ABOUT the reality of being a drunk, which drunks do not love, as they hit just too damn close to home. 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 anyone says. It just helps to be on the inside of it, i.e. buzzed, to be able to laugh when things get terrifying.

Generally even non-drinkers can all be amused, impressed, and a little envious of the 'high-functioning alcoholic.' The rest of us either quit or die. Addiction is--in the end--a disease brought around by a combination of genetically-endorsed depression, access to alcohol, and an acute awareness of its self-medicating properties. We drunks often feel cut off from the world as kids. We mope around, we're bad at sports and dating --we may even avoid a chance to drink since alcohol tastes so horrible. But then, for some blessed reason, we're convinced to drink enough to get our first buzz: the clouds part, the sun shines in color for the first time, that flood of warmth fills our sails, and we're suddenly good at sports, more assertive, comfortable in our own skin, able to think clearly; we actually feel happy!

A few drinks in and we're like Dorothy waking up in Technicolor Oz.

How can she go back to sober sepia after that? She can't, Auntie Em. A few days of depressing Kansas (that sepia tint like a twisting dagger of ennui), the wet hay and offal tinging the nostrils like an accusatory finger. Her one source of solace--Toto--is sentenced to the gas house (they never show Mrs. Gultch cycling back to grab Toto all over again). She can't take another minute of this hungover black-and-white grimness! If she can't wear ruby slippers, she's going barefoot! She kicks off her sepia shoes and sneaks to the back of the shed and finds Zeke's moonshine jug (that funnel on his head in Oz clearly denotes that inside his hollow chest is fermenting sour mash). A few swigs later and once again Technicolor gushes into the world; she can see the miasma of OZ superimposed over the drab flatlands! This time she's gonna stay in Oz, forever!

But... always a but.. 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 evil Mrs. Gulch's dog-hating machinations continue. You better believe Dorothy's tumbling back o'the shed to Zeke's jug asap, before the shakes start. This time though, Oz has some sepia showing through. She can't drink the Technicolor back to full brightness -- the jug is empty. Now even Oz looks faded.

A few more 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 state asylum's eletroshock 'cure', a job in the brothels and... damn, AA is still only an Ohio thing.. but it's coming, Dorothy! Hold on!

Thanks be to whatever higher power you choose, the Wizard, Auntie Em, or just the Emerald City door knocker, AA is everywhere today. Dorothy can find a whole new kind of half-color Emerald awaiting her in Kansan church basements and coffee and (once upon a time) cigarettes, provided the wizard remembers to give her a meeting book and a copy of Living Sober. 

--
OZ isn't really about alcohol, but as a universal myth--maybe 'the' myth of our age--it can't be beat for analogy.

The ARE movies about alcohol addiction that are less metaphorical than OZ, that address booze directly, good or bad, and I've seen them all. 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 guy or girl on fire with thirst figure out just where they're at.. So take a seat and find out  just how much lower you can go before you hit bottom. Rather than lying through another AA Blue Book quiz, come along with us as we examine the cinematic alcoholic scale:

1-5 EARLY STAGES

(slurring to sodden - but reversible without hospitalization)

LEVEL 1. Scintillating (First Plateau)

William Powell as Nick Charles

THE THIN MAN (1934)

Dir. W.S. Van Dyke

He's who we drunks aspire to: he's able to solve crimes while hosting dinner parties and knocking back martinis; he's able to hobnob with the upper crust and knockabout with the lower dregs all in the same night without skipping his groove. Watching the entire series a few years ago on New Years' Eve (see: Notes from the Class and Alcohol Struggle in a THIN MAN Marathon), I was forced to watch as--over the course of the six films--Nick slowly succumbs to the weight of the world. Laid low by studio censorship-enforced boozing limits, wartime rationing, changing times, and just plain getting old, by the time of the final entry, SONG OF THE THIN MAN, he and Nora are regarded with little more than bemusement by the younger beatniks. The harder the couple endeavor to seem 'with it' the more obvious it was that their style of life, society, culture and even music, would never 'scintillate' again. Still, in the first movies, we get the portrait of the ideal drunk, higher functioning than us when straight, nice to all, where even the guys he sent up the river like him.

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. But it is hilarious!

LEVEL 2 - Hilarious

W.C. Fields in Everything

"Don't labor under the misconception that 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 as long as he's within elbow distance of a bar or flask, or Bill Fields is 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 an alarming (no longer amusing) light. Fields' hands don't shake, in fact his dexterity and eye hand coordination remain almost supernatural (1), making him the ultimate in rationalization totems.

I used to modulate that Fields quote above for AA meetings, for when I was on a bender near the end, I would say no to a morning drink a thousand times before breakfast. After the will power involved with swearing it off the thousandth time that morning--the shakes getting exponentially worse all the while--well, who wouldn't deserve a morning snort? The shakes instantly abated once I surrendered, but each morning drink is like exponentially accruing interest on a terrible debt. Sooner or later, you'll be out of booze, and excuses, and saying yes to a drink a million times still won't get you one, because just putting on shoes and finding your wallet and getting to the liquor store is an impossible dream.

LEVEL 3: Existentially Debauched

Terence Stamp as Toby Dammit

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 shadow reflecting in the water of the toilet bowl as you dry heave, or in silent, recurring faces at parties. Watching you enigmatically across the crowded room is someone you're never quite able to make it over to confront. They smile and evade when you do finally confront them about it in the parking lot, if you can even get to them, for every two steps someone jams a camera in your face or tries to get you to read their book or discuss your feelings on some philosopher, anything to get your attention, a selfie together, whatever. That you're in terrible wild-eyed distress, or nearly hysterical with that mix of boozy euphoria and horror that is the daily seesaw of the semi-functional alcoholic, only means you might be more vulnerable, might need a friend, a glomming remora eel crutch. No matter how rude you are to them, they keep coming. They cease to be people at all, or demons, but cut-out images, or dead frozen tableaux.

Meanwhile, you start to look ever-paler and more bedraggled, still gorgeous, but moving into the zone of rock stars before they either overdose, get haggard, bald and bloated and start canceling gigs  or get sober and fade away. You can still quit without needing hospitalization, but there's no one within a square mile around you who's not an enabler. Managers, agents, fans, they all make sure you have a tumbler in your hand; they fight over who will get you ice. How demonic and ghostly they look through your death mask haze! Ironic too, that the more horrified you become by them, the more alluring the women seem to find you, and the more demonically needy they appear in their supportiveness. The whole mating courtship as second motherhood (with you as the booze-hobbled infant) thing becomes stripped of all its magical glamor, leaving only a kind of bleached skull grin of want. The only thing left for you is speed... go on, bet the devil your head!

LEVEL 4: Fallin' Apart

Robert Mitchum as J.T.

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. After a few days, a fistfight, and a bath, old JT'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 zillionth time. Alas, Erich knew his own drinking problem is much farther down this list. Maybe yours is still safely here at level 4? Quit now so you can drink again later, or drink now and have to stop forever later? Brother, that's some choice.

Let's not forget that the main difference between all these drinkers on this list might not be self-control and will-power so much as biology. If you're depressed and SSRI meds haven't been invented yet, booze might be your only solace. You might be relatively sober most of your adult life and then something happens, like a girl who was "no good" gets off the stage. Your first round-the-clock drinking bender might derail you altogether. On the other hand, most of us only get a few dozen JT-like benders before we turn into pickles. And once you're a pickle, you can never be a cucumber again (old AA proverb).

 Though god knows we'll keep trying.

--THE BREAKWATER MEDIAN--

LEVEL 5. The Shakes (St. Vitus' Dance)

Dean Martin as Dude
RIO BRAVO (1959)

Dir. Howard Hawks

With Mitchum's JT in EL DORADO, alcoholism is treated as 'redeemable' --even comical. Once the dangers facing the McClouds, and initial pain of sobriety, have passed, it's OK for JT to drink whiskey again. But his bender lasted only six months. Martin's in RIO lasted--we're told-- two years. It's rare to see this meridian level of alcoholism so succinctly played, and to comprise such a major part of a major classic, rather than just either Ford-level comical or Wilder-level simplistic --for example we never actually see him take a drink in the whole film, not even beer, which is used as a smart way to ease down from the cliff of whiskey shakes ("there's nothing better for sobering up than beer" as Geoffrey Firmin says in a later film on this lise). It's clear the authors of Rio Bravo know the misery of sobering up from a bender, and what makes this portrayal so rare is how it's a side plot rather than the main thing in some social polemic ("I've been there," Chance notes, with the perfect mix of empathy without enabling.) It's used instead as an action plot device, a kind of medical condition that makes his gunfighting skill compromised while he recovers, but can he recover before the big shootout looming on the horizon.

Trading on Dino's boozer persona, Dude is seen as a master gunslinger who was Chance's (John Wayne's) deputy. A girl rode into town on the stage, Chance told him she was no good. He left with her anyway, and came back a bit later and it had left him a bitter wreck. That's how 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 solace of the gutter before the DTs kick in. Dude! I've never been that broke, but I've been so low I would have gladly done fished a spittoon for a drink, as it would be easier than going downstairs to the liquor store even though I had cash in my pocket and literally lived right next door to one!. God help you if you need to drive to get your refills, or are left dry on a Sunday morning in NY state. Even Denny's can't serve you wine until noon, seven AM on a Sunday and the all-night mart can't sell you a six pack! As Don Birnim says in a later film on this list "bars don't open til noon on Sundays! Why? Why, Nat?"

Note that--while Dude's sobering follows a similar arc to JT's (with a bath scene) in EL DORADO--Dude can't really go back to drinking at the end the way JT does. He can still maybe have a beer or two, but we've all tried to "just drink beer" before having to. quit permanently and completely and "it didn't do any good." It never does. But, come on, Dude, don't give up. Librium isn't invented yet, so he has to tough it out, shivering in the hot Texas sun. It's not until a piece of Mexican 'death march' music plays from down the street at Joe Burdett's saloon and hips him to the cosmic cool he used to know, that suddenly he "remembers how [he] got into this thing in the first place." He's merged back into the tapestry of the Hawksian group; his shakes are gone because they've moved into the walls, and into the knees of enemies, and into the electric crackle of his guns and finally into Stumpy's tossed dynamite.

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 a shape he's in. The similarity of character, costume and disease to Martin in RIO BRAVO says it all. If there hadn't been a Joe Burdett to sober him up, Dude might still be on the bottle, or gone a-roaming and hiring his gun and contributing to his own legend until... there you go. Joe Burdett is the savior that stops a Dude from becoming a Kid.

Let's face it, Marvin won the Oscar that year thanks to one great scene, because all the alcoholics laid end-to-end in Hollywood would be... hilarious. The drunks of the Academy all got the dry sardonic joke: here might be the best illustration of the joys and perils of genetic alcoholism ever in any movie, comedy or drama: Shelleen arrives at Jane Fonda's ranch a hungover bleary mess, starts painedly eyeing the targets laid out for him across the yard, he hasn't even a gun. The old guy sympathizes: "you'd like a drink more than a kick in the head, wouldn't ya?" A huge swig later and suddenly the Kid's amazing: confident, stoic, a dead shot, brave and true. Filling them with hope as he fires perfectly, he seems to inhabit a cool sober bravado facade (almost like he's back at level one, the Nick Charles charmer); he then finishes the pint, throws it into the air to fire at it, but misses and by the time it lands, he's toast again. "I never seen a man run through a day so fast." someone says.

This is about right for this dangerous level - the one right before the point of no return. And Marvin, a drinker who was no stranger to black-outs, nails it perfectly. 

LEVEL 7: Sandbags off!

Ray Milland as Don Birnim

THE LOST WEEKEND (1945)

Dir. Billy Wilder

This number is actually a bit arbitrary as Don's alcoholism runs the gamut, a kind of drinker's greatest hits, anchored as it is by two things: one, he starts the film more or less sober --albeit in 'white knuckle' city-- and, the other, that he's got no money to go on a bender with. His brother and his girl, are both conspiring to get him out of the city for a week of fresh air. They know that with a twenty in his pocket he'll sneak off on a spree, and they're right. He has a bottle hanging outside the window by a string so he can pack it in his suitcase when the brother isn't looking. Nice try, Don! But the brother finds it, so--in a truly heartbreaking moment--makes Don pour it all out (grown men are know to weep at this tragic waste). Undaunted, Don fakes his interveners 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,' the maid comes by for her week's salary; she tells him the brother leaves it in the sugar bowl. Naturally Don pockets it and tells the maid his bro must have forgot. Sorry. Door slams. And he's off! Run, Don! Run!

When Max and I rented it one LBI summer in 1991, six years before I first quit drinking, Lost Weekend was like the creepy herald at the gas station in a horror movie. This baby had my number right down to the neighborhood (NYC) and walking style. It was almost like an intervention. On the other hand, in its effort to run the gamut it fails to really vividly capture the effects of withdrawal. The theremin score is a good place to start but the dance of the empty raincoats with the bottle of rye in the pocket went on too long, like Wilder really wanted to sneak an operetta into things somewhere, that he'd grab any excuse to shoehorn in a little Austrian high culture. And what kind of idiot drunk wouldn't have brought the rye into the concert with him? That's why pints are all thin like that and why suit jackets have inside pockets! And the thing with the mouse and bat was fine and freaky but frankly it was too singular. DTs are more fluid. You wouldn't see just one bat and one rat, you'd see hordes inside the walls, deep and spiraled out, ala the paredolia amok quality of a bad acid trip. At least they tried, though I would have loved to see the little turkeys with straw hats the dipsomaniac ward guy Bim's always talking about. And yeah, that alcoholic ward was great - nothing's quite as fun as a hospital bed where other patients are already screaming. Hell, you may as well scream too! Let 'er rip!

When it's good it's pretty good

But when it's bad its really bad, and for far, far longer

If Don manages to get sober without medical attention it's only through the grace of God and a Good Woman. Though this time he finds the wherewithal to sneak out of Bellevue in the dead of night, if he was just one level farther down this list, would be next to impossible. He needs an Ativan drip, he would have gladly stayed if he had one, but it didn't exist yet!

Barrymore as--more or less himself--- DINNER AT EIGHT

--POINT OF NO RETURN---

There's no way back now without either convulsing at home and maybe dying from withdrawal, or going to a nice sanitarium, detox, rehab or hospital. But in the meantime, enjoy the calm after the horrendous breakwaters. Now there's no sense struggling against the current. You're so far out to sea you don't know which way to paddle anyway. You're fucked, my friend, but for the moment you're also free. The serenity of the irrevocably damned cannot be measured. 

LEVEL 8: Literary / Kafka High (Second Plateau)

John Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew

BARTON FINK (1991)

Dir. Coen Bros.

A southern gentleman clearly modeled on Faulkner, a man who also spent some time puking in the bathrooms of the big movie studios and having writer bungalow DTs, Mahoney gets 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-nursemaid-drink pourer/enabler. At the same time we see the comfy 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 pet project 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 and producers so busy spouting contradicting messages that they barely notice you're in the room. Then again, when you're this far gone, the space between being too drunk to move and too sober to sit still is ever-shrinking. In other words, this is where most great Hollywood writers and actors orbit, any farther and they're stuck in the drain's inescapable vortex. Here ,at least, they are suspended. Like the doomed vessel in Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom," they achieve a fixed orbit around the lip of the whirlpool. It's dependent on the girlfriend--or-assistant--or-both, of course, to keep them spinning like a magic show plate. Sure this driunk will crack when he hits the floor, but in the meantime, there's a certain tranquility in surrender. It's the moment of clarity that comes when the horizon line of the shore disappears, and it no longer makes sense to struggle against the current. Just float all the way to China.

LEVEL 9: Existentially Debauched Mach 2

Albert Finney as The Consul

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Dir. John Huston

"I must drink desperately to regain my balance."

We can all hope we never get stuck with a houseboy as creepy as callow Hugh here, the younger brother and adulterer, patiently plying his rival/sibling with 'cures' for alcoholism like a regicidal lover creeping through the royal garden with his poison earwax candle. We're too drunk to resist him, except for the occasional passive-aggressive jab. We're past those breakwaters, so now on 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 very far) hopefully of something other than strychnine. It might be easier to be publicly intoxicated in a place like Mexico, where--as WC Fields would say--drunkenness is so common it's unnoticed, and where 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. I can't say for sure, but I do have experience with this level of goneness, and I dig how, when Yvonne, his estranged wife, suddenly appears out of the morning mist, after being gone for years, and he dismisses her as an hallucination, barely making eye contact as he rhapsodizes to the empty air. Is Yvonne even really there? 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 man with alcohol and ego problems, as he did in Night of the Iguana (which finds Shannon at Existentially Debauched Mach 1 - the Toby Dammit level (#3, above).

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, is made all the more painful by his utter dependency on good old Hugh. Both Yvonne and Huge have to dress him like an infant after he naughtily runs through the shower, making it hard for old Geoffrey to assert any alpha dominance. It would have probably been more enjoyable had someone like Burton played the part, but Finney certainly does have the breadth; booze seems to emanate from his pores in the hot Mexican sun. He is, in short, colossal. Watching him oscillate in a fluid motion between pathetic and absurdist, triumphant and pleading, bitter and humble, celebratory and shitfaced, adventurous and craven, fuming with suicidal self-loathing and rhapsodizing with a love for the world, constantly turning his conversations into glazed-eyed monologues and rationalizations, boasts, defeats, petty hollering, is to feel both a lysergic tang in the saliva glands and a brutal chill to the bones.

LEVEL 10 - Crackin' Up

Jack Lemmon as Joe Clay

THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (1962)
Dir. Blake Edwards

I used to hate this movie on principle, but a recent viewing (in the wake of my February relapse) showed me I was just scared of the neurotic intensity Lemmon brings, and the weird way the combination of Edwards and Lemmon indicates this should be a wacky comedy. It is, it's just also terrifying, gut-wrenching, humorless and dark-as-pitch. Lemmon ably captures 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 so are compelled to go staggering out into the public sphere, hoping you find something ope. 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, (you just black out and wake up in an even worse condition). The more booze you have the more blank space there is between agonized withdrawal periods -- like a pause button on the alarm clock in the morning of your torture-filled death. Sooner or later the booze is gone, the pause goes off automatically, and the pain resumes, only more so. All booze does is make it later and later, which makes the pain worse and worse, and when you wake up screaming and are also out of booze, well, you're truly fucked. Now the only way you can keep going is if you have a loyal servant, spouse or enabler who won't go all Baby Jane on you in your hours of helplessness.

Lemmon does a pretty great stagger through the campsite trying to find some booze here, and it's that stagger that turned me around on the film. The desperation with which he breaks into the liquor store is a little trite - no good drunk would be that unused to that level of desperation. Or so I thought. Once. But this last relapse, I remember --there's a window into a real estate office adjacent to my apartment with two bottles of champagne within grabbing distance behind the ground floor window. Just smashing the glass and grabbing them seemed easier to my shattered brain than going down the street to the grocery store to get beer, a trip that involved so many steps, the need for entering a building with overhead lights, and money exchanges I was terrified of falling over, flipping out, passing out in the dairy aisle, letting the cashier see my shakes, or winding up arrested for public intoxication, then cracking up in a holding cell or hospital. But punching my hand through the window of a real estate office? No sweat.

Still, now 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 the shattered eyes of Sinatra in jail in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM as he watches a fellow junky (who's been there longer) enter the throes of early withdrawal Yeeesh.

LEVEL 11: Last Call (Third Plateau)

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 involve the detox ward or the morgue, or both. "I came to Vegas to drink myself to death," notes Ben to his last-days lover Sera (Elizabeth Shue). Their doomed affair is so touching, and Cage's performance is so raw and electric, seeing this in the theater with my girlfriend, I came home and starting pounding whiskey like Ben for the next several weeks, my girlfriend no longer trying to stop me, for she got the tragic romance of the 'non-interference' policy.

At the time I saw it, Ben's decision seemed very strange to me, but my drinking was still safely at level four, the Toby Dammit stage. But now I get it. Stopping drinking at these advanced stages of boozing is a nightmare. The best way I can describe it is via the hangover. Most of us, even the worst drunks in our beginner phases, can 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. We might still feel like shit, but we're better than we were that morning. At the Ben stage, it's reversed, and there's no limit: if that was Ben going to work, by 5 PM he'd be in convulsions, or at least shaking insanely (St. Vitus dance!). 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 is vibrating apart.

At this stage your life becomes purely a series of black-outs punctuated by miserable stretches between waking up and getting enough fresh alcohol into you to stop the shakes and vomiting. Which after a few days of continual bender is harder than it seems. I guess you would shit your pants if you had any solids in your system. Trying to make it back up or down stairs, to avoid getting hit by a car crossing the street, or just appearing in public without winding up handcuffed to hospital gurney is as daunting as brain surgery on a galloping horse. Just getting a shoe on can cause all sorts of vertigo and panic. It can take hours. Finding another one to match is like a needle in a field of haystacks. Socks, forgot socks - an hour finding a pair and getting them on, and they're still inside out and mismatched.

And what's the reward if you manage to procure and down enough booze to stop the pain? Bliss, for a few hours or so, maybe some writing, followed by some period of dead unconsciousness, usually waking up to find your glasses are missing or smashed against your face, and you've broken at least two things, including maybe the coffee table. Sleeping with your head on the cold tile floor (the best!), gasping like a dying fish for hour-after-hour, hangover slowly getting more intense as the days click by. A single bite of toast takes hours of dry heaving to keep down.  These interminable epochs of intense misery are what you remember, what stays etched into your soul deeper than a recording stylus made of wolverine claw. The 'good parts are dim moments of glowing, transcendental love/bliss/joy - a sense of warmth ebbing into your soul like cosmic jacuzzi. Ideally you did some writing in that time - as you won't remember you even felt it otherwise. (2)

---

--DEATH--

LEVEL12:  Destroyer of Worlds

Clint Eastwood as William Munney, i.e. America

UNFORGIVEN (1992)

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Sometimes there's a man gets healed by the love of a good woman, the lord, or the people in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Sometimes the meeting is canceled or isn't fun anymore, or the lord leaves for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back, or the good woman 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 - did one of her kids steal it? The nightmare finally swamps your raft and you sink. So 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 brutalizin' sheriff beats Will's buddy to death, Munny relapses and it's like Popeye eating some PCP-laced spinach, which is what it's like when you relapse after a long, long time off the bottle. Hell follows with Munny and he kills everyone in the bar. "I've always been lucky when it comes to killin'" he explains, and Eastwood makes sure we see the US flag waving behind him in the flames, for Munny's 'luck' with killing, and his terrible addictions, are America's. And when I too fell off the wagon after almost 20 years earlier this year, wasn't I, too, America?

This level is, incidentally, not the 'next' in line from the LEAVING LAS VEGAS category above. The next in line is seldom captured in film because there is nothing afterwards except degraded madness, which is not cinematic. Or it's death, which is the same, unless one becomes it, and that's what Munny becomes, like Shiva, or Opie at Los Alamos.
---

I had a 20 year itch moment this past Christmas, trapped like a cat in a sack for hour after hour with a loud drunken family, something I can't abide when not drunk myself - apparently. Day after day of misery until the final surrender, watching SUICIDE SQUAD with the boys on Xmas Day and pounding down enough vodka it was like tripping after all these years, the warm fuzzy courage filling my sails like the sudden taste of freedom after 20 years in a 10x10 concrete cell. But six weeks of my progressively more belabored attempts at moderation and sobriety later, boom, there I am, slipping from level 1 all the way down to here in about as many weeks. Who can judge but those who know? I wonder what channel I would have requested for my sober cell back under Viola Davis' wing (the lizard guy got BET)- but I don't wonder long, of course it's TCM. I blame their Wine Club for contributing to my downfall - as it's like someone set up a bar in the middle of your AA homegroup.
==
Final Note:

I've tried to keep this post light, but for those of us on the outside, the long road back to 'normal is long, thorny, and often without joy, or hope.

But fear not! There's a meeting near you, or close enough: so 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. No one 'represents' AA beyond what's laid out in the literature vis-a-vis the steps. Don't trust the ones who try and go beyond that. Fire pushy sponsors who try to micro-manage your sobriety or take over your life. They have no real power beyond that which they try and co-pt. Just go to meetings and listen, and blah blah. Never let them push you into something you don't want to do, or take advantage of your weakness .'Hiccup!' Never let them push you into something you don't want to do. I just said that. But be sure your not wanting to do it isn't fear of facing the truth within yourself. It works if you work it! The happy ending to this post is only ever granted one day at a time. Ain't we lucky we got 'em... for now? May God help us all... in the future. 

I think He will. If we let 'im. 

NOTES:
1. There was a study in Sweden comparing children of alcoholics with those of non-alcoholics - their eye hand coordination was studied both before and after consuming a shot of whiskey. The non-alcoholic kids lost coordination but the alcoholic ones gained it. It was like they switched places. I learned it in class, but can't remember where... you know why :)

2. I haven't had any alcohol during the whole life of this blog except for a short period - in early 2017 (between 12/25/15- 2/15/16) if you want to see an example of this euphoric writing see Dipsomaniac Amore, most of which was written during that time)

For the whole drunk family: GRABBERS

Ah laddies and lassies faire, are ye home this Thanksgiving? Will the family be looking to you to pick a film from the Netflix once all football and food is done and the wee ones and pious old folks safe in bed, and only the serious drinkers left coherent (read "serious" in that beautiful accent Claire Florani uses in those "All Hail the Drinkin' Man" commercials for Johnny Walker Black, the only reason to watch TV anymore - my praise here)?

Well, of course Netflix'sh got you covered.

GRABBERS 

(2012) Dir Jon Wright

***1/3

It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid that's part of the lineage of solid drinking films from the more remote and storm-swept parts of the UK, like LOCAL HERO, TIGHT LITTLE ISLAND, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING, and MAN OF ARAN. Drunker family members might scoff during the first bits, but hush them and soon they'll be noting how gorgeous the emerald scenery and the leads most attractive. Ere long they'll be singing "Jug of Punch" and recalling aloud John Wayne in THE QUIET MAN and Gene Kelly in BRIGADOON with a merrye twinke in their eye. 

And there's a great hook: to avoid being eaten all the residents of this tight little island must drink, a lot. 

Dig that caption!

H.R. Giger-esque (but not too much) industrio-tentacledness

There's an adorable little lady ball-busting cop (Ruth Bradley), similar to how Holly Hunter used to be, pre-PIANO, but cuter even, and it's rewarding watching her character get drunk for the first time, like a little two-fisted Gallic faerie, falling for the drunken officer who decides to stay relatively sober just this once, even though it means having to stall the first kiss with this newly forged firebrand. Bradley makes the most of the chance to cut loose and is a wet-eyed mussy haired miracle in a big jeep stakeout, which is also craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and/or romance. There's some taking time to capture lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline, a few too many green and azure filters, overdoing it just a dram like we're watching the film through green sunglasses, but the whole third act is over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all my favorite films, it ends at dawn.

AGE GROUPS: Unlike most monster films, the American ones for example, there's no guns on the island, it's Europe, after all, so when monsters come they have to improvise with various devices of a non-gunpowder-related nature. Violence is mostly of the squishing and severed head variety, nothing the hip kids haven't seen in frog-cutting class; there's nothing sexual or overly traumatic, and even old grandma can respect how, even under monster duress and whiskey inhibition lowering, the romance stays chastely Fordian. By the same token, fans of the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost films (such as SHAUN OF THE DEAD) shall know it by the same approximate seriocomic fan's eye view attention to squeam-and-squish minutiae. In sum, if your family's been known to have a wee dram, slither in. 

Andes Hard: NIGHT FLIGHT

"Fog... darkness.... surrounds us like a prison," intones John Barrymore  to a row of aviation board trustee silhouettes, "but no more!" Above him glows a giant topological map of South America, like a comforting artsy lighthouse beacon. He's sending brave pilots like Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery over and through and around the Andes! Up and down the South American coast from Rio down to Buenos Aires, even with zero visibility in the dead of night without enough lift to make it above the troposphere! He's prepared for the inevitable crashes but not for a minute lateness or a single mechanical slip-up. The mail must go out on time! Or a pilot must lie dead, a plane lost. This is history! This is happening! "In spite of ya, night flying is going on!"

The trustees wince in fear -- Buenos Aires is fogged-in and the Andes are dangerous even in clear daylight due to treacherous wind currents  -- but with JB at the helm, flights leave on schedule even in ceiling zero! And the planes aren't all fancy like the poster above, they're bi-planes, and Andes' air currents hit them "like an elevator!" (there's some exhilarating aerial footage of Mongtomery's little plane bobbing up and down in the wind currents over endless white caps). Gazing contemptuously one last time in their piddling humanitarian direction, Barrymore snarls at the row:  "If it wasn't for me you'd still have one plane, a ferry service across the river to Montevideo." Yo, I took a three hour (?) hovercraft ferry across that river! And its entirety is (a natural) light coffee brown! When the water sprays up it turns the whole sky a surreal setting sun pink... I felt like I was on Venus or something. Instead, just the opposite end of the world.

Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic and modern meditation, full of great cool midnight moments, particularly in the Robert Montgomery sections; he seems to really grasp that elusive mix of bravery and wistfulness the movie is going for. After nearly dying in the valley between two mountains, he lands at the BA airport with a kind of calm benevolence. More than almost any other actor in any other moment he underplays the cosmic relief of being safe on firm ground after so long hovering over the maw of death, while conveying to a level approaching poetry, or at least early Hemingway. Unfolding over one long night it has curious poetic-noir fairy tale qualities-- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will, occurring in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep, recalling They Shoot Horses Don't They? and nothing else. So there's Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction--clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in a radio station of tango orchestra music on his operator's headphones, and looks up at the moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Just our luck if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust! And now he's got the divine Myrna Loy, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting. Her endless sobs invite the same sort of passive sleepiness as the drone of the planes. "Like an elevator!"

Better moments: Robert Young's slow, careful dismounting from his plane after he nearly crashes deep in a canyon. Bumming a cigarette from the prop man and slyly kissing of the ground, Young tells him "air current... dropped me into a canyon... just missed the rocks. It's as if the mountains were crouching ready to spring at ya.... not a thing moved... almost too quiet.... as if a secret..." and he catches himself, pulling back from conjuring a silent demon incarnation of the Andes. Again the moment is leisurely, dreamy, Young makes vivid the high strangeness of what it feels like almost dying in the middle of nowhere without a creature stirring for hundreds of miles and how the landscape itself starts to seem like some giant, sentient ambivalent god (maybe if you've ever driven alone through an empty stretch of Montana or Wyoming while almost out of gas in the dead of night know too wanting to kiss the ground). "It's too good to be alive... on such a night." Young says, and his gratitude-drenched sardonic laugh feels real and beautiful. He even goes to dinner with Lionel Barrymore, an old codger who can't stop scratching his eczema and fining pilots for being even ten minutes late in the darkness, fog, and wind. But Young says he's "not half-bad" and you feel some joy because hey, life is precious when death is so daily courted and maybe that's why it makes such a dreamy, fascinating, hypnotic film. Meanwhile the wives and girlfriends pine at home, fretting every unreported hour. And Dr. Irving Pichel waits in Rio for the medicine to come by plane - which a child needs or he won't live the night!

But oh, there are some worried wives, the coolest of whom is Myrna Loy (of course) married to most uncool man (Gargan) and the most uncool (Hayes) inhabiting big ether-misted greenhouses of monologues, bugging Barrymore to bring her man home in one piece, as if he can somehow stop the weather or the night. Even if he could, Barrymore refuses to let sentiment get in his way. He doesn't even know that package of medicine waiting in a foggy Buenos Aires for the Rio-bound plane, but he does know only a ruthless iron determination can create the impossible dream, and that night flights are already going on in Europe and North America and we have to keep up! Up! UP!

Aside from the beautiful muted poeticism there's a giddily unabashed look towards death that reminds me of The Little Prince, which makes sense since that book too was written by aviator-poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry; you can tell its written by someone genuinely in love with the moon, the night, flying, the Andes and living on the lip of death. I like death too films that occur in the middle of the night--that say fuck you to normal sleep schedules--really soothe my ruffled brow, and I love that for some stretches there's no talking in Night Flight at all, just the tick-tock of clocks and metronomes, the whoosh of turbulence, and weird ethereal vocalizing in amidst the lullaby soundtrack, it's like my white noise machine in film form. Even the wives pining at home are helped by the deep dark spaces; their shadowy boudoirs are like big warm airy wombs. And as they all hover between life and death, love and loss, goodbyes and going back to sleep, a really dreamy, opiate sense of floating coheres.

While it's packed with MGM stars, ala Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, any sense of Night Flight being an ensemble film is undone by how seldom two stars share more than one scene. The pilots are off on their own, up in the clouds, bathed in darkness, fog, and moonlight; their wives are home alone, eating dinner and crying into their champagne; over at the Buenos Aires air station, Barrymores try to hold it all together while gazing up at the big board, lecturing abstract silhouettes, and fining sleepy pilots, as if each actor only imagines the others exists but in reality they're all asleep and the empty night sky is the dream canvas. At home, the silence and dark tendrils of sleep seem to creep around whining Helen Hayes and gorgeous Myrna Loy like loving arms of night. In the air the moon is the like a big comforting mother cradling the plane like a baby, and the BA tango music picked up on the radio is perfect in its ghostly lullaby allure.

Some of the comments around IMDB encapsulate what is wrong with the film as far as conventional drama, and they are all quite right, but for me personally these same 'flaws' are why the film's so cool and beguiling. Michael Elliot writes:

I think the biggest problem is that the screenplay really isn't all that impressive and most of the drama never comes because the story never builds up any emotional connection to any of the people we meet. The Gable character is meant to be the backbone of the drama yet we never get to really meet him and we certainly never get to know him as all of his scenes are in the air and he's given very little dialogue.

But Michael, that's the point! These characters we meet in this period are all isolated, adrift in their little pocket of the world, sleeping in dark art deco rooms or crying in front of the nervous maid, waiting weeks for their husband to drift home for a few days where all he does is sleep and look wistfully out the window at that old devil moon. It's like the modern age is being born before our eyes and the sad faces of the old widows and brides as their men take off to sea in Moby Dick are here frozen at their fullest blossom in nightshade honey and spread across die dunkelbrot nacht. 

So thanks, TCM, for rescuing this film, and assisting in getting the licensing issues between Exupéry and MGM resolved, allowing it to emerge from its 75 years inside the dark cloud legal limbo like Amelia Earhart. We can almost feel the lack of eyes that have been laid on this, the way it feels is like a person comfortable with being a lonely artist, most awake and productive in the hours between midnight and dawn, when everyone else is asleep so they don't clog the airwaves with petty junk, and he can subliminally harness their dreamy calm. Many critics and fans who've wanted to see it for decades were perhaps expecting too much, I wasn't expecting anything except that it wouldn't measure up to the brilliance of another film about treacherous night flying over the Andes, Hawk's Only Angels Have Wings. And perhaps it's in the comparison, as the Fail Safe to Wings' Dr. Strangelove. In fact the two airlines could very well be connecting to each other along the South American flight plan! They might never meet, either, just a pilot once in awhile comes through Barranca, buys some drinks, waits til the storm clears, and takes off again.

And you can find much breadth of vision between the two if you compare the warm camaraderie of Hawk's film, which takes place almost entirely in the cozy bar/saloon/airfield owned by Sig Rumann, with the shadowy isolation of the command center of Night Flight, wherein the only 'fun; moment occurs when Young and Dorothy Burgess drunkenly sing "How Dry I Am" as they drive up to the runway in her convertible. It's a single moment of merriment like a daring final laugh in the face of mortality, vs., say, "The Peanut Vendor" in Angels, or the various macabre toasts, "Hurrah for the next who dies!" in The Lost Patrol (see my analysis of the WWI anti-war aviation films of the early 30s).  In this one, the song comes when the sun is just coming up, and Young puts his flight suit on over his tuxedo and gives his girl in the convertible a farewell kiss, and off he goes into the horizon, still drunk off his ass. Even in these early days of commercial cinema pilots went to work drunk! Why not? It's not like there are pedestrians or stop signs in the sky, and you're already taking your life in your hands just going up there. You need courage, by the quart if needed. And god knows you can't even be nice to Lionel Barrymore's inspector, lest brother John hear about it and break up the friendship with petty fines, so that it will be easier sending the boys into their death. What a dick.

But now that planes can fly fly fly up high enough to coast right over the Andes, thanks to pressurized cabins (and even heroes like Denzel get dragged over the coals for cockpit drunkenness) the opportunities for a man to sneer at mortality are far between. And the weird disconnect between all the stars' big scenes (like each actor was shot in a day or two on a soundstage where they didn't have to run into each other) is perfect for the subject matter. In careening through the inky blackness of the night sky instead of coasting through the inky dark dreams of sleep with their Argentine wives, these brave men of the air mail routes are, just like Exupéry's Little Prince, unbound up by the laws of gravity, sleep schedule convention, or the normal routines of human relationships. Refusing to choose life over death or home life over the air or vice versa, if they go down, they go like men, with only bobbing jellyfish parachutes for gravestones, free forever of their overbearing bourgeois wives.

Some more lines from Moby Dick maybe encapsulate the true kernel of poetic treasure within the seemingly disparate scenes of Night Flight:

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Like those birds on the plain, other MGM star-studded prestige pics like Dinner at Eight may soar critical esteem but they're in familiar ground, while Night Flight--even when it nosedives, is way up in its own gyre. Where conventional airplane dramas tend to just take a spin around the void, throw in some flares and then ride off back to safety, Night Flight plunges straight down into the black abyss, landing lights off, harpoons at the ready, all to get the postcards and insulin to Rio at the scheduled time. Call it crazy, call it suicide, but it's the kind of black art that stirs me up like Ahab's electric oratory. It's no surprise then that I'll defend the lonely black night beauty of this film, though it crushes me to the core like gravity's ticking metronome....

And, like flying itself, is often boring.

The First Lebowski: CUTTER'S WAY (1981)

Every once in awhile a man has to pause. Every once in awhile a man has peer into the decades behind him, take a cursory flip through Leonard Maltin and wonder... is John Heard really a good actor? I mean, is he awesome? Or is he too much too late?

The question is answered the same time as you ask: do all 1970s movies involve grizzled vet loners going after corrupt power father figures like they're lone wolves growling valiantly but for naught against the dog food industry?

As Robert Evans would say, you bet all 1970's movies involved grizzled loners growling for naught against the machine. And they all must have a big crowd scene parade, or a wedding, or a political rally, or some place where they can see some willowy female figure in a white dress representing old world innocence reduced to a symbolic lamb sacrifice against the coming storm of dread and draconian soul-eating.

Perhaps a bit shaggy, CUTTER'S WAY can't make up its mind about itself: is it called CUTTER'S WAY or CUTTER AND BONE? Is it an Elmore Leonard-ish beach bum crime drama, a Vietnam vet character study, a dysfunctional buddy comedy meets California corruption tale, or an elegy to the American dream ala DEER HUNTER? A quirky tale of a small California town where everybody knows your name and you can drink right out in the open and not be arrested, ("Hey man! I have a beverage here!") it's CHINATOWN meets MIDNIGHT COWBOY divided by BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA meets NIGHT MOVES + SHAMPOO divided by THE DEER HUNTER if Roger Altman started to direct it, got replaced by William Friedkin, who turned it over to Louis Malle. It's got a little of a lot and sure it's brilliant but by 1981 these tropes scan like quirk-by- numbers. Why shoehorn the whole evil murder plot in there at all? And Heard overplays so much and acts so drunk that a murder case seems way too much for him to handle, or care about. He should be using some of that voracious animal intellect to not piss his pants, like the rest of us!

Those pants really tied the room together.

In short, this movie could be a prequel to THE BIG LEBOWSKI, wherein a younger Dude, still played by Jeff Bridges, deals with a similar conspiracy by the much saner approach of saying fuck it and going bowling, and Bridges' Vietnam vet wreck of a buddy John Goodman but a little scrawny fucker with only one leg and an eye patch. Goodman would have shaken the shit up in CUTTER'S WAY, but Heard can't do much more than ride a horse through a window. As Sam Eliot once said: "Take her easy, Dude... I know you will, too."

CUTTER takes it too easy, way too easy. It started as a project back in 1971 and if it had been released in 1972 instead of the early nine years later it would probably have been a hit and a modern classic like your DEER HUNTER and your CHINATOWN, but studio regime changes as well as trend shifts delayed its completion and release, and by 1981 people had grown a little weary of the traumatized vet loner solving a rich man's crimes and getting nothing but alienated. I remember reading some good reviews in the local newspaper when CUTTER finally did come out, but I knew even then, at 14, that the 1970s were over. We'd all had a good laugh at the HEAVEN'S GATE debacle, and grown tired of the undignified trash talking--chronicled in PEOPLE magazine--between the stars of DEER HUNTER and COMING HOME over the 1978 Oscars, with one side bashing the other over its 'demonic' portrayal of the Viet Cong and the other side bashing the other over its idealized liberal critique of Bruce Dern. One more film about a Vietnam vet disillusioned and seeking to overturn the turtle of American politics wasn't going to make us leave our sofa, not in 1981. We craved fantasy, escape, ET!!

And lo, ET was on his way, to trade us our innocence for some magic candy--like a safety class stranger--just one year after this last gasp of 1970s corruption-venting. In 1981, being disillusioned about America was universal to the point it had disappeared from notice.

And for some of us, John Heard was just too... Kevin Bacon-ish? No denying he's ferocious here and gives it 111%, but seeing the film now, long past any due date, I honestly don't know how I feel about him, or the film. All the ingredients are there and maybe that's the problem. It's like the film was given an unlimited shopping spree at the seventies' paranoia cliche' store and just had to clean the place out.

But hey, it's worth seeing some time when you're high on 1970s Vietnam-gate, and what a double bill it would make with LEBOWSKI! May I recommend an angle on which to view them, for political meta-purposes? Just have Bridges = Blue States / right brain (far out, man) and the vets (Goodman and Heard) = Red states / left brain (guns break class barriers). The corrupt power elite figure in each equals the 'real' corporate shadow puppets (Halliburton, Enron) that capitalize on the dissonance between the colors/hemispheres to steal everyone's IRA and soul. Keep this in mind and let the bowling balls and cocktails fall where they may.

The fine and trenchant blog OUT 1 reviews CUTTER here, and draws a similar Lebowski conclusion while dealing more with the plot and production of the film itself. It makes a fine double bill with this post! Tell them the Dude sent ya. I know you won't, too... you'll forget.

I know I have.

Secrets of 2012, or the "The Day of a Million Relapses"

Sorry to be so late to the party in loving/trashing Roland Emmerich's 2012, but I got so much to say, You HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME! We're running out of time! First, First, I love the insecure way Emmerich steals bits not just from himself but from James Cameron, and Michael Bay -- they steal bits from each other, as if there was only one 99 cent bag of tired action movie cliches and they had to share it between them, and make it last three hours. Emmerich of course is the worst, stealing everything while sticking to what he knows best - destroying the world on a bigger and bigger scale and refracting the escapes and deaths through the on-the-street perspectives of an an offensively cliche'd cross section of 'everypeople'-- each a unique distillation of stock characteristics defining their Ameri-racial heritage.

There's enough great carnage in 2012 to forgive it its trespasses, of course: Las Vegas collapses into a giant flame hole, all of Los Angeles gets a long fly-over as it sinks back into the earth, the Vatican (!!), and other tourist spots collapse and a joyous time is had by all, though it's rather like having a lover who covers up the fact they don't have an erection by performing an elaborate courtship dance. 

But hey, we've all died before in other lives, we know it's hard, and Emmerich makes sure we all are represented by one stock character or the other. Me, I resonated most with Harry (Blu Mankuma), the beautiful old African American jazz man father of the bleeding heart geologist son (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The two have a nice farewell via ship-to-shore phone (Harry's pianist in residence on a cruise liner) and upon hanging up--his responsibility to his son completed--Harry grabs a Jack Daniels off a passing waiter's tray. His old sax man (George Segal) remarks: "Harry, you haven't had a drink in 25 years!"

Harry doesn't even answer, and our movie makes sure we actually get to see him drink that first drink in 25 years, a healthy swig, thus letting us know that (a) he's cool and b) he's doomed, and c) he's relapsed and doesn't give a shit! As someone with half his 'time,' I can't help but cheer!! Someone in that scriptwriting pool knows the score!

Sadly, the next time we see Harry he's not abusive or sprawled on the floor, or staggering around on his second fifth of bourbon, or even playing some mournful blues on the lounge piano as the room fills with water and waiters wade by in slow motion (they're on a cruise). So many missed opportunities... but finally a disaster movie actually put in what every sober alcoholic waits for--the unshakable excuse to relapse. There's an old saying in AA that I made up about promising to drink again when hell freezes over: one day we're bound to find ourselves on a Zamboni machine heading down into the flames.

So that's 2012 for me, and I don't even have to tell you the rest of the plot: A perennially late divorced slacker dad (John Cusak, flailing wildly) racing to pick up his kids for the weekend from hot, beachwood-aged-wife (Amanda Peet) and her shallow dork of a plastic surgeon, lawyer or stockbroker boyfriend/husband (Tom McCarthy). Cusak is one of those dads who talk baby talk to their children long past the expiration date that such condescension passes for parenting. Dude, your daughter's watching the world cave in around her and you're the one panicking like a hysterical over-acting ninny.

I'm always glad to see that Hollywood for all its smarm is deeply concerned about micro-managerial parenting and the crippling anxiety it creates -- especially in men, causing them to run away from responsibility and dread every weekend of custody, terrified the kid will slip and fall on their watch. Like Tom Cruise in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS remake, our spazzola action movie everyman is caught at ground zero of immanent catastrophe right at the time he's most anxiety-prone: child custody weekend. His first thought once the meteors start is to return the kids asap so he can be free to die with dignity. Is this how real fathers feel, or is it what teenagers are afraid they'll feel as fathers?

I'm childless, no kids y'all, and the whole "road not taken" fascinates me,  not in a fuzzy way but in a queasy way -- like watching your friends fall into a giant threshing machine and come out looking thirty years older, but with a nice shiny 'warm-colored' patina, telling you in their pod person voices "Once you have a child, your whole outlook changes, you appreciate life." Thus, God opens the door right as the floor falls away behind you, and he expects you to jump through only at the last possible second, your mouth agape, going "Ahhhhhhhhhhh!"

Next thing I love about this film? The covert condemnation of liberal bleeding-heartedness. I mean, can we be honest? Do we really care if four billion people die, or an extra hundred crrazy idiots get to come on the ark or not? Would you really care so much, Holly, if one of those little ants down there stopped moving? Either way, why INDEPENDENCE DAY and DAY AFTER TOMORROW did this so much better was by eliminating the whole ark crap. The mad chase across the globe to fight to get on some escape craft is a kind of hack ploy to show a lot of different lands getting wiped out, but a close reading opens up all sorts of THE BOX-style Pandora-ish issues of empathy and survival instinct that  come off best either being addressed in Brechtian reflexivity or in a film noir-style survivor guilt way (ala 28 MONTHS LATER) or not at all. Don't lecture us for enjoying watching ant-sized people falling out of burning skyscrapers if that's what got us in the seats. We didn't come for character development.

The moral quandry is brought up and simultaneously side-stepped by this strategy. Ejiofor plays his bleeding horn whenever he learns someone he knows has died, demanding everyone drop their own issues to acknowledge that these people he knew had NAMES, feelings!  Meanwhile, the "self-preservation" other of the equation is Cusak as the kind of dad who promises his kids front row seats to Justin Bieber  and on arriving at the stadium (without tickets) and learning the show's sold out, panics and proceeds to storm the doors, blow the family fortune on scalpers, sneak in through the back, make a big scene with security about how much it means to his kids, cries and pleads, traumatizes everyone-- not just his kids--and eventually incites a small riot and burns down the stadium, and the kids don't even really care about Justin Beaver, at all; they hadn't the heart to tell him.

There are men who can act rationally when faced with crisis, and men can't, men who've just bled too much from their liberal martyr hearts to see the forests from the trees. These are men who will freak out because they can't find one girl's lost daddy and so righteously go around yelling even as huge fissures are erupting under the makeshift med unit and thousands are dying and burning all around. The only time this scene has been done right was in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND (left), when Scarlett walks out of the makeshift confederate army hospital to get help and just keeps going right on home, after seeing the mass carnage spreading into the horizon. But Scarlet's morality was inherently dubious, what with slavery and all, and because Selznik hewed to the book, Scarlett was, almost by a fluke, allowed to be totally mercenary and immoral. (Everyone wants to make a film as sweeping and memorable as GONE WITH THE WIND, but have they actually ever seen it? The lead character's an unrepentant bitch, y'all!) GWTW could hardly even be made like that today, with such a ruthless, self-centered heroine. If the suits remade it, Scrarlett would probably end up a saintly single mom, and then all her capricious manipulations and treacheries would be solely to care "for the child" and therefore saintly.

To show you how bad things get without ambivalence and naked self-interest, let's return to 2012 and the only two guys with any maturity in the whole picture: Woody Harrelson as a Yellowstone hippy DJ who greets the huge volcanic eruption of old Faithful with a head full of mescalin (I'm guessing) and Oliver Platt as a blustery political something or other who soon regrets inviting Ejiofor along on the ark, especially when he starts to make emotion-cracked pleas to open up the arks to the unwashed masses rioting outside. Platt screams at him: "You might have gotten us all killed but as long as your conscience is clean." Amen. When Oliver Platt is the only one with any sense, that's a sad crazy day.

My fellow Americans, many must die so that John Cusak and his two rugrats may live and have last minute escapes, one after the other until the law of averages shrugs and walks away as if from his friend's nonstop video game playing. Of course if you really really really want to live, then come on! We have to get on that plane and take off before the earth splits apart but first I have to slowly do five things! There's a saying in AA, you know you're an alcoholic when you have to choose between believing in God or dying drunk, and need time to think about it. If to live you had to endure John Cusak's overacting, there shouldn't be a second thought.

Like, am I the only one who just wishes everyone died in this film? Why be loyal and liberal bleeding hearty to CGI stick figures? Let them die! That's what they're for!!! I remember in 6th grade, my friend and I drew stick figures killing and dying elaborate horrible deaths in each other's notebooks during class - it helped blow off steam. The teacher thought the drawings were cool (it was 1978) but we should pay more attention to class topics. If we pulled that in a 6th grade class today we'd be red flagged and the parents would be called-in, and the teacher would worry and admonish the way Ejiofor does to Oliver Platt: "Those things you drew - they're just stick figures to you, but they have NAMES, feelings! They represent real people!"

Like everyone's going to crack up with cheering and weeping if Cusak (who in his Jar-Jar spazzing nearly destroys all humanity) survives. If he had been a real hero, he would have just let his ex-family die like everyone else -  he'd be spared all the running and flailing, but no, he's that kind of dad, a total victim of the idea of "proximal morality" -- that is, the condition wherein something is important based on its proximity. You might be running to stop a bomb in a crowded restaurant, but if you pass a dog with a thorn its paw, you have to stop and pull the thorn out. That dog has a NAME, feelings, people! The dog's proximity preempts the bomb in the restaurant, cancels it out -- the squeaky wheel-greaser dad in action.

Thus, the ambivalence of Scarlett lives on in a passive aggressive display of parenting anxiety: Worrying about his children exempts him from responsibility for all the billions of lives that are being left to die. In this manner Cusak's no different from Billy Zane in TITANIC (1997, left), muscling his way into a lifeboat by claiming to be the guardian of some random kid he scooped up. If it was actually his own kid, he'd be considered a saint,. And aren't we all children of God, Nic? I mean John? Now which way is the bar on this sinking tub?

POST SCRIPT: See also on Bright Lights:
Shyamalan's a Ding-dong (Will Smith is a great dad, please)
Dads of Great Adventure: A Guide to Cinema’s Post-Apocalyptic Hyper-Parent