The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)
eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)
Alcoholics are like snowflakes: all very similar but no two are deformed and mangled in quite the same way. The character defects emerge way before the drinking actually commences, and my main one is toxic pride. Ask just about anybody. It can get ugly, but I’m usually a drunk who implodes instead of exploding. I’m the kind of drunk who camps out on the floor for eternity and a day. An unpleasant curse attached to my lived delusion-formation—we all have them—is that my dominating and most impregnable triggers to relapse, consistently, are the heartache and romantic disappointments I bring on myself. I’m a bad enough and old enough low bottom alcoholic to know at this point that when I pick up a bottle I am summoning all the infernal, flaying resources of hell to go to work for me and devour me comprehensively in so doing. I usually hit the pavement below at least as fast as a jumper would. Recovering alcoholic Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel The Lost Weekend is almost certainly the most brutal and accurate depiction of late stage alcoholism found anywhere in literature, though the popular Billy Wilder film adaptation is not generally taken very serious by actual alcoholics on account of its being so sanitized. If you don’t believe me, Nick Tosches says so too in his excellent but unsettling Me and the Devil. Charles Jackson goes in like an ace surgeon in front of a cohort of medical students, showing everybody around the affected body. Resentment, self-pity, inward loathing ballooning, the soul pocked with tailings ponds, another sack of meat leaning against another sack of meat in the meat packing district and no way back to dear old Omaha. Mania, torment, obsession, visions of the dead. Asked by the extremely skeezy doctor he’s chatting with on a large oceanic passenger vessel if he knows what the expression “running amok” means, the narrator of Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella Amok thinks it perhaps has something to do with “a kind of intoxication affecting the Malays…” Doc: “It’s more than intoxication…it’s madness, a sort of human rabies, an attack of murderous, pointless monomania that bears no comparison with ordinary alcohol poisoning.” Buddy, you’re spilling all my secrets! The villagers in Malaysia get it. They’re able to ascertain that no accessible power can halt a man running amok, so they shout warnings ahead when they see him coming—‘Amok! Amok!’—and everyone beats it for the trees. Yes, the doctor and his story are tragic, but they are also manipulative and cruel, evidence of a compromised spirit intent on taking hostages. A legitimate spiritual guru once told me: stop telling your story. Sometimes the plague passes itself on through stories. Storytelling that unburdens? No, it is poison and it knows it and it does what it does anyway. There is no absolution. There can be no absolution for anybody who didn’t have the time or the vantage point to have their heart break for every last living creature. You cannot undo the damage done by the alcoholic in active addiction, but you can work with the alcoholic as you find them today…even if it’s only working at making a ham sandwich or sorting through bills. Alcoholism is in large part a spiritual disorder and spirituality is about connections to both worlded and otherworldly things. Try not to leave the sick person in isolated disconnection. If you can help it. I understand perfectly well how frustrating it can be. I worked in a homeless shelter and a treatment centre. It’s no better with normal people, actually. As soon as you have approximately five people you’re basically herding cats. I have ingrained bodily memory of my own traumas along with all the ones I missed out on, too. The database of the whole history of our pain is in the part of your spine where there used to be a tail sticking out. Go ahead…rub it.
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