JIM
There comes a time in the life of every alcoholic when the bottle is God. Nobody, nothing matters but the next drink.
Kirsten disappears on a bender of booze and promiscuity; Joe discovers her in a seedy motel, drunk, mean, sloppy, and lonely: “Have a drink with me, please?” she begs him. “What did they do to you in there? I’m a woman, can’t you hear me calling you?” and continues to beg, plead, and belittle him until, in what he believes is a gesture of love, he pours himself a drink. Noooo! I want to yell, and the moment he raises that glass to his lips is heartbreaking because this time he has no illusions, he knows full well exactly where it will lead.
Which is straight back to the hospital. Joe is strapped down for another screaming, sweating round of alcohol poisoning, DTs and withdrawal, while Jim insists if he loves Kirsten, the only thing he can do, until she is willing to accept help, is to stay sober and set an example. Months later he is doing just that, holding down a job, raising their daughter alone, living soberly in an apartment next door to a blinking neon bar sign — constant invitation, constant warning — when Kirsten shows up, bedraggled and wan. She’s been two days sober, she tells him: “I want to come home.” Joe, still very much in love, wants nothing more than for them to be a family again. But she scares him, he tells her. She cannot come home if she continues to drink.
KIRSTEN
The world looks so dirty to me when I’m not drinking. I don’t think I could ever stop drinking, not completely, not like you. . I want things to look prettier than they are. . I can’t bear the thought of never taking another drink.
Why can’t it just be the way it was between them, she asks, back in the beginning, back when it was fun?
JOE
The way it was? It was you and me and booze. A threesome. Do you remember? We were a couple of drunks in a sea of booze and the boat sank. I got a hold of something to keep me from going under, and I’m not going to let go of it! Not for you, not for anyone. If you want to grab on, grab on. But there’s just room for you and me, no threesome!
Try it for just one more day, he pleads. Go look at their sleeping daughter! Do it for her!
But “it’s so dirty out there,” she says, and leaves. She has made her choice. Joe hugs his daughter. “When is Mommy coming home?” she asks, in a sad, sleepy-child quaver.
JOE
Honey, Mommy is sick. And she has to get well before she can come home.
DAUGHTER
Will she get well?
JOE
(pause) I did, didn’t I?
And he gazes out the window at Kirsten’s retreating back, the looming bar sign blinking, blinking. It will blink for him forever, and he knows that, and sees it, appreciates it, for the warning it is. But despite his hopeful final line, it will always be a lure for Kirsten, an irresistible, winking invitation to the devil’s dance.
Jack Lemmon gets the most intensely dramatic scenes, here — the sweating, screaming, straitjacketed writhing — and he is brilliant in this role. Lee Remick is no less extraordinary, but her unraveling is quieter, more subtle: Messier hair, dulled eyes, a steadily less expressive face. But Kirsten’s plunge is the more tragic, because her denial dooms her; all our hope is for Joe and his determination to keep ahold of something and stay afloat. Yes, he relapsed for love, but from that hellish fire forged himself into a stronger man, and — significantly — a better father. No such hope for Kirsten, the drowning, floundering bum.
Her story is also the more disturbing to me exactly because of its subtlety, the lack of unhinged histrionics; I cannot imagine myself smashing a greenhouse to bits or writhing in that “Hangover Plaza” drunk ward, and while I might really like that second (or third) glass of wine sometimes, I can still stop at one. I don’t gotta ride Don’s merry-go-round all the way, around and around. I’m no common whiskey-head, as Sarah’s Therapist warns. I am still a soaring balloon girl, held aloft by ethanol-heated air. But Kirsten’s I can’t bear the thought of never taking another drink hits a little too close to home. My thirty-day self-tests seem disingenuous; sure, anyone can stop for a while, when you know you can celebrate at the end with a festive Kir Royale or two. I do want things to look prettier than they are — not all the time, I really don’t desire to get drunk, or to stay drunk most of the time, as Joe says — but why wouldn’t I, or anyone, want a soft-focus lens sometimes, the cinematographer’s trick of good lighting, the flattering angle, the clever aesthetic touches to pretty up a scene? As Kirsten reasons, can’t I stay back at Brandy Alexander level forever, where it is all sweet giggles and fun? That’s still the best thing to have, right?
Kirsten also unnerves me, because here is a relatively rare, fully realized Portrait of an Adult Woman Alcoholic, in her full, start-to-bad-finish trajectory. Female drunks are a different cinematic animal from male drunks; we shake our heads at the Dons and Joes, we weep for them or bemoan their bad behavior, but when it comes to the drunk female character, some of our reprobation is gender-specific; the drunk woman has “fallen” in a uniquely ugly way, and our sympathy for her is more limited. Kirsten’s father stresses how, before meeting Joe, Kirsten was such a “good girl” (we are persona-sisters, there) and there is no worse indication of how low she has sunk than her drunken promiscuity (like Sarah T. propositioning the older guys. . like my own inebriated, less-than-smart sexual choices. .?) or, the greatest of her sins, her abandonment of her daughter. A woman who chooses booze over her role as a mother is an especial failure and deserves an extra heaping of shame; in When a Man Loves a Woman, Meg Ryan’s neglect of her children is the final shaming straw that sends her to rehab (at which point the story turns, like Joe’s, to a portrait of the fallout of codependency—Is sobriety making your home life unhappy?).37 The drunk woman is a harridan, coarse and unseemly, there is a certain monstrousness in her fleshy, unbridled appetite; Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a blowsy, emasculating virago, and while Richard Burton’s George is equally pickled in booze, we can’t help but blame her for his escape into drink.38 Patty Duke’s campy, nasty drunkenness in Valley of the Dolls functions in the same way: The drunk woman is a harpy who drives men to drink or just far, far away.39 She deserves to be punished, abandoned, and alone. Jane Fonda is an aging actress in The Morning After, who, after an alcoholic blackout, wakes up next to a dead man, and her inability to remember what happened is a moral failing; her slatternly bad behavior has led to murder. . one she possibly committed!40 Dum dum dum! All those drunken sorority party girls in raucous teen or college comedies, sprawled out sloppily in their lacy bras and panties in some upstairs bedroom, empty Solo cup in hand and vomit stains on the sheets, are dismissible as stupid and slutty, objects of ridicule, wholly to blame for any subsequent sexual abuse. When the alcoholic woman is not a nasty harridan, she is pathetic, slurring, and sad, a cause for our pity, not our empathy, such as Maggie Smith’s lonely spinster in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne or Gena Rowlands’s self-destructive dysfunction in Opening Night.41 There really is no female equivalent to Arthur, a female character who can carry a whole movie on her drunken charm; the closest might be Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones’s Diary, but her drinking, along with her smoking and overeating, is still symptomatic of single-gal desperation and neurosis.42 We excuse Audrey Hepburn her tipsy silliness for a scene or two in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but then we excuse Audrey Hepburn absolutely anything.43 Another rare exception: Karen Allen’s alcohol-empowered Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark, who can throw back shots with the best of them, indeed, can drink a guy twice her size literally under the table or use her macho mastery of booze to outwit a Nazi.44 But Marion isn’t a drunk, and again, her drinking is limited to two scenes; this tough chick has her head on straight. Faced with images of passed-out sorority girls, desperate spinsters, and ugly, lurching, bitter harridans, I realize I need to take special, feminine care when I drink: Pronounce your words carefully, make smart choices. Stay elegant, stay upright, refined. Stay in control. Do not let it mess up your hair or get the best of you.