And do not retreat into Kirsten’s denial, her self-dooming I’m not an alcoholic and I refuse to say I am! As long as you stay self-aware, I tell myself, as long as you keep that honest logbook going, you’re fine. As long as. . maybe. . you can say those magic words, you can stay afloat indefinitely, stave off the Something Bad forever.
So, fine, I’ll say it: I’m an alcoholic. Well, maybe. (That is not denial, just scientific uncertainty — there is no quantifiable, definitive diagnostic test to earn that label, now is there?) Okay, that was easy. Nothing hard about admitting it, as Sarah T.’s Teenage AA Friend says, sure. Except then you have to give up the booze.
But why? Life is still going along fine. By now I’ve stumbled into a second wonderful career, I treasure my relationships with beloved family and friends, I still score an A or at least a B+ on any silly AA exam. At least I’m not into drugs; I’m not shooting heroin. I’m a drinker, not a drunk; I have never hallucinated a purple cockroach or flapping bat. I haven’t thrown up on a bathroom floor since I was sixteen. If I lived in France, I joke, the amount I drink would make me a virtual teetotaler. I can “watch my drinking” just fine, just as I “watch my sugar” because of my high blood glucose. What’s the difference? I can have it all, like Arthur. I am leading my own delightful comedy of a life, and I can stay on my tipsy, prettied-up side of that imaginary line forever.
“How long does it take to drink yourself to death?” Sera asks Ben in Leaving Las Vegas.45 “I think about four weeks,” he estimates, but he is already well on his way, much further down the alcoholic road than Don or Joe, so far past the imaginary line the line has dipped below the horizon forever. When the film begins, Ben (Nicolas Cage in his gifted, authentic heyday, all snaggletoothed and thinning hair), a one-time ultraslick Hollywood agent or producer or some such, has already downward-spiraled his way out of a job and friends; there is no loyal sponsor or girlfriend to be found. His wife has left him and taken their child, but
BEN
I don’t remember if I started drinking because my wife left me or my wife left me because I started drinking. So fuck it.
He’s done; the opening scene is Ben enthusiastically filling a shopping cart with every gleaming bottle of booze there is, dancing in the aisle. He arrives in glittery, dizzying neon Las Vegas, chugging a bottle of vodka in the car, to a sometimes-tinkling, sometimes-desultory jazz score, with the last of his money and one final goaclass="underline" To drink his way out of purpose, out of life. Gazing at a hot woman, he fantasizes about getting her drunk,
BEN
. . so then I could fall in love with you, because then I would have a purpose: To clean you up and that would prove that I’m worth something. .
Despite a hint of the self-loathing, tortured soul, here, there is little time spent on the why of Ben’s alcoholism, on whether the self-loathing led to the drinking or the drinking led to the self-loathing. Fuck it; this is where we’re at. Ben meets and falls in love with Sera, a prostitute with struggles of her own (Elisabeth Shue, a very fresh-scrubbed hooker), but makes it clear that her love won’t save him; he is a man with a bigger mission, after all. She asks why he’s a drunk, with an echo of Helen’s belief that unlocking the mystery of why someone drinks (There must be a reason why you drink, Don, the right doctor could find it!) will serve as a life preserver tossed to a drowning man, but Ben dismisses that line of inquiry as irrelevant. Sera moves on to why he wants to kill himself, then:
BEN
I don’t remember. I just know that I want to.
SERA
Are you saying that your drinking is a way to kill yourself?
BEN
Or killing myself is a way to drink.
Again, fuck it — he’s not interested in chicken-or-egging anymore. Ben’s drunkenness is not about fun, or building self-confidence, or even an escape, really, from existential despair; it is an engraved invitation to the devil to join him in the ultimate dance marathon, a final selling of his alcoholic soul. In his end is his beginning. Sera falls in love with him, too, despite, or perhaps because of, his alcoholism having rendered him impotent, sexless; it is intimacy and connection she craves, and the rare moments they have together between his drunken binges are painfully lovely, Ben at his most soberly lucid, vulnerable, and tender:
BEN
I’m in love with you. But be that as it may, I am not here to force my twisted soul into your life. . We both know I’m a drunk. And I know you’re a hooker. I hope you understand that I’m a person who is totally at ease with this. Which is not to say that I’m indifferent or don’t care. I do. It simply means I trust and accept your judgment.
She asks him to move in with her. But wouldn’t she get bored, living with a drunk? he asks.
BEN
You haven’t seen the worst of it. These last few days have been very controlled. I knock things over and throw up all the time. Right now I feel really good; you’re like some kind of antidote that mixes with the liquor and keeps me in balance. But that won’t last forever. . What you don’t understand is you can never, never ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?
And she says she does, even buys him a hammered silver flask. They head out to a happy-couple, wine-and-roses montage at a casino, Ben consuming a staggering amount of booze until at last he throws an alcoholic fit, becomes irrational and violent, and they are thrown out; he awakens the next morning to full-on alcohol poisoning, shakingly pouring vodka into a carton of orange juice before throwing it right back up. Don Birnam never quite lost Ray Milland’s suave sheen; Jack Lemmon had his happy clown face to balance out his own tragic mask, but Ben’s alcoholism is as nakedly ugly as it gets. We can see the toxins seeping from his skin, we can smell the corrosion of his organs. It shrinks his liver; it pickles his kidneys. He drinks underwater in a swimming pool, he takes a bottle into the shower with him, he cannot keep food down. And Sera knows she is losing. She tries seducing him by making herself into a human cocktail, pouring whiskey over her naked breasts so he can lap it off, perhaps satisfy his need by drinking her in, but he falls, shatters a glass table, and the moment is gone. In the end, all Ben can do is lie there, choking, convulsing.