Sarah Noble
From Psycho to Sex Symbol: Demonisation and Glamourisation of Addiction in Film
AAD Dissertation Studio 3 2020–21
Extracts from Sarah Noble, From Psycho to Sex Symbol: Demonisation and Glamourisation of Addiction in Film
Dissertation Studio 3 Narrative and Storytelling Tutor: Jon Baldwin
School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2021
The italicised quotes are taken directly from the author’s autoethnographical account of their lived experience of addiction and recovery.
4 Main body 4.1 Reasons for drug use Sulkunen (2007) ‘Addiction is, by definition, a craving that escapes reason and explanation’ (p.2). A consistent theme across all the films analysed was that the root cause of addiction was left ambiguous; it was left up to the audience to put pieces together throughout the film as to why they did. Out of the 6 films analysed, half had an addict parent, which could indicate a genetic reason as to why these characters have addictive personalities. This is an accurate representation of addiction, as an individual has a higher likelihood of addiction if direct family members have the disease (Begleiter, 1999, Schuckit, 2000). In ‘28 Days’ (2000), Gwen (Sandra Bullock) whilst detoxing at the treatment centre has flashbacks of her childhood at 39.45min where she would see her mother and her engaging in dangerous activities because the mother was drunk, she did not think of the welfare of Gwen and flashbacks of her falling over drunk. At 41.18min, Gwen has a flashback of her aunt informing her that her mother is dead.
A child who suffers trauma weather it is sexual, physical or emotion are likely to deal with stress poorly as an adult which can lead to substance abuse (Maté, 2012). Addiction as a familial trait could be due to genetics, but also due to the trauma that an addict parent creates for their child. The films ‘When A
Man Loves A Woman’ (1994) and ‘Trainspotting’ (1996) give an insight on what it’s like to have an addict parent, and the trauma that the parent inflicts on the child. They do this in ‘Trainspotting’ by showing Allison (Susan Vidler) shooting up heroin on a few occasions throughout the film whilst her baby Dawn was in the same room. ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ does this by showing Alice (Meg Ryan) physically assaulting her eldest daughter (33.18min) and the secretive behaviour that she goes along with unknowingly. An example of this is seen when her eldest daughter’s dad throws the remainder of her drink away, she tells him ‘you’re supposed to wrap it’. With her not realising that this is not normal behaviour.
“I do have addiction on both sides of my family, and I do think the reason for most addicts is that is it genetic. With childhood trauma there were a few times in my
childhood that my father was verbally nasty to me calling me horrible names and on occasion when drunk would lash out at me and try to attack me, Like the time I was 4 and he was drunk, I must have had a nightmare and was calling for my mum, he came in the room and refused to let my mum in and said that I needed to go to sleep and stop being a nuisance, I managed to get out and run downstairs to my mum, he smashed the glass on my bedroom door and then there would be 3 more violent outbursts from my dad till the age of 14.”
Although genetics and trauma can be a factor of becoming an addict, this is not the case in ‘Beautiful
Boy’ (2018). Throughout the film it is clear to see how much Nic (Timothée Chalamet) is loved by both his parents and how desperate they are to see him happy. It is not clear as to whether there is family history of addiction, but neither of Nic’s parents are addicts. At 58.44min, the film flashes back to when Nic was a child, and his dad David (Steve Carell) is saying goodbye at the airport. David says to Nic “I want you to know when you come back, I’m going to be here…right here for you…call me when you miss me, and I’ll call you. Do you know how much I love you…what I feel for you is everything.” This scene may be trying to dispel the perceived misconceptions that addict becomes an addict because of their terrible childhood. In ‘Clean and Sober’, Daryl (Michael Keaton) at 34.20min calls his mother when he is in a tough situation and in need of money. Daryl’s responses demonstrate his mother is concerned with his well-being, in the same vein as ‘Beautiful Boy’.
A defining feature of addiction is the addict’s self-perception of victimhood. Addicts use self-pity as a reason to drink (Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001). At 21min in ‘Beautiful Boy’, Nic tries to give David reasons he uses drugs, describing David’s disappointment of him as a reason to use. This is like Kate (Mary Winstead) in ‘Smashed’ (2012) where she plays the victim card and blames her husband for not staying sober. When an addict is not using, it can seem to them that they are a victim of the world around them (Lindesmith, 1938).
“I remember I got cheated on by an ex-boyfriend and my reaction was to buy two big bags full of booze and go to a friend’s house in the morning and get completely out of it and order a few different types of drugs so I could numb the pain and be the victim. Towards the end of my drinking, I thought that everyone had abandoned me, that I was the victim.”
As Alice states in ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, “nobody knows how alcoholism starts.”. A common theme across all films analyses was that there is no clear reason as to why someone becomes addicted to a substance. Instead, there are many contributing factors and never just one direct cause. This contrasts with films in the 1920s that show external factors (such as relationship breakdown) as the causes of addiction (Herd,1986).
4.2 The portrayal of relationships with people/family/other addicts The relationships between addicts and other people in their lives are portrayed in a variety of ways. Unmanageability is an inherent characteristic of addition. Addicts become so consumed with using a substance that their desire for anything else in life is taken away by only having a desire for drugs, and thus are unable to manage ordinary functioning (Margolis, 2002). In Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step of the programme is to admit you are powerless over alcohol and your life has become unmanageable (Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001). This is seen at the beginning of ‘28 Days’ (2000) when Gwen awakes after a night of drinking and realises, she is late for her sister’s wedding. She demonstrates unmanageability by going straight to her fridge to drink a beer – she is unable to perform the normal function of getting ready without alcohol. In ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ (1994) Alice’s husband Michael (Andy Garcia) comes home from work and Alice is nowhere to be seen. The babysitter has had to stay late as if she had not, the children would have been left unsupervised. What had been shown from the previous scene is that a co-worker invited Alice out for a drink after work and after Alice had one drink, the physical craving had kicked in and the unmanageability meant she would not make it home and would continue drinking. Alcoholics Anonymous (2001) states ‘The phenomenon of craving is limited to [chronic alcoholics] and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all’ (p.xxviii). Here, the film excellently depicts the reality of the impact of addiction on the relationships of addicts. This impact on relationships is demonstrated by the following quote from the author’s autoethnography:
“On one of my birthdays a friend had organized a party get together with some people and the night before I decided to stay in on my own and drink wine, I then moved onto cocaine, even though I knew my friend had organized this whole thing, once I started drinking I couldn’t stop and adding drugs to it meant I wasn’t able to get any sleep and just carried on throughout the night, I couldn’t show up to the gathering as I was too messed up, I was constantly letting people down. I only ever thought I was hurting myself, my selfishness in the madness stopped me from thinking about others.”
Through continually letting people down, a distrust towards the addict is created. This is portrayed in
‘Beautiful Boy’ where, at 1hr10m, Nic comes home late after having been at a 12-step meeting and his phone had died and was unable to contact David. David is unsure if this is the truth, so asks Nic to do an at home drug test. Trainspotting also depicts the distrust caused by addiction in the relationships of addicts. Swanney (Peter Mullan), the drug dealer, keeps a counterfeit note-checker so he can check the money is legit from the addict, with the implication that he believes an addicts default setting is to lie. Distrust, whilst signifying a negative or toxic relationship, implies that a relationship still exists. However, as addiction progresses, gradually that distrust grows into distance.
“The relationship I had in my life were rocky and weak. I had let my family down a lot and friends had distanced themselves as I was too much of a liability.”
This is seen in ‘Beautiful Boy’ where Nic’s behaviour puts a strain on David and his wife Karen (Maura Tierney) marriage (1hr24m) and David realises he has done all he can do. David lets go of his belief that he can ‘save’ Nic. When Nic calls David after his girlfriend overdoses and says he needs help again, David refuses him and goes to Al-Anon (support group for friends and family of addicts) to recover from his loss. “My actions were taking years off [my mum’s] life, just from the stress and this was only a couple of years into my drinking there were so many more times to come.” In ‘28 Days’, Gwen asks her sister Lily (Elizabeth Perkins) comes to visit the rehab to have a family day. Lily declines the offer, and tells Gwen “you never mean anything”, before hanging up. This symbolises Lily’s loss of faith, demonstrating she has given up on her sister. Addicts, upon losing the relationships of family and friends, instead embark on relationships of enablement with other addicts; people they use with – friends, but not real friendships. This is seen in ‘28 Days’, where Gwen’s boyfriend Jasper (Dominic West) forms an enabling relationship. Gerhardt (Alan Tudyk), who is a patient at the same treatment centre, shares in the support group and explains why addicts need to let go of individuals who enables you. He describes a metaphor of a fork in the road, and sometimes you must go in different directions as that relationship is only causing hurt. This type of relationship is also seen in Smashed (2012), where Kate’s husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) enables her using, even to the point of encouraging her use. Kate tells him she smoked crack the night before, and she thinks that she needs to get help for drinking. Charlie replies, “just playing devil’s advocate, maybe it’s the crack smoking you need help with, not the drinking” (15.55min). At 31min, she goes to her first 12-step meeting and shares that everyone she knows drinks, and that she surrounds herself with these heavy drinkers, so she does not have to acknowledge her drinking.
“The only friends I had were using friends, these were people who did not use normally. This allowed me to drink and use to the extent I did without having to see I had a problem because in my eyes if everyone around me drank and used the way I did; it must be normal. At this point I had pushed away all the people that were good for me for me to not see what a mess my life had become.”
Films represent the co-dependency, secretiveness, and commitment issues in the relationships of addicts accurately (Sulkunen, 2007). Films in the latter half of the 20th century recognise the fact that alcoholism doesn’t just affect the alcoholic themselves, but the entire family as well (Denzin, 2017). Substance abuse is a way to show the unmanageability of the addict and the chaos they leave in their path (Harvin, 1979).
4.3 Mental and physical effects of the addicts portrayed ‘[alcoholics] were not drinking to escape. They were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control’ (Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001, p.XXIV)
‘Trainspotting’ took an extreme approach to the potential effects of addiction on someone’s mental and physical health. A ‘shock factor’ is created to show the viewers the severity of the disease. Renton’s (Ewan McGregor) parents seem to realise how seriously he is suffering after he overdoses. They decided to home-detox him Renton had tried clinics and professional places to get sober and it had not worked. At 50 minutes his mother says that they were going to do it ‘their way’. When Renton is detoxing in his room, the scene that followed was very disturbing. Renton sees Dawn’s dead baby crawling on the ceiling with her head twisted all the way around and haunting visions of his friends, all happening whilst screaming at the top of his lungs. There were some realistic elements of the mental effects with addiction when Renton (10 mins) drops drugs down the toilet and hallucinates falling into the toilet and ending up in the ocean. To the viewer, this seems impossible, but to Renton this is happening in his mind.
“Big consequences to my drinking, and one of the main reasons I sought help was the mental side effects to using. I hallucinated on quite a few occasions, once I
thought that aliens were coming to abduct me… Another time I was in my bedroom with a candle on watching something on my laptop and the candle kept flickering and that to me meant that an evil entity was trying to possess my body.”
Kolb (1927) describes the physical and mental effects that are caused by withdrawal as occurring over several months, whereas films portray cessation of symptoms in a matter of weeks. 5 of the 6 films watched portrayed the effects in this way. This misrepresentation may be due to the lack of storytelling from the perspective of the addict (Sulkunen, 2007).
“Along with the hallucinations came the paranoia, that friends would talk about me in code to each other whilst I was in the room. There was one night where I was in bed and there were friends in the flat and I thought I could hear them talking about me through the walls and saying horrible things and when I was getting going from one place to another that people on the street were looking at me and laughing.”
In ‘Smashed’, the opening scene is of Kate waking up from a drunken night having wet the bed. It appears not to be the first time this has happened, and her reaction is that this is a normal thing. She passes it off as having a weak bladder, not thinking that her weak bladder is due to addiction. At 20 minutes, she goes to an off license demanding she be served alcohol even though the shop cannot serve her due to licensing hours. She suddenly realises she needs to go to the toilet but because the toilet is locked, she urinates on the floor of the shop. Even with the shop assistant’s shocked reactions, this does not really faze her. The conscience of an addict’s physical and mental health when in active addiction does not normally concern the addict until later on in life when things have really deteriorated for them.
“At 15 I was taken to hospital as I had been in bed for a week and could not keep any food or water down. I was in the hospital for a few days whilst the doctors tried to work out what was wrong with me, they first thought it was down to dehydration until the doctor asked me if I drank, from my answer they worked out it was liver damage caused by alcohol…The doctor said that if I kept drinking the way I was it would lead to an early death for me.”
The physical withdrawal symptoms of Daryl, Gwen, and Nic are not so theatrical. However, Ritson (1979) whose analysis identified that delirium tremens (DT) (a rare physical response to alcohol, with approximately 5% of all recovering alcoholics experiencing it) is represented in nearly all films about alcoholism analysed. Gwen’s inability to sleep and continues flashbacks of the past, Daryl’s sweats and throwing up, Nic’s twitches and shakes demonstrate more realistic portrayals of the physical impacts of addiction.
“I would sweat continuously all day, my pores would just feel clogged, no matter how many showers I had, my body was trying to get rid of the toxins from the using. I was a morning drinker unless I was carrying on from the night before, so when I would wake up, my hands would shake, I felt fragile. I didn’t realise that because I was somewhat reliant on alcohol, not completely but was getting there, that I needed the drink to steady my hands.”
4.4 Representation of recovery and rehabilitation ‘Trainspotting’, ‘‘When A Man Loves A Woman’’, and ‘Clean and Sober’ were all made before 2000s and there is no representation of an AA-style ‘higher power’ in these films. Films that feature AA as a key part of the film often leave out the spiritual component of the 12-step process (Room, 2015). In AA, a higher power plays a large role in an addict’s recovery, and to have this missing in film representations is problematic. However, ‘28 Days’, ‘Smashed’, and ‘‘Beautiful Boy’’ all incorporate the notion of a higher power. This demonstrates a significant change in the way recovery is represented in film. In ‘28 Days’, (1hr37min) after trying and failing to do an exercise she was being taught in rehab, Gwen looks up to the sky and says, “I just need help, right now.” This indicates her belief in a higher power, which is step 3 of AA’s 12 steps (handing your will and life over to God). The notion that if addict needs help, their higher power will show them is a key tenet of AA. This is also seen in ‘Smashed’ where Kate, at 14.45min, feels she needs to slow down her using and may need some help. She goes to a meeting, and the following day her co-worker Dave (Nick Offerman) opens up to her that he has struggled with addiction. He reveals he is nine years sober and goes to 12-step meetings, stating “that shit saved my life”. It is subtle, and seems like a coincidence, but to an addict nothing like that is coincidental, it is always perceived to be your higher power.
“Over time these sayings became my everyday life. I started to live in the present, I handed my will and my life over to a higher power and I started to react differently to things that were happening in my life that I had no control over.”
In ‘Beautiful Boy’, the reference to a higher power is in the perspective of a girl who has been to rehab but is in active addiction. She tells David that she has ‘run away from rehab 3 times [because of] all that god shit’. This perfectly represents someone who is in active addiction and running on self-will because they will not surrender to a higher power.
In ‘Clean and Sober’, ‘‘When A Man Loves A Woman’’, and ‘28 Days’, the main characters Daryl, Alice and Gwen go to rehabs to get clean continue with steady recovery after their first treatment. This is unrealistic as 65% of people in their first three months of sobriety relapse (Hunt, Barnett and Branch, 1971). De Leon (1993) claims there is a high probability that people with relapse within 6 to 12 months of getting clean, although there is lower chance of relapse if you complete treatment fully. There are exceptions to this, but realistically “relapse is the rule” (De Leon, 1993). However, this unrealistic representation has changed over time. Two years after the release of ‘‘When A Man Loves A Woman’’,
‘Trainspotting’ shows Renton not entering treatment or attending 12-step meetings, even though he puts in a plea in court that he has entered into a rehabilitation programme to get off drugs (42.46m), leading to a suspended sentence. This shows that the courts do see treatment as a viable option in conquering addiction. Treatment instead of prison has a better effect of getting to the root of the problem which potentially helps the person stay on track and live a sober life, meaning they will not be in and out of prison (Gown, Whetstone, 2012).
In ‘Trainspotting’, Renton portrays relapse through trying to get clean on his own in a few unsuccessful attempts. One of which is shown at the start of the film, depicting an at-home detox. It is made clear that he has tried this technique before as he narrates what is needed when doing this technique, however each attempt fails, and he returns to using. In ‘Smashed’, Kate gets sober and then some months later relapses. In ‘Beautiful Boy’, Nic also makes several attempts to get clean, but what seems to be the pattern with Nic is that he is doing it solely for David, which all addicts know does not work, you have to do it for yourself.
“I was one of those alcoholics, at 2 and half months in I relapsed, I put myself in an uncomfortable situation and I could not deal with what life was throwing me, I did want to go through the emotions, and I know drink would suppress those feelings. My research was only one night, although because of all the shame I felt from relapsing and what others would think I did not get to my next meeting till a week later, but those thoughts of shame around relapse goes through lot of addict’s heads
as I hear in the meeting all the time. I realised after my relapse that I had partially done kept away from substances from fear and for my mother.”
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