Muy Borracho
A couple of works of art on my mind these last few weeks, all of them about doom— I hope my preoccupations are not becoming predictable. I hope by now it’s clear that there’s going to be spoiler in here. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t like things being spoiled, then go to the freezer.
The first is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the movie that first made me afraid of becoming an academic when I saw it a high school English class. Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and George (Richard Burton) play a decidedly wet middle-aged couple, whose hatred for each other and spiraling drunkenness plays out in a series of depraved and cruel games. Their victims are, first of all, each other, and second of all, a young couple, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis), new in town and to the university. Both couples are deeply needy and lonely, estranged from one another, their marriages born out of convenience, and their manner of coping heavy, heavy, heavy drinking. Both couples have had fantasies of having children that have bled into their real lives. The games unfold late in the morning, until the sun comes up and the cruelty is all played out, the dirty laundry stinking up the musty apartment, and revelations about the extent of each couple’s respective delusions make stark just how deranged these people are, and crucially, are allowing themselves to be. The older couple pretends, (and here’s the big spoiler), privately, to have their own son, who is the only bright spot in their life. They quarrel over the course of the film over who is at fault for his deficiencies, and it’s only at the end, when George says that the boy is dead, that it becomes clear that the boy never existed at all. And the younger couple have had their own fantastical pregnancy (“She went up, and then she went down,” as Nick puts it soddenly). These games and delusions are distractions from their pain and its sources, which are their pride and unwillingness to do what would be the kindest thing of all: leave each other. Each marriage is conceived as one of convenience where George hopes to get to be chair of the history department and Nick gets to reap his wife’s fortune. Martha and Honey seem to both know that their husbands are exasperated by their feelings and resent the men (rightfully) for their callousness and selfishness.
There’s a moment in the film when Martha is raging at George about his failures to achieve and provide, and George, unable to take the assault on his character, breaks a bottle, and then, of all things, goes over to Honey and starts dancing with her, starting up the song that gives the movie its name. He spins her in circles and circles singing it, clearly still agitated but no longer in a rage at Martha. The dance ends when Honey announces that she’s going to be sick (she’s had a lot of brandy), and George goes out of the house to sit by himself on a swing with the bourbon. Martha later accuses him of trying to make Honey sick, but George denies it forcefully. The act of dancing with Honey, of reprising the song (which he’s cribbed from Martha and earlier admits is funny), seems to be means of distracting himself. It’s a moment that is enormously endearing, because whereas elsewhere, the games the couple play seem to be meant to inflict pain, this dancing is just childlike avoidance. In general, these people’s lives are such black holes of misery that they cannot avoid making their games about that misery, and they only know how to terrorize and be cruel to each other. (See when George gets a gun from the woodshed and pulls the trigger on Martha, only for an umbrella to come out rather than a bullet). To be humiliated is to want to turn that feeling back on others. To humiliate, then, is also to invite at least domestic warfare. In this case, George seems to be crying uncle, or in this case, wife. He only wants to be left alone. He doesn’t want to hurt her back. Later, of course, he will, he’ll want to hurt her quite badly, he’ll even attack her.
The solution to their problems, if there can be one, is not to play games or have children, it’s to stop treating each other with such cruelty. But the movie doesn’t have a simple message of kindness, it’s not suggesting a panacea, if anything it suggests that these people are trapped in their own characters, in their habits of thinking and habits of coping, stuck behind their respective masks. Which is how they can be sympathetic even as they also are drunken, cruel, and disorderly. We understand that their behavior is, in some sense, beyond their control. They are like a car spinning out on ice, a rocket with an O-ring failure, a sinking ship. Nothing but luck is going to forestall disaster. Whether the disaster is of their own making or their mum and dad fucked them up seems nearly beside the point. There’s no point in trying to change the boards on the ship of Theseus if it’s hull is shattered. They are what they are now.
Then there’s Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which is just as dispomaniacal as Woolf. It follows Geoffrey Firmin, a British Consul, for one day, the Day of the Dead, in Quauhnahuac in 1938, alongside his wife and brother and another man who has cuckolded the Consul (you heard that right, his brother has unmanned him). The book is an inversion of Joyce’s Ulysses, in some respects: a cuckolded man abroad, rather than at home, actively destroying his life rather than pining for halcyon days, and ending in disaster rather than a gesture of, if not hope, at least love. As the day unfolds, the Consul gets drunker and drunker, trying at times to stop himself from drinking, giving in at others (“the necessary, the therapeutic drink”, he tells himself once; at other times, he insists he’ll switch to Mexican beer soon, which he believes if “full of vitamins.”). It seems, frankly, like he’ll die if he keeps drinking the way he is, and his doctor tells him as much.
The book pulls off something difficult: we expect the Consul to meet tragedy because of his drinking and refusal to meet his wife halfway. She has come, after all, to Quauhnahuac because she still loves him and wants to rescue him, but on some level he regards her continuing love and pity for his condition as an assault on his pride. The presence of his brother does not help matters, as he cannot help imagining him with her. And yet it’s not his fate to die directly from drinking, (here comes the spoiler, you whiners) it’s his fate to die because of his lack of foresight and the viciousness of the fascist military police, who have become convinced because they find a letter of his brother’s, a communist, in his jacket, that Geoffrey is a communist (an “espider,” they say). The Consul seems to wonder over and over again if he can change, and if he wants to, just this once, if he can fix himself, get over a “bad case of delirium tremens”, only for it to be the changing of the world around him that does him in. He rants, in fact, about how societies have eaten each other up over millennia, and that the fascists can’t be any worse than the kings and queens of yore, only for the fascists to show him in the end just how bad they are. “Christ… this is a dingy way to die,” he remarks.
I suppose these two pieces have stuck with me because they illustrate one of the central paradoxes of alcoholism and of human free will in general: to escape the traps we set for ourselves, we have to have the foresight not to set them in the first place. More crucially, we must want to escape our problems, we must believe that we can. And we can be as clever in devising our own disaster as we can in any other endeavor, if that disaster is what we want. There’s a sense of freedom that comes with finally destroying our lives. I think of the line from a Robert Stone story about an alcoholic: “Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret.” A festival of regret. We will celebrate our own disaster and undoing, if that’s what we think we deserve.
Other Things
-I published a review of Percival Everett’s latest novel, James, which I was sad I did not enjoy, over at Los Angeles Review of Books. Please read it if you get a chance! Zain Khalid also wrote a review I admired (mostly, yes, because he agreed with me) for Bookforum.
-I watched Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel the other night, and uh, well, I guess it reminds me of Uncut Gems in a way, but somehow manages to be ten times more upsetting and anxiety-provoking. Good baseball/crack cocaine movie, though.
-Have been listening to Jeff Buckley for the first time since high school (don’t worry, I’m fine). Lilac Wine fits with the theme of this post and is one of many great tracks off Grace.