What happens when you mix time, alcohol and the creative temperament with storytelling?

Questions cloud your mind the morning after a night of heavy drinking. What exactly happened? How did I get so bad? Did I do anything stupid? And why the hell did I get so wasted in the first place? Such worries aren’t always easy to allay, confounded as they are by mental black holes swallowing all sense of clarity and chronology.

Emptiness typifies the best movies about boozing, many of which are full to the brim with distressed protagonists who drink to fill the void within. Negation destroys part-time writer and full-time alcoholic Don Birnam (Ray Milland) in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, a sweaty melodrama that still sours the palate seventy years on.

Cornell dropout and inveterate sponger, Don is a man who drinks ‘because of what he isn’t rather than what he is’, sating his inner sense of lack with a gargantuan bender across the Big Apple, redeemed only by the saintliness of puppy dog girlfriend Jane Wyman.

Suicide mission

Hollowness reverberates throughout, as Don rolls pathetically from one bar to another, as listless as the empty rye bottles that trundle around his brother’s apartment floor. But don’t we all feel that way after a mega blow-out: leaden, gutted and unfulfilled?

Writing and alcohol are explicitly linked in The Lost Weekend. Both pastimes attract the insular and the introspective, and both can easily turn from being therapeutic to self-absorbed to downright maddening. Wilder’s film finds its modern-day drinking buddy in Leaving Las Vegas, whose lead character is also an inebriated scribe on a prolonged suicide mission in a city of sin.

The film’s neon-soused setting and freewheeling jazz score wonderfully capture the hedonistic freedom of a night on the tiles, just as they evoke reckless careering into a psychological abyss

Yet whereas Wilder’s movie strives towards a salutary social message, Mike Figgis’s picture is drenched in fatalism. Scant reason is offered why Ben Sanderson (Nicholas Cage) drinks his way to becoming a DT-debilitated cadaver, aided by appropriately-named hooker Sera (Elisabeth Shue). What will be, will be in Leaving Las Vegas, a romantic film in the saddest sense of the word, in which two lovers snatch a temporary state of grace from the jaws of compulsive disease.

The film’s neon-soused setting and freewheeling jazz score wonderfully capture the hedonistic freedom of a night on the tiles, just as they evoke reckless careering into a psychological abyss surrounded by miles of arid, unforgiving desert.

Paranoia and parochialism

Space is why many people drink, after all. Intemperance may be a social lubricant turned social cancer, but it’s also a vacation from life, as it is for Ben, a realm where you can get away from your past, your future and the futility of your situation.

Two of cinema’s most hilarious escapees are Withnail and I (Richard E Grant and Paul McGann), a duo of dishevelled actors who flee the squalor of their Camden flat for the tranquillity of the Lake District. Sadly, the only tonics to be found are paranoia, parochialism, a sexually-rampant Richard Griffiths and the shotgun-wielding menace of real-life alcoholic Michael Elphick.

A spiky cocktail of puerility and pathos, Withnail and I’s seediness is enough to dampen anyone’s methylated spirits. Set in 1969, the film is about calling time on good times, a bittersweet farewell to what drug dealer Ralph Brown calls ‘the greatest decade in history’, in which two socially-awkward thespians wallow in the bitter dregs of a party to which they were never invited in the first place.

The Overlook is in a similar paralysis too, the psychic residue of its grisly past surging back in moments of clarity, blood saturating its corridors like the finest Château Margaux

Nostalgia for a bygone age is one of many acidic undertones in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, where time, reality and sanity dissolve spectacularly into a beguilingly empty horror show. Aspiring writer and recovering pisshead Jack Torrance is seduced by the eerie solitude of The Overlook hotel, then driven punch-drunk crazy by the toxic blend of a grating wife, phantom bourbon on the rocks and the responsibility of looking after so much empty time and space.

Making time stand still

Deciphering Kubrick’s endlessly cryptic film is like piecing together a chaotic night through a mind’s eye bloodshot with hangover. The Overlook is in a similar paralysis too, the psychic residue of its grisly past surging back in moments of clarity, blood saturating its corridors like the finest Château Margaux. So it’s fitting the film closes with an image of Jack partying like it’s always 1921, the life and soul amid a pack of Jazz Age booze hounds, frozen in time and forever free of history and consequence.

In the end, succumbing to alcohol is as much about making time stand still as it is about avoiding responsibility. Whether it’s the night you never want to leave, the past you’re desperate to be rid of or the tomorrow you can’t bear to face, diving into a bottle is like jumping into your own existential chasm, a place where you can cease to exist and drown momentarily in the sweet nectar of oblivion.

Withnail finds himself on such a precipice at the end of his movie. In a lonely, rain-swept London park, he recites his beloved Hamlet to no one in particular. As he wanders despondently off into the distance – directionless, abandoned by his friend, without any hope for the future – you shed a long overdue tear of pity for the man, and imagine that for him, as for all alcoholics, to be or not to be really is the question.

The Links

‘Maybe I shouldn’t breathe so much’ Leaving Las Vegas, 1995

‘What a piece of work is man’ Withnail and I, 1987

‘A momentary loss of muscular co-ordination’ The Shining, 1980