:The Lost Weekend:
I came at this film with great trepidation. This would be the tell. This would be the moment I’d been waiting for. I was going to compare The Lost Weekend with the modern-day television show Nurse Jackie and their treatment of addiction. This would be where the wheat was separated from the chaff and we determined whether I was a pedestrian modernist or someone who could appreciate older art forms.
I’m happy (and relieved) to report that I was greatly affected by this movie.
I found myself truly horrified by Ray Milland’s hallucinations. The image of that bird eating the mouse while it’s blood runs down the wall is forever seared into my brain. His desperation for a drink and the constant sqirreling away of bottles of alcohol scene after scene really underscored his unslakable thirst for a drink. Where it didn’t stack up as well against Nurse Jackie was two-fold.
First, the sad co-dependency of Milland’s on-screen girlfriend was not as affecting as Nurse Jackie’s marriage and love affairs where we watch her destroy relationships with people who once loved her. And that flows into the second way in which Nurse Jackie is more effective at getting across the horrors of addiction and that’s format. We have years to watch Nurse Jackie pick herself up and fall down, pick herself up and fall down, pick herself up and fall down.
With Ray Milland we have just 48 hours and a few flashbacks to watch the insidious effects of alcoholism and addiction. The movie relied not on relapses to get hopelessness across but individual scenes of the DTs, rehab, damaged families and drunkenness. And given its format it succeeds marvelously and spares me the fate of being hopelessly trapped (along with my tastes) in the 21st century.
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