A Film Canon

This extraordinary film presents alcoholism as aestheticism, rather than mere addiction. Not only does failed writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland) find precedents for his poison from Antony And Cleopatra to La Traviata, but inebriation imbues him with a Shakespearean grandeur, both in the elegance with which he expresses himself ("Pour it softly, pour it gently, and pour it to the brim"), as well as the various existential crises that are structured around it. These include the indeterminacy that comes from waking to a dimness that could be either dawn or dusk, as well as the terrifying period before the liquor stores open, but finds most poetic expression in Don's perpetual experience of being an onlooker on his own life, forever eavesdropping on a series of disapproving voices, of which his own is the most pronounced. Hence the complicity between Don and those voices, or, more specifically, the hypocrisy of those bartenders and landladies who only object to his alcoholism when he can't afford to pay for it, and whose sympathy is ultimately subordinated to their Mephistophilean role as a disembodied, supplying hand. This elevates the film from an individual to a collective critique, in which alcoholism is construed as a response to - or, perhaps more accurately, an attempt to aestheticise - a peculiarly urban dislocation of subjectivity: "My mind was hanging outside the window...and out there, in that great big concrete jungle, I wonder how many others there are like me...poor, bedeviled guys on fire with thirst." Hence the preoccupation with shooting on location, as well as the disarming implication that Don is only interesting, and possibly only a real protagonist, when drunk, or experiencing the self-loathing that comes from drink. That said, the film never descends to the coldness of sociology, just because Wilder ensures that every aesthetic experience that it provides is similarly inflected through the "perfect little circle" of liquid left by the bottom of the glass - from the slightly lurid lighting, which suggests nothing so much as the sheen of gin on ice, to the tipsy, hallucinatory music, whose religious connotations find their complement in Don's rediscovery of a bottle that he had drunkenly hidden in a light fixture, its magnified, elevated shadow producing an alcoholic sublime, or even revelation. From this perspective, Don's final resolution - and the writing that it produces - ultimately feels no different from those that have come before, demonstrating that the dichotomy between "Don the drunk and Don the writer" is a false one (or, rather, that alcoholism is his art), and providing the perfect conclusion to the most perfect cinematic portrayal of lust to date.