I Would Like to See It: The Lost Weekend

It’s hard to make art about fictional art, especially when the fictional art in question is supposed to be good. The viewer has to believe that a novel that doesn’t exist could truly transport made-up people they’ve only known for minutes or hours. Think of the often-lambasted Cookbook from M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, or the drippy, maudlin pap of Flying to Avalon, Sean Connery’s novelist character’s magnum opus in Finding Forrester. It’s a different skill entirely from making a film or writing a novel entire, because the fictional art must capture the viewer’s attention with nothing but snippets, must enrich the primary narrative without seeming too purpose-built. The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s acrid little film about nasty but eloquent drunk Don Birnum (Ray Milland) and his struggle with alcoholism pulls off a feat of fictional manuscript-making worthy of Calvino: creating a fictional drunk’s biography, The Bottle, which sounds irresistibly salacious and, from the brief taste we get of it at the film’s close, has a nagging, insistent sort of genius separate from but believably of a piece with the film itself.

There’s a particular line in The Bottle’s opening narration concerning Don’s dissociative fugue as he packs his suitcase, which he explains as a sort of projection out of his body and into the glass surrogate of the bottle of cheap rye hanging outside his window by a string. It’s a sophisticated visual metaphor drawn directly from the actual events of the film’s opening, the squalid, ratlike resourcefulness of withdrawal cravings transmuted by a turn of phrase into something at once haunting and deliciously dirty. That Millan, with his hangdog, disheveled good looks and Mid-Atlantic drawl can sell it in a flat shot is a minor miracle. On its face, it’s Wilder and Brackett congratulating themselves for their own cleverness and insight, but the film’s total sincerity in concert with its abject and then-unheard of realism neatly sidestep any potential accusations of self-satisfaction. It’s a fight, Don wrestling his demons from one bottle into the next, and even as he finally finds the words to perform that dangerous transfer we know in our hearts that it’s far from over.

Wilder’s visual language in The Lost Weekend is among his very best. From the bar mirror phantasms made of Don’s hunched form and juxtaposed with his intoxicated rambling about “the two Don Birnums” to the Hitchcockian confines of a detox ward where a soft-voiced orderly purrs to Don that “delirium is a night disease” and the feverish claustrophobia of a sequence in which Don, attending the opera, finds himself without a bottle and as the score and voices swell and roar we remain fixed on his mounting discomfort — a scene with which Jonathan Glazer’s similar orchestra sequence in Birth is very much in conversation — the film is never content with the bare minimum. Everywhere it might have been sappy or sentimental, everywhere it might have turned moralistic or contrived, instead it digs deeper into Don as a living, breathing man and into his great lifelong struggle to make something out of his misery, to perform that singular magic trick which so many addicts fight their way toward for months or years or entire lifetimes. To find in that bottle, in that record of one’s suffering, a single sign that any of it meant anything at all.