Booze, Brawls And Bankruptcy

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Probably, more so than ever, a mixture of the two.

Our main evening entertainment these days is watching Netflix movies and series. Of the shows offered, a great many involve murder, mayhem, intrigue, and often a general sense of confusion. The usual theme is that some character has a secret past and finds themself endangered by nasty people who want to take revenge or use them for their evil purposes through coercion, blackmail, kidnapping, or threatened or real bodily harm. The viewer is sometimes hard-pressed to ascertain who is the good guy and who is the bad guy until quite late in the game and still often emerges unsure. To make matters more complicated the scenes often switch from the past to the present, back to the past, back to the present to the point where it’s hard to tell whether the characters are coming or going.

We’ve resorted to sprinkling into the movie mix classics from an era that didn’t require so much gore and mayhem. That does not mean to say they are devoid of violence, but there is a certain limit to it that makes it a bit less horrifying. Sadly, since Netflix discontinued DVDs, these are in scant supply.

Being myself so often confused by the action going on on the screen, I am not surprised when the characters themselves become confused, frustrated, overwhelmed and annoyed. It’s enough to drive them to drink, which they do. Constantly, it seems. So much so that there has developed a stereotypical scene, required to occur at least once during the course of the story. The characters hit the bar scene and find a pretext requiring them to get completely smashed. They proceed to down what seems to be dozens of shots of hard liquor within a very short time. Not infrequently this leads to romantic encounters against the restroom wall that are often interrupted by those who are actually in need of the facilities for their intended purpose or by bad guys who break in and take advantage of the protagonists’ compromised situation.

The bar scene would not be complete without two additional components. First, the music has to be so loud that no one could possibly hear what the other person is saying. So the people in the bar wind up dancing, if you would call it that. This usually consist of swaying around with arms high above the head. It is essential for the women to be wearing sleeveless tops to provide a seductive display of armpits and transmit their pheromones to their partners, which probably leads to the aforementioned restroom scenario. The scene often ends with a brawl between two characters or more, adding to the violence that the modern audience requires.

As one who never was a big frequenter of bars to begin with and is now in no position to patronize one, I wondered if this kind of drinking is really going on in real life. Some younger people tell me it is not uncommon in the twenty-something set. If so, what does it say about our society and the younger generation?

I did some research and I found out that a little over 20% of the population, mostly between 20 and 35 years old, actually do engage in binge drinking at bars at least monthly, often one or two nights a week. Binge drinking is defined as consuming at least four shots of liquor for women or five shots of liquor for men within a two hour period. But typically the bingers have between 8 and a dozen.

I’m going to backtrack to the events prior to the bar scene, just the way they go back-and-forth in the movie, to the pre-barhopping dinner during which copious amounts of wine are consumed. And, just as an aside, whenever a character arrives home, or at someone else’s, they head straight to the fridge and grab a beer. Does all this on screen drinking normalize it for viewers?

To be clear, I have never been a teetotaler, but on the small number of occasions I have become really intoxicated it took far fewer than a dozen drinks to produce that state.

In my neck of the woods, the cost of one shot of the house liquor is about eight dollars. For higher end liquors up to $15 or more. Let’s say someone puts down eight to ten shots one or two evenings per week. That alone would more than pay for my groceries. Now let’s add to that expense the cost of the multitude of entertainment apps subscribed to and the $200 a pop concert tickets, the required six dollar morning latte on the way to work, lunch out, dinners either ordered in or taken at a restaurant and we begin to see just how expensive it is to live the life of many modern young people. It also wreaks havoc on their health.

Binge drinking and violence, reflected in popular entertainment, may well influence people to overindulge in both. When we look at the state of affairs of the world, perhaps we can understand why so many people have the need to escape, however, the price paid for that temporary relief can be dire. Fortunately, most of us experience it vicariously in our choice of entertainment while coping with the our trials and tribulations in less self-destructive ways.