#5 Drunk On Film

The documentary I was in, the class at Notre Dame that's bizarre and life changing

TLDR for this week: I was in a documentary on changing the drinking culture at Notre Dame. You can watch it here.

More on that below. But first: newslettery.

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I'm from California, the sunny parts of it, and yesterday even though there was a blizzard in NYC and up here it was very snowy and very cold, I had this orthopedic massage appointment in the next town over at 1 P.M., and it didn't occur to me at all not to go. Bob, the massager, didn't text me to say "maybe you shouldn't drive in this" the way other People From Here do when dealing with my naïve "70 degrees is cold!" self, so what I'm saying is yesterday I drove in a freezing, snowing hellscape and almost died just to get my sacrum released.

I've been here for a few years which you would think would make me an expert; in Land by this time Robin Wright has learned how to skin a fucking deer and split wood and I still don't know what a sump pump is or why everyone up here mentions them casually. The roads weren't plowed and by the halfway point I'd already skid (or let’s say, gracefully moved laterally without traction) twice; I was scared; I wasn't sure if it was safer or stupider to turn around; I didn’t think my car could even turn around. I crept over those twelve miles at a speed of fifteen miles an hour, clinging to my steering wheel, face pressed forward. An old man in an early 90's Buick passed me. All the stores were closed because apparently snow closes things. I got to the appointment, late, and by the time it was over and I drove home the snow had stopped, the roads were plowed, like we just hadn't almost all died in it.

There's no point to that story at all except for the subtext, which is what is this shit. Why snow? Can someone from California please come get me? But it does set up to things I want to talk about in the next few weeks, essays I’m working on. First: during that car ride I listened to a podcast on addiction with some author of some book that I had to eventually turn off because it physically hurt my frozen legs to listen; she was many years sober; an acceptable, proud amount; she had written some things about sobriety at her one year mark which mortified her; she was so wrong, so delusional, so in denial, so embarrassing back then. I heard it as a shit talking session, about herself, and it cut in a way that felt personal, probably because now a decade of my own work and words live on forever in the indelible ink of the world wide web, as a constant stable presence, when I am not; changing our minds, becoming different people, growing up, evolving from our embarrassing delusional former selves…if we are doing it right this is the way; we are typically committed to what is true to us at the time. Gandhi: “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.” So, all that: I am exploring why we need to bus chuck former versions of ourselves, instead of celebrating them for getting us here. Second, I've been thinking a lot about the pink cloud of sobriety, and near death experiences, and the endless waiting for Covid to end, and how those three things intersect. Those two essays are coming in the next two weeks.

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THIS WEEK: I want to talk about a documentary I was part of. This summer I got an email from Ted Mandell, an Assistant Professor of Film, Television and Theater at the University of Notre Dame. In short, Ted told me he'd, along with Anre Venter (Professor, Psychology) had created a class in 2019 that used contemporary films to show students how films (and media) teach us to binge drink, normalize all kinds of things from sexual assault to addiction, create binaries of normal vs. abnormal that blur based on context, etc. The class, called Drunk on Film, uses 22 films and a handful of studies and readings, in order to engage in thought provoking, life changing dialogue. In his email Ted said he'd read my book shortly after creating the syllabus, and added Quit Like a Woman as the one required text for the class. Would I be interested in giving a talk and maybe coming to campus to be part of a documentary? Yes Ted, yes.

Starting last August I audited the actual course, which is taught over Zoom (Notre Dame was one of the few Universities that didn't move to remote learning in response to Covid, this is the only remote class in order to facilitate difficult conversations that are harder in person). I watched as Ted and Anre guided the fifty students enrolled through extremely complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, often heartbreaking conversations around alcohol; perceived use, benefit and consequence of alcohol on film; perceived use, benefit and consequence alcohol on campus. I was hooked in the first five minutes—Drunk on Film is probably the most ingenious “recovery-related thing” I've been part of, if only because it simply gave information to people who are in the absolute thick of developing lifetime drinking patterns, and allowed for a completely non-judgmental conversation around personal drinking habits.

There is no "don't drink!" message imparted; there is no shaming for the twenty beers a student might drink over a Saturday; there is no controlling the conversation or assertion of right vs. wrong; no morality play. After being exposed to this kind of compassionate, non-judgmental, "here is the info do with it what you will" forum, a lot (and I mean a lot) of students end up changing their drinking habits. On a campus where the football is sponsored by Guinness, 75% of the students drink and the general assumption is 95% of them do, where there are words like "Darty" (day party) and the tailgates start at dawn and the parents bring the booze and there is no AA presence or sober living and just one sober club: this class has a waiting list; students are lined up to take it. This semester, there are 300 students (still more didn't get in)—that’s a 600% increase from just last fall. Ted and Anre are teaching 25 high school teachers their curriculum in the coming weeks. I've never seen such a simple concept with such a large impact in what I'd guess to be one of the most entrenched and alcohol-soaked cultures (Midwest, football and sports centric University).

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In November I flew to South Bend, Indiana, to give a talk on campus and be filmed over the course of three days. It was rigorous and exhausting; I'm in an introvert, I have social anxiety, and the point of the film was to throw me into the middle of a college campus over a football game weekend where everyone is drinking to talk about alcohol. (Like I had to go to multiple tailgate parties.) I expected it would be a nightmare, and it wasn't. It was delightful, eye opening, hilarious, heart breaking. I told a friend the other night it was a highlight of my life, because it was. 

The documentary is part of Notre Dame's Film, Television and Theater department's series, First Time Fans; since 2014, the FTT has hired an alum to come back to campus, film a documentary, and use a student film crew to capture someone’s first time experience at Notre Dame (from their website: "First Time Fans is a filmmaking co-op where University of Notre Dame alumni are given the creative canvas to tell a Notre Dame story through the eyes of someone new to campus, using the backdrop of a Fighting Irish athletic event. This unique production model brings together alumni filmmakers with current students to produce inspiring short films.")

I've mentioned that 2021 was a terrible year more than once; mostly because I forgot why I do what I do or rather, I stopped remembering the point of anything at all. The things that used to get me out of bed in the morning stopped getting me out of bed; I stopped caring; at many points I stopped getting out of bed. Being part of this community, becoming friends with Ted who is just this normal Midwest dude who cares in a way that makes you remember caring for the sake of caring, listening to the stories of students who almost stab you through with their honesty and courage, learning all over again but from this privileged, fly-on-the-wall vantage point, the insidious, casual and entrenched nature of alcohol…it has all profoundly shaped me. Changed me. Made me care again. Saved my life. Etc.

There's a medical term known as informed consent; it means you understand the thing you are agreeing to do to your person, be it undergoing a procedure or taking a medication. It means: I, the patient, understand and agree to the implications of this intervention. It means: I know what this may cost me. The four components of informed consent are decision capacity, documentation of consent, disclosure, and competency. If all four of those pillars aren't present, we don't have a participatory experience; we have manipulation, mal-practice, etc. With alcohol consumption, not even one of these pillars exists. In fact, we don't even have warning labels on alcoholic beverages. We are expected to drink and we are trained to expect to drink, and we go into this completely uninformed; kids grow up believing they are supposed to be able to drink still. Alcohol is separate from drugs still. One of the four or five rights of passage is coming of age to be able to drink still. Not drinking is a weird, lonely choice still. I am surrounded by sober people, recovery people, quit lit and sober Instagram and all of that shit and I forget, so easily, how absolutely insular this is. No one at Notre Dame that I met considered just not drinking to be an obvious choice a human could make; unless they had taken Ted's class. What I am saying is, I think things have profoundly shifted in the last decade, and they have. But barely. We're still breeding mass addiction through expectation and the simple yet powerful exclusion of informed consent. This class challenges that. This class should be required at every fucking high school and university. "Here are some films: see how Ben Afleck drinks twenty beers and he's an alcoholic but these guys over here do it at a party and we think they're just having fun? Is that weird? See how in this documentary this girl thinks she's had five drinks but she's had 12? See how in this film this fifteen year old has three pink shots and then the most popular guy in school wants to marry her and her life changes because of alcohol? Is that true? Has that ever happened to you?" I mean. Genius.

Thank you to the brilliant Clara Ritger of Humanity Is Us Productions who worked tirelessly and carefully to understand this subject matter and create a human-centered, comprehensive and beautifully edited film that captures Ted, Anre, the students, the campus, and myself. Thank you to Ted Mandell and Anre Venter for being champions of this cause of providing information in context, for the way you hold compassionate space for your students to examine it all; I love you both. Thank you to Kiki Carney for being my sweet and funny buddy and reminding me that most 21 year olds are more mature than I am and showing me Notre Dame; thank you to all the students and faculty that helped make this happen. If you are interested in bringing this programming to your school, Ted and Anre are seriously overwhelmed but you can send me an email to pass along (subject line: Interested in Drunk on Film course. I won't respond, I'll just forward.)

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The Mantra Project, a 40-day email course to support quitting drinking, is available for purchase here.