Studies show that alcohol portrayal in films and adverts sparks viewers' cravings, writes DONALD CLARKE
DUTCH SCIENTISTS have discovered that if you lock a group of sane adults in a room with nothing to watch but American Pie 2 they will drink themselves into bleary oblivion. And your point is?
Whereas the first outing for the priapic teenagers was passably amusing, the second was so mindlessly juvenile it would, surely, drive even Ian Paisley towards the devil’s buttermilk. More interesting was the revelation that, while watching a Josh Hartnett film, the test subjects felt no great need to reach for the booze.
Mind you, the test was carried out in the Netherlands, so the participants might have leapfrogged the alcohol and gone straight for the legalised marijuana and tolerated assisted suicide. I jest.
The study was set up to investigate the effect that on-screen boozing has on the viewer. American Pie 2, in which teenagers drink everything (including their own effusions) that can be accommodated in a glass, was, in one test, accompanied by advertisements for alcoholic beverages. The lumbering Hartnett vehicle, 40 Days and 40 Nights, in which the squinty, but relatively abstemious protagonist abstains from sex for a few weeks, was shown without such commercials.
It seems that the test subjects – who had access to a fridge full of beer and wine – drank twice as much while watching the swilling American Pie team as they did while enduring the comparatively booze-free Hartnett film.
Rutger Engels, the lead researcher, came to a sombre conclusion: “Our study clearly shows that alcohol portrayal in films and advertisements not only affect people’s attitudes and norms on drinking in society, but it might work as a cue that affects craving and subsequent drinking.”
Don Shenker, chief executive of Alcohol Concern, put on an even sterner face when confronted with the report.
“Unfortunately, alcohol advertising and promotion on film and television usually present drinking as a positive social ritual, while leaving out the potential harm that drinking can cause,” he said.
Is this still the case? Over the past 20 years, Hollywood has come to treat smoking as a sign of weakness, immorality or genuine derangement. In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a key comic-book of the 1980s, quite a few of the characters puff tobacco, but, in the recent, successful film only the Comedian, a vile, right-wing thug, is allowed to hang on to his cigar.
Daniel Craig’s James Bond can batter men to bloody death in public lavatories, but, unlike Ian Fleming’s original character, who smoked 60 Turkish coffin nails a day, he is now conspicuously off the fags.
The situation with booze is a little less clear-cut. It is certainly true that the casual consumption of alcohol by well-balanced protagonists in films set during the present day has declined. The kids in American Pie knock back the stuff with abandon, but their middle-class parents all appear to have left that phase behind.
Drink is, however, still about the place. James Bond continues to quaff the odd Martini and, in last year’s Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr – despite having had his own problems with the sauce – cradled quite a few highballs when playing the dissolute Tony Stark.
The infuriating heroines of Sex and the City, recently transferred to celluloid, were responsible for the absurd rise in popularity of the sickening blend of spirits and cranberry juice that fashion victims call the cosmopolitan.
Casting an eye at that list, we must reluctantly conclude that Mr Shenker has a point. Hollywood has, it is true, addressed the issue of alcoholism. Think of Ray Milland watching imaginary mice crawl up the wall in Billy Wilder’s great Lost Weekend. Consider Nicolas Cage dying in misery during Mike Figges’s Leaving Las Vegas. Watch as James Mason (or, in other versions, Fredric March and Kris Kristofferson) gargles away a great career in A Star is Born.
Yet, for all these graphic warnings, the movies have always favoured the charming drunk, the alcoholic who twinkles more often than he vomits.
By any sane standard, Nick and Nora Charles, played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in a series of 1930s classics, would be regarded as co-dependent alcoholics. Beginning with The Thin Man in 1934, the smart-mouthed detectives embarked on a career that had as much to do with locating the nearest bar as it had to do with tracking down the murderer.
The Charleses’ world is one of blurred conviviality where the only negative consequences are mild and temporary: a thumping hangover, a brief shortage of ready cash. If they ever suffered hallucinations one suspects they would be of the sort that assailed the titular hero of Henry Koster’s Harvey (1950).
In that film, far from imagining rats with piercing eyes, Jimmy Stewart conjured up a friendly giant rabbit, whose company enhanced, rather than inhibited, his sedated progress through life. W C Fields, the cinema’s most unapologetic drunk, would have applauded Harvey’s reluctance to enter the sober world.
So what would Alcohol Concern have us do with Harvey, Fields and the Charleses? In the final act of the film, they should, perhaps, have stared in the mirror and come to various unhappy conclusions about their hitherto misused lives.
Nick could have set up a counselling service for sozzled detectives. Harvey could have written a self-help book: How to conquer the Rabbit Within. W C Fields could have . . . Well, if W C Fields ceased to drink he would, one imagines, have simply ceased to be W C Fields.
It’s a gruesome prospect, you’ll agree. The fact is that, just as we enjoy the vicarious thrill that comes when Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up a helicopter, we appreciate the second-hand surge that comes from watching movie stars and TV characters booze without consequence.
On-screen drinking is, from time to time, not just incidental to the entertainment experience, it is a vital part of the pleasure. Just consider how much less fun Mad Men, the hit series concerning advertising in the 1960s, would be if the characters stopping swilling (and puffing) their days away. Remove the bibulousness from cinema and we would be left with something a little safer, but considerably less entertaining.
But remember. Enjoy movie boozing responsibly and do not drive or operate heavy machinery while under the influence.