"I remembered
laughing with my friend
when he had been put in
mandatory counseling after
he was caught drinking
before turning 21."
"Margarita-nights,
wine tastings, champagne
popping and quiet whiskey drinking
are all portrayed as common
group activities"
When I started working on the script “When you’re sleeping” I felt I had sufficient knowledge on alcohol use disorder. Knowing people who had suffered from the disease I felt I had some idea on how to form the alcoholic character Oliver. For the first draft of the script the words just poured out of me and the image of Oliver was so strong in my mind. I used my own experiences to color him and make him come more to life from the black and white pages.
It wasn’t until I started playing around with the script the next month that I realized how black and white the characters were. In my head they had been so colorful and alive, but that didn’t come off as well when rereading the pages I had written a few weeks earlier. The more I started playing around with the characters, the more I got to know them, and the more I realized the importance of research. Being completely spontaneous when writing is freeing, but I love creating under certain restrictions. This time I had chosen to create the world around a monologue I had written a year ago. But when talking about the world of addiction it became clear to me that I had to understand the disease better intellectually in order to portray it as true as possible.
I decided to write a research paper on the subject of alcoholism. I started the process by writing down some questions I had before starting to search the internet for answers. At first, I focused on researching the link between the disease and mental health. Heritability was also something of interest to me in analyzing the character of Oliver and I found some enlightening studies created on that subject indicating the caution children of alcoholic parents had to take. Then I started studying the actual disease itself. I learned a lot about the cravings and the devastating long-term effects of alcohol abuse. Looking at a study on American college students and how their drinking habits easily can develop into addiction had me a little worried. Thinking back at my college days there had been so many parties with a considerable amount of alcohol several days a week. I remembered laughing with my friend when he had been put in mandatory counseling after he was caught drinking before turning 21. He had told his counselor he used to black out drunk several times a month. The counselor had been genuinely worried, which was difficult for him to comprehend, blacking out drunk was just a normal weekend activity for him.
When I put the word film into the alcohol use search, I made a new discovery that surprised me. Articles and studies on how alcohol in film affected adolescence and children from the age of 12, and probably younger as well, popped up. This responsibility was something filmmakers had, probably even without knowing it. It worried me that I hadn’t even heard the mention of that before and I started reflecting on why that was.
Living alone and working from home during the beginning of the Corona pandemic it didn’t take long until the loneliness came creeping. I started watching a lot more TV in order to trick my brain into feeling more social. But the more I watched films and TV shows the more I realized that pretty much every occasion was accompanied by alcohol. There was always a bottle of wine on the table, or a conversation over a beer at a bar, or some big party with shots. Margarita-nights, wine tastings, champagne popping and quiet whiskey drinking are all portrayed as common group activities, and you rarely see characters gather without the presence of alcohol. I had bought a boxed wine during the Corona lock-down that I enjoyed every now and then, but I was strict and did not allow myself to drink alcohol every day. When watching the people on TV drinking all the time, it made me want to join them in the beginning. But the more I watched, the more they drank, and it started bothering me. Do normal people really drink that much?
When I read the studies on how alcohol affected teens and young adults, I started thinking back to all those instances where they put alcohol in films when it seemed completely unnecessary for the storyline. I researched some more and found that 83 % of the top 100 U.S. box office films each year from 1998-2002 depicted some form of alcohol use, which proved that my observations were accurate. This is viewed as an easy way to make some money on product placement of alcohol brands by the production companies, especially in America. Looking more into the studies on how this alcohol depiction affected the young viewers made me surprised that this wasn’t something I had heard about before. The glorification of drinking alcohol can be compared to the smoking of cigarettes in films where there is more data available on the consequences and influence it has on the viewers. The past couple of years the increase of smoking in films has been debated, and I believe the alcohol consumption is an equally important subject to start discussing. How much do the films we watch really affect us? Do I really want a beer after a long day at work, or do I drink it just because the movies I’ve watched told me that it’s the right way to unwind?
The deeper I get into this research, the more franticly I start looking around for more information to support the research I’ve already read. Digging deeper only leads to more questions. How do they conduct the studies? How many studies are there? Have they been recreated in other parts of the world? And how many years have scientists actually looked into these issues? What do the production companies actually know? There is so much more to uncover as well, so many things I want to get out there, or just reflect on by myself. But for now, I need to keep my focus on the issue of alcohol and the condition alcohol use disorder. I need to look at the information needed to construct Oliver to be as true of a character as possible, which again will make it easier to create a real-life Lisa, someone living with a person suffering from addiction. This information will help me figure out how this film can help others in a similar situation as Lisa, finding the strength to help yourself before helping others.