Alcoholism: ALCOHOLISM IN FILM AND LITERATURE
Pick up any book, which was written in the latter half of the 19th century. If it has a bohemian background, the hero is going to make sure that he brings out his creative spirit by drinking absinthe. As he struggles to gain success, he starts drinking even more. If you want your withers really wrung, you're going to complete the full book as you go through the gamut of his despair as he falls more into the clutches of alcoholism. His dear woman is going to try her best to save him, but success is only going to come on the last page, as he succumbs to alcoholism. End of story. There was a time and alcoholism and literature was romantic, because it meant that the person was so sensitive that it would not bear his love leaving him. So he began to indulge in drink to drown his sorrows. The association of wine and woman in literature has been around for a long time.
Even now, in chick lit, you find instances of the woman going straight to down a Martini, just because the man who would she thought she had a good thing going, preferred the charms of a pneumatic and sometimes even more prosperous, blonde. But as this is romantic fiction, she is going to stop at one Martini. In real life, her counterpart would have downed another and then another and finally ended up in rehabilitation. But romantic fiction makes warrior woman go all out because he done her wrong, and make the lives of both of those rats so miserable that they end up in rehabilitation. On the other hand, she ends up happily ever after with another person, and they celebrate the end of the story with Champagne.
That is the same story in films. Only some films glorify alcoholism in which the hero ends up dead at the end of the movie or successfully rehabilitated, and ends up with an Oscar. The alcoholic prototype in Westerns, show a doctor who is an alcoholic, but manages to have the strength to operate upon a patient. The operation is successful enough to make sure that the doctor gains his self-respect and confidence. That is the running theme of alcoholism and literature in films.
