Penny Post #34: Drunk On Film

My favorite class & my drinking habits.

Before the age of twenty-one, I could count on one hand the amount of drinks I consumed. There was that one high school party in my good friend’s grandfather’s pool house that eventually was busted by said grandfather wielding an angry fist and chasing us with his car. There was that one summer during COVID where my friends and I paired Pink Whitney with the Hamilton soundtrack that left me like this:

And there was that one time at the Jersey Shore where a neighbor’s mother offered me a drink that I dutifully sipped and hated every single second of (including her). 

Needless to say, alcohol rarely ever made it past my dry lips. Mostly because I couldn’t stand the taste. And as someone with an ED at the time, I was not about to waste calories on something I hated the taste of.

Easy enough to stay away. 

Senior year came around; my anti-anxiety medication kicked in; and suddenly alcohol sounded good. [It still didn’t taste good, for the record]. I started to drink most weekends, with a half-and-half Twisted Tea in my hand. I began to notice how I behaved differently buoyed by some liquid courage. If the lexapro was working, so too was the alcohol. The anxiety and inhibition that acted as a social deterrent became obsolete a few sips in. I was fascinated by alcohol’s influence, but more than most, grateful that this drug did not wrap its grimy addictive claws over my body and call itself a victor. 

I learned the consequence of the claw’s victory [no pun intended] in a class entitled “Drunk on Film: The Psychology of Storytelling with Alcohol and its Effects on Alcohol Consumption” during my Junior year of college. I took the class mostly because I was in need of electives that would count towards my film degree, yet I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of how alcohol functions in the liver of society [pun intended].

In this zoom class of roughly 40 students and two outspoken professors, we talked openly and without consequence about our drinking habits. The students hungover in class shared. The students who had escaped the infamous “drunk tank” in the football stadium shared. The students where “one too many” became their last shared. No holds barred: everyone - regardless of their drinking habits - shared.

The sharing was also a part of our grade. 

The syllabus indicated that if we did not participate, our grades would suffer. 

I made sure to raise my zoom-hand every class, both to share in ways I thought clever as well as to get that “A”. Many of my peers shared in my ambition, creating a virtual queue of zoom-hands and half-formed thoughts. 

I was scrolling through my zoom screen one day, amused by the cohort that I shared this virtual space with. All of the faces I recognized except one. A background with plants and bookshelves surrounded this floating head which zoom had named Holly. She had never once participated, and I knew our professors were likely taking notes. 

Little did I know Holly would not receive a grade at all. She had gotten an “A” long before she ever entered the zoom waiting room.

It was only weeks later, when Professor Mandell and Professor Venter introduced her as Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like A Woman: The Radical Choice To Not Drink In A Culture Obsessed With Alcohol, did I realize my grave mistake. This woman - who I had dismissed as nothing more than inconsequential - happened to be the most consequential person in that zoom room. QLAW was our class bible: we lived and breathed it for weeks - pairing it with movies and television episodes and documentaries in our quest to understand what it really meant to be under the influence.

Her writing - both in QLAW and her newsletter Recovering - is exquisite. She translates her consciousness into words better than anyone else I’ve read. Needless to say, I was shaken. She had been in the same class as me for over two months and I never even noticed. Thankfully, Holly was going to make the trek to South Bend, Indiana to visit our class in-person. 

Holly’s visit is captured here (If you correctly spot me, you get a year’s free subscription to APFMT):

It’s easy to guess why Drunk on Film is my favorite class of all time. Holly Whitaker might have something to do with it. Beyond that, though, this class was exceptional in that our professors exempted all willing participants from punishment, shame, and, most scarily, the Office of Community Standards. The freedom with which we were allowed to express, explore, and expose is unmatched to any class I’ve ever taken or will take. 

I’m one month away from twenty-three and I no longer can count on one hand (or even two) the amount of drinks I’ve consumed. They’ve come and gone like the passing of a breath: in and (sometimes) out. Yet this class - Professor Mandell, Professor Venter, and Holly Whitaker - have not passed as quickly as a sip. They are lasting influences that offer support even now - two years removed. Sobriety is not a goal of mine. Neither is drinking excessively. Yet truth is. And, for me, truth is found somewhere in between. Where like meets unlike, where sobriety meets alcoholism, where my two cents meet yours. 

Let me know in the comments below: what is your relationship to alcohol? What class have you continued to learn from, even out of school? Where is your truth?

Until next time,

Kiera