Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
“They are not long, the days of wine and roses: / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.” These lines are by Ernest Dowson, a decadent 19th century poet in the Oscar Wilde circle, who died of consumption at the age of 32. In contrast we also have these much more famous lines from Baudelaire: “You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it — it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back, and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.” Dowson’s poem is lovely but I prefer Baudelaire. I was a bit afraid to watch Days of Wine and Roses. But I wanted to. I mean how appropriate was it that TCM had programmed it just a few hours before Donald Trump announced 30 more days of quarantine? There is nothing to be done, in my view, except be drunk. My friend and I have been getting drunk every afternoon for the last two weeks. It’s a break in the day, or a goal of the day; I’m not sure which. I suspect you will not approve. But my therapist told me that I should do whatever I need to do to get through this; and I do respect her advice. I think there is a lesson in this grim little lecture against alcoholism called Days of Wine and Roses (it’s not actually little, it lasts for 2 sometimes tedious hours); but it is not the one you might imagine. Jack Lemmon meets the beautiful Lee Remick at his public relations job, woos her, and marries her. He is already clearly an alcoholic, and his alcoholism is clearly framed by 1960’s martini culture. I remember it — my parents used to partake in it; it was a time when no civilised human being in their right mind ignored ‘the cocktail hour.’ Lee Remick is not an alcoholic at first; but she is addicted to chocolate, and as Jack Klugman makes clear when he appears (yes, this is years before The Odd Couple, but I always found him irritatingly insincere) Remick had an addictive personality, and chocolate was only the start. “There comes time in the life of every alcoholic when the bottle is God,” preaches Klugman. Well no doubt, and I must admit the scenes where Jack Lemmon wrecks his father-in-law's greenhouse looking for a bottle of booze, and then ends up in a straight jacket, are difficult to watch, in just the right way. But I’ve never been fond of a moral lesson. And the lesson of Days of Wine and Roses is that morality is not -- and should never be -- the proper purpose of art. Rather than preach at us about the brevity of drunken joy as Dowson does, why not celebrate the ineluctable human need for rose coloured glasses? As Lee Remick says: “I want things to look pretty.” As someone once said about an alcoholic who I loved very dearly (my mother) ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed but she was never very comfortable in the real world.” Well we had that in common, my mother and I. It is with admirable restraint that I get drunk every afternoon — and not every night — during this nightmare called ‘social distancing.’ But this writing is my true drunknenness; imagine me indulging in it now, as you read this. All I have to look forward to are those precious moments when I listen to Norma (I’m listening to it now —she’s a pagan princess, and what, after all, exactly, is that?) and disappear into old movies, celebrating my own swirly, girly take on them. You don’t have to agree with my choices, alright? You just have to respect them. Can you do that? We learned this from AIDS. After much finger waving from doctors and straight people we just decided to ignore the whole lot of you and make our own rules. Fellatio, for instance. It used to drive me crazy that AIDS information pamphlets said you could get AIDS from blowjobs. Well of course you can’t. And there was never any medical proof, there was only the perennial ‘well of course anything’s possible.’ But saliva kills HIV (little known fact — why do you suppose they didn’t want you to know it?) At any rate, some of us, like me, decided blowjobs were okay. We each had our own rules during the AIDS epidemic, and we respected everyone’s right to make the rules that worked for them. I have no doubt that for some, perhaps even many, ‘social distancing’ is inspiring (as one online friend earnestly suggested - ‘More time to discover crocheting!’ ) So before you report your neighbours to the police for having more than two people to the house for dinner, remember that we are creatures of feeling and magic and drunkennes and vice. Our bodies may be tied to the so-called real world, but our souls are not. And yes there are other worlds, and who is to say they are not better? And frankly, if you do not believe in those other worlds, it’s your funeral. “There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio….” And I have it on good authority that Shakespeare not only enjoyed a stiff drink now and then, but he liked to disappear on flights of fancy — the only prerequisite being that they had no actual relationship to reality as we know it on the quotidian (which means day to day). When Shakespeare wrote 12th Night (SparksNotes tell us) there was no place named Illyria. Hamlet believed that chameleons did not eat food, but instead, lived on air. Yes yes (boring, snore) people obviously need food and water, and yes, of course, they need their (snooze) friggin’ health. But we also desperately need hope and dreams — which means the fantasy of perfect happiness on earth, which, truth be told, rarely — no, actually, how do I break this to you? — never, ever. happens. Chameleons, Shakespeare said, were “promise-cramm’d.” So are we. Without our starry-eyed drunken dreams — false and illusive as love itself — we too, will starve.
