"Shutter Island"

 A particularly Murnau-esque image from Scorsese's film. 

A lot of people don’t like Shutter Island. I get that. It’s excessive, lurid, and even those who’d argue the excess is part of the point will perhaps admit it does duty above and beyond in that respect. Mystery mavens will tell you the film’s plot is laughably obvious. It’s arguable that the film conjures up tropes of the atrocities of 20^th century history far too glibly.

I praised the movie when it was released in February of 2010, but these days when it comes up on social media I don’t offer too full-throated a defense of the movie, if any at all. And if the movie comes up in conversation with friendly acquaintances, and one of them proclaims “Well that sucked,” or something along those lines, I just zip my mouth tight and shrug.

Almost all my adult life I had been a hard drinker. When my family moved from Dumont to Lake Hopatcong in the mid-‘70s, when I was between my sophomore and junior years in high school, I was terribly irritated to be consigned to the sticks, but I wound up doing well there. I was a social pariah in Dumont, something to do with my brash personality, but at Jefferson Township High School I found friends, quite a few of them, and many of them are friends to this day. There were social hierarchies there but they didn’t seem to be taken quite as seriously in the more cosmopolitan realms of Bergen County. The jocks and the self-described “band f*gs” kind of got along, and they drank together at a bar called Rudy’s that sat at the top of one of the mountains separating Hopatcong from Milton. It was there that I did not learn how to drink. I remember trying to do a “flaming shot” of Green Chartreuse and spilling it, pretty little flames dancing on the linoleum. The proprietors were pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. Of course they were serving sixteen-year-olds without even making a show of carding them.

In any event. Once I began writing for a living almost a decade later, I had your standard issue perspective on the position of alcohol in the life of a scribe. One friend would refer to what he considered my “interesting relationship” to spirits, which he did not take as alcoholism.

Whether I had been an actual alcoholic during the better part of the relationship is, at least from this perspective, neither here nor there. But the relationship took a decisive turn when I lost my office job (at the website spun off from Premiere magazine, a job I should not have accepted in the first place, but that is, again, neither here nor there) and was obliged, for the first time since the mid-1990s, to work as a freelancer.

This was in 2008. My ticket to Cannes was already bought, and I started the blog you are reading now. I got a lot of sympathy and not a lot of work. For the third time, neither here nor there in the larger scheme of things. I drank like more of a fish than I ever had,  I got fatter than I’d ever been, I was invited to play a fat monster in a Steven Soderbergh movie.

Some time in 2009 it occurred to me that because I felt I had to have a lot of alcohol every single day, I might have a problem. This was pretty plain to my wife Claire as well. My routine was something like this: I’d get out of bed a little before noon. (My wife, on her way to her office job, would cheerily repeat a little mantra she’d formulated, reminding me to perform a few actions, including showering and putting on fresh clothing.) I’d do a little work. I’d wonder if I should go to Hanley’s for lunch. And whether, when there, I’d just have one drink. There was a pretty lively afternoon crew at Hanley’s, including a carpenter who had inexplicably cut off a part of his finger recently. The bartender was a goddess with the buy back. Some time after five, I’d ooze on back to my house, and try to arrange myself as if I had not spent the afternoon getting utterly hammered. It was kind of tedious for me, and really sad for my wife. I had long past burned my way through my Premiere severance and was in the process of obliterating our shared savings.

I tried some of them there "meetings." (I like how Paul Williams describes his sober path in the book Trust and Gratitude: “The path I took to get here is the oldest and best hope for any alcoholic of addict who seeks help.” He does not refer to it by name and I’m going to follow his example.) They did not work for me. I literally walked out of one muttering to myself that I was entirely entitled to my resentments. Claire asked me to go speak to a counselor at the New York office of Hazelden. We had an amiable chat. I told him that I did not care much for the chair of one of these meetings; I suspected that he ran the numbers game in our neighborhood (he didn’t). “So you’re concerned that he doesn’t walk the walk,” the Hazelden counselor asked with what I did not recognize at the time as exquisite sarcasm. “Exactly,” I said.

That was in the summer. I drank through the fall and the winter. I white-knuckled a week at my in-laws’ place. There was a bottle of Maker’s Mark in a cabinet under their microwave and I contrived to drain just a little of it for myself one day while everyone was out shopping or something. (The bottle is still there, and it’s at the same level I left it.) When we came home after New Year’s, I had given up all pretense. Every day when I woke up I  immediately contrived to get my first drink. My most cherished time was Happy Hour at Blue Ruin, a still-extant dive (and I mean that in the nicest way) on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Two-for-one from four to eight. That’s a lot of Wild Turkey 100 Proof with a Stella pint for relatively little money. I’d sit in the bad lighting with a bunch of poor creepy guys like myself and play Stooges songs on the jukebox. And drink.

In late January Claire left town, to tour the country in a production of Gravity Radio, a music/theater piece by Mikel Rouse, who also was the primary performer. Claire was the newscaster whose stories, which she chose from the real news every day, punctuated Mikel’s “radio” songs.

The cat being away, I played. I don’t want to get too specific, and anyway, as the Rutles once sang, “Do I have to spell it out?”

I don’t even remember just what I was doing for work at that specific moment in time, but one of my clients was the MSNBC website, which ran all sorts of original editorial at the time, and paid okay for said editorial. My editor there called me up the morning of January 27. Would I be interested, he asked, in doing the video junket for the new Scorsese movie, Shutter Island? I would be interviewing Leonardo Di Caprio and Ben Kingsley, but not the director. This despite the fact that Scorsese was someone I’d interviewed not infrequently back when Premiere magazine was still a magazine. A magazine where I ruled the roost to the extent that once, two fact checkers quit because my boss wouldn’t fire me for yelling at them all the time.

I was not keen — I try not to appear on camera if I can help it, honest — but then Dave, for that was my editor’s name, said the labor paid five hundred dollars. That was good, because at the time of our conversation I had more or less no money. I had no substances. I had little alcohol:  A can of Sapporo Premium Beer — one of those fluted 22 ounce jobs. So, you know, who cared who I interviewed, or didn’t interview?

After the phone call, I drained that fluted can and went about trying to make myself presentable. And coherent. The screening was on the early evening of the 28^th, which was the next day, and the junket was on the morning of the 29^th.

While I was an avid Scorsese person, I had not been following the making of the film; I had other things going on. So I went in relatively clean. And I was knocked this way and that for a while — a lot of the time it seemed that Scorsese was aiming for a high-toned variant of a Hammer film. Which was fine with me, provisionally.

Almost two hours into the movie, there’s a flashback involving the film’s central character, "Teddy Daniels", played by DiCaprio. It’s from a time when he was an officer of the law, married, with two children. At this point, unbeknownst to him, his wife, who’s severely depressed, has drowned those two children and has laid them out on the back lawn. It’s been shown that throughout his marriage Teddy has ignored, or at least been ignorant of, his wife’s mental illness. In the scene prior, Teddy has hallucinated a conversation with his wife and one of his dead children. Now, in the flashback, he is returning to a beautiful house of stone. “I’m back,” he bellows, seeing no one in the house and  expecting that Dolores (Michelle Williams) will hear him outside. He takes off his jacket, folds it over his arm. “We got him just outside of Oklahoma.” He takes off his hat and puts that and the jacket on a chair. “We must have stopped ten places between here and Tulsa, I could sleep for a week.” He moves over to the kitchen sink.

Now the audience already is aware of what has happened to the children, and of the state Dolores is in. If you’ve been able to achieve any kind of emotional connection to the movie by this point, it weighs heavily.

Teddy opens a cabinet, pulls a bottle of whiskey out of it, says “Dolores?” and pours a not-all-that stiff belt into a glass. He downs it and shows his teeth, temporarily satisfied. It wasn’t that big of a drink. But it was something that he put in front of everything else. He looks behind him and yells “Dolores” again.

This was my white light moment. My moment of clarity. I do not exaggerate when I profess that it hit me like a thunderbolt. In an instant. This is me. And this is what is going to happen: I am going to lose my marriage (by destroying it) and I am going to lose my mind (by destroying it) and I am going to die.

I looked at my watch and did a little math. If I did not drink between now and six-thirty the next evening, I could go to one of those meetings and proclaim that I was an alcoholic, and I could ask for help.

The next day I got to the junket site early. It was the Hotel Parker Meridian and the junketeers were offered a stupendous breakfast buffet and I sure did appreciate it. I was herded into a waiting area to do my first interview, with Di Caprio. A journalist of my acquaintance noticed me with some surprise. You don’t usually do these kinds of things, he noticed. “Have you got a one-on-one with Scorsese?”

“No,” I said glumly. “Essentially I’m Tyrone Power near the end of Nightmare Alley.”

“I don’t know that movie,” he said.

That night, at the meeting, the guy I thought ran the numbers took one look at me, ashen in my overcoat, and said “Tis the season.” That was January 29, 2010. I haven’t had a drink since then. Thanks to everyone who helped.

 

Comments

[Cornerofjustice]

Congratulations on the ten year anniversary of what sounds like you absolutely getting your life on the track you wanted it! I'm so happy you had both the personal desire to make the change, as well as the support in your life to make it successful.

Thanks for sharing your experience in such a beautiful piece. I have no real feelings about "Shutter Island," but hearing it weaved into the narrative of your own story is one of my favorite parts about film. Even a movie that left very little impression on me like this one now as added value after hearing how it ended up having such a dramatic impact on your life.

I already love movies, but hot damn. Reading a reflective and vulnerable piece about a movie I've mostly forgotten makes me appreciate them even more. Thanks for taking the time.

[carl]

Mazel tov. I cried reading this, and also felt mild surprise that Dave Wallace did not come up.

[Matthew]

Beautiful. So glad you made it, Glenn.

[bp]

thank you for sharing this and congrats on a decade

[Ron]

👍

[Hammer]

Congrats Buddy. I ran into you around that time or the year before in Carroll Gardens. I was going through stuff myself. I'm glad you are doing so well!

[richard]

congratulations. and thank you—i've learned a lot from your work over those same years.

[Gordon Cameron]

I was wondering how you would make your way from such a beginning to 'Shutter Island'. It was worth reading to find out, but I'm sorry you went through all that. Congratulations on your sobriety, and thanks for writing this.

[Eric]

Very powerful. Thank you for sharing that. It's something I needed to read right now.

[Tony Dayoub]

This is what makes cinema so personal and so individual. Congratulations!

[Mike Gebert]

One of my favorite lines in a movie is in The Freshman, when Matthew Broderick reads a poem his late father wrote and Marlon Brando doesn't say he likes the poem, he says he likes that Broderick has kept the poem and returns to it. The quality of the poem doesn't matter, the meaning that it has for him is everything.

I liked your story. Congrats on a decade of recovery.

[Cory Bobrowski]

Congratulations Glenn!

[Titch]

A profoundly moving and personal read.

[Craig Kaplan]

Glenn, I have tears in my eyes. Truly so proud to be able to read this

[OlliS]

Glad to have you around, Glenn! (Also: a Rutles reference in a story like this. Goddammit.)

[Manohla]

Thank you for writing this lovely piece, and for sharing it with us. I’m glad that you’re here.

[Pedro]

Fantastic, and thank you for posting this. Personally, even with all distance, I’m a huge fan of what you wrote for Premiere. I have kept all the Premieres from the 90s. Even with all its commercial aspect, I miss having film centric magazines.

[Shawn Levy]

Very happy for you, pallie. This is a remarkable share. Good for you. Blessings.

[Nicholas Ramsey]

This is such a touching and vulnerable piece to commemorate a major anniversary. Congrats!

I've been reading you since the Premiere days--I always read the "Ask Glenn" column and DVD reviews first. I look forward to reading you for many, many years in the future.

[lazarus]

Glenn, I was very entertained by Shutter Island upon its release, even moved in a way that I hadn’t been by a Scorsese film since The Age of Innocence.

Your initial review vindicated that reaction (in the face of a somewhat divisive reception after a few heavy hitters that decade from Marty), but it also led me to probe deeper on subsequent viewings and com to
understand that this wasn’t just a piece of effective genre fare, but something more personal, more resonant, more nuanced. To this day, whenever a new Scorsese film comes out, it’s your take that I’m always the most interested in reading.

You only mentioned your connection to the main character’s struggle in that review in the slightest way, and this decade-later expansion of why it hit you so hard is very much appreciated.

Thanks for sharing, thanks for sticking around, and congrats.

[Howard Karren]

Glenn, besides the fact that this is a great piece of writing, it's truly heartwarming, and that's a word I rarely use with complete honesty (except here). As much as I enjoyed your friendship when you were drinking, I had always hoped you would experience the thunderbolt that I now know you did watching Shutter Island, a movie that I unashamedly love. Now I love it more. Mazel tov and l'chaim. XO

[Chris]

A beautifully written piece. Thank you.

[Preston]

Very nice indeed, Glenn. Congrats on your milestone. Glad yer around, too!

[Bobby]

What a wonderful piece of writing. Congrats Glenn.

[George]

Great writing, Glenn. Sounds like you sobered up just in time. Some people have to hit bottom, and do jail time, before they change their life.

I remember hearing another critic (I'd rather not name him) say on a podcast that he got drunk every night in his 20s. And I thought: Me, too, more or less. I quit that lifestyle in my 30s.

[Misha]

This was beautiful, Glenn. Thank you for sharing. And keep up the great work on all fronts.

[Chaz Ebert]

Such a beautiful and poignant telling Glenn. Congratulations my Friend on a day-at-a-time for ten years!🙏🏿

[D Cairns]

Beautiful and brave words.