What is it about sober people and movies? When I first started going to meetings I was amazed at how much time people spent talking about films they’d seen, films they wanted to see, or films they were planning on seeing. One friend of mine in particular – I’ll call him Jack – impressed me particularly in this department. The first thing he’d do in the diner after the meeting was spread out that day’s copy of the movie section of the Times and outline the films he was thinking about going to that night. As far as I could make out, he’d see anything. Mediocre special-effects spectaculars; romances; sequels… There was apparently nothing he wasn’t willing to sit through. Clearly, Jack wasn’t going to the movies just for entertainment. There was something else he was getting from the experience, and that something-else was connected to sobriety.
After a while, I couldn’t help feeling a little judgmental about the whole business. All through rehab and ever since leaving it, I’d heard that recovery was about living your life – being present in the world. What, exactly, did all these movies have to do with that?
Ten years along, I’ve come up with a few theories on the matter. Along the way, I’ve also become curiously enthusiastic about movies myself – in a way that’s distinctly different from the way I used to be enthusiastic about them, before I got sober. Unlike my friend Jack, I don’t go out and see every new movie that comes along. In fact, I rarely go to the movies at all (sobriety has rendered me hyper-conscious of my fellow movie-goers, and I’m happier watching one at home on my computer screen). I also, unlike Jack, tend to favor movies I’ve already seen. I’ve always loved horror movies, especially those of the late sixties and early seventies, and at this point I’ve completely lost track of how many times I’ve seen Jaws or Night of the Living Dead.
But those differences are largely beside the point. Even though my style of movie-going is different from Jack’s, the reason we both like – even need -- to watch movies is, I suspect, largely the same.
It has something to do with ecstasy.
Ecstasy? I know, it sounds stupid, but bear with me. Not ecstasy in the sense of intense pleasure, but ecstasy in the original meaning of the word: standing outside oneself. All my life, I’ve been trying to find a way out of the world. Not all the way out, but to a place at the edge of things: A place from which I could look at whatever was happening around me and at the same time be gloriously disengaged from it. When I drank and took drugs, everything that happened was kind of like something in a movie. I was there for it, but I was also… somewhere else.
What’s the opposite of this drifting, dreaming, wonderfully disengaged state? That’s easy: the state of I wake up to every day now that I’m in sobriety. It’s just that feeling of being down here in the world rather than safe and above it that sobriety forces upon me so relentlessly. In the words of a Nine Inch Nails song that became newly meaningful to me after I entered recovery: “I was up above it, now I’m down in it.”
Of course, there are a million other reasons why sober people love movies. But I know that when I put one of my favorite DVDs in for yet another viewing, a big reason I enjoy it so much has a lot to do with my struggles with being down here in the world, rather than away and up above it.
While I think there’s basically nothing wrong with this movie madness, I also think that ultimately, making a place down here in the world, rather than trying to escape from it, is what sobriety is all about.
A quote by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel that I came across recently has something to say about all this.
“You feel you are hedged in,” Marcel writes. “You dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you: you will find God there. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs.”
Ptolemy Tompkins