A Lesson in Distraction

Wertz's Drinking at the Movies embodies what I find to be a chronic and very common condition of produced distraction within contemporary North American culture. What I mean by this is the simultaneous living with and beside, contributing to, benefiting from, and being robbed and controlled by the economic, political, cultural, and social systems that keep the pillars of this society intact; which promotes ever increasing individualization (read: isolation) and benefits only the very few. In writing this I am not suggesting that Wertz should have created a different work with different content (which would be to say that she should have had a different life)... but it was this condition of distraction, of not being able to look directly at the conditions of her life and/or the society in which she lives that informs this impression.

For example Wertz references a number of pivotal events that have shaped recent American history: 911, the  2007/2008 Financial Crisis, increasing civic bylaws within New York quashing nightlife, gentrification, with fleetingness that feels ambivalent, and at times like obligation, as though she is saying "Well, if I'm going to write about New York then these are things I *need* to mention." On page 15 she writes, "What I didn't foresee was the wave of political change and upheaval about to take place." And as a reader I didn't see the ways in which she felt personally impacted by these dynamic events. There is never a meaningful investigation of these events. The world seems to float around her. The radio buzzes news of terrifically horrible events as she sketches. Page 162 "The Way We Are" summarizes this best and is the only time in the text that Wertz looks *directly* at these issues while emphasizing her condition of distraction ie. "Hm, the US is waterboarding people like crazy and.... Oh look! Kittens!"  As she writes "My political consciousness was rooted in skepticism and despair" (16) which promotes immobility and dissociation. Further when she writes "I'm actually glad to live in a society that expects me to be a fuck-up. That way I never have to act like a real grown-up" (85) she is speaking towards a culture that promotes lack of collective responsibility which condones again, turning away.

What is painful about this distraction is the way in which it mirrors the distraction or inability to look directly at the conditions of her family's story and her own struggle with addictions. In the opening of the work we are thrust into the moment that she comes "into consciousness" (at that point we don't know about what) and then witness her through the following pages spiral into addictions. The structure of the work is interesting in that sense - it opens with a cliff hanger that gets us invested and from there we travel with her as she arrives at the bottom, noting all along the irony of the focus on her brother's addiction while denying her own. I'm assuming Wertz structured the text in this way to have her brother function as a foil. But even throughout this spiral we rarely enter very significantly into Wertz's internal register. The locality of event and description remains at a more cursory region which emphasizes in many ways her distraction and looking away. What punctuates this is the way in which her friends also participate in this looking away - their attempts at intervention seeming incredibly distant. Everyone seems willing to co-exist with these challenging truths. We also only learn about incredibly pivotal personal events including her parents' separation once we are deep into the text and only through the interpretation of Holmes and Watson, which again signals her unwillingness to speak directly. As a craft choice (which I assume these were) it signals again the profound looking away as a theme and practice throughout the text.

I found the surrealist moments, particularly Mystery Theatre functioned powerfully within the text. The investigation that Holmes and Watson undertake leads us to the context of her addictions - primarily through the interview with the mother - and through this device she makes sure to avoid catharsis. She also does a really interesting and incredible job of interpreting what the process of fighting with an addiction is like through the device of a runaway brain. At the same time I wonder how much this strategy is symptomatic again of the tendency within the text to look away and distract. Her use of humor in this moment simultaneously leaves the experience perhaps more accessible to those who do not know the brutal challenges of addictions (and really those who do) and functions to hide the narrator's direct ownership of the experiences produced as a result of her condition and choices. This piece is a continual act it feels of bottling-up and leaking "Anyway, I'm just gonna bottle this back up until it explodes in my future therapist's face." (117)

As I was reading this work I was struck about the way in which the Phantom Limb works as a perfect metaphor for this condition of distraction centred in this text - the sensation that something is wrong, but the training of the eye/heart/mind/body to not relate to the sensation as though it is more than symbolic utterance of something immaterial, but instead very real, very present...

The implicit and explicit racism and classism of the text were impossible to ignore. From the recurring use of the term "bum" to describe homeless/street-involved people and her characterization of these individuals as verbally violent basically across the board seems to function as a method of asserting incredible separation between herself and them, and reveals a kind of disassociation with what perhaps made them more common than she wanted to admit - ie. her own economic precarity (it at times seemed as though she was just one paycheck away from homelessness herself). This distinction of self from other is emblematic of white middle-class Americanness, which she at times within the text acknowledges but does not challenge. The very few moments that she talks about whiteness (while honest) are problematic "I'm just sick of having to apologize for being white and in my 20s." (85) "So are they white trash or are we just snobby assholes?" (81) "As a white, middle-class American, I carry around a lot of guilt" (162) I do not write this to suggest that the text should have been committed to an anti-racist project or a thesis on whiteness, but to illuminate the way in which latent racism is communicated. She is searching to locate identity often in this text through processes of opposition that resist the undertaking of true ownership of the identity she actually inhabits - ie. the assertion that she isn't a yuppie and therefore doesn't have the same impact that yuppies have in the process of the gentrification of neighbourhoods.

Lots more.

Looking forward to the conversation especially in relationship to graphics which I didn't touch...