It's an odd feeling watching a movie about an over-the-top self-destructive character, and remembering specific times when you did same thing. Scenes intended to be climactic moments of pathos feel like last September. “This guy seems familiar,” you think, as you watch the character needlessly bungling opportunities while wallowing self-pity.
Watching someone self-destruct in life can be painful, but it's more entertaining in a movie, as characters make bad decision after bad decision, often with a grating, stressful music score in the background. Whether it's Uncut Gems, Julia, Bad Lieutenant, Love Liza, Leaving Las Vegas or others, we stare fascinated as characters screw up their lives in ways that either make us feel better about our own mistakes, or at least help us mistakenly romanticize them as if our life is a movie.
They're often films that many people never watch again, and yet masochists can't help themselves. They explore that dark urge: the tailspin, in which a character says no to life and recedes into a spiral of degradation, usually involving drugs, alcohol, crime, solitude, gambling... whatever ruins their day the fastest. It's as much a fantasy as watching an overly-heroic film.
Those cinematic moments of helplessness and willful destruction stay with us: Philip Seymour Hoffman in Owning Mahowny unable to look up while gambling and acknowledge his friend's pleas, Tilda Swinton in Julia convincing herself in a drunken rage that kidnapping is a good idea, and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas cheerfully pushing a shopping cart filled with liquor. Some of the best films in this genre are the ones in which it's not exactly clear why the character is doing this to themselves. A tragedy that launches characters into a spiral—like Manchester By the Sea or The Whale—can feel like convenient, heavy-handed exposition.
But when addiction and self-destruction are presented without a clear genesis, it's more cathartic, because we all have reasons to withdraw. The binge is often about the binge. Many recognize the corrosive patterns and can pull back from the ledge, but the lure of the abyss is always there, and it's as if these films are saying, “Here what that dark abyss would look like, with better lighting.”
The question is: what are we gleaning from such films? Francois Truffaut argued that it's not possible to make an anti-war film, as the cinematic action and camaraderie ultimately romanticizes war as a fun adventure. I wonder if the same can be said about self-destructive films. They're not treating the spiral like in an overtly amusing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas manner. But watching someone move into the abyss and put up wallpaper is entertaining, unfortunately more so than watching them ask for help and get their shit together. We love seeing Paul Giamatti gulp wine from the spit bowl in Sideways, or that moment in Love Liza when Philip Seymour Hoffman sniffs gasoline and dives into the middle of a remote control speed boat race. People slow down for car crashes for a reason.
There's a fine line between over-romanticizing misery, and acknowledging the tempting ridiculousness of high-octane self-destruction. We have this notion when we're young that excess in the extreme, whether it's drinking, drugs or another isolating activity—is somehow going to cause us to burst into light. But in reality there's the next day, and aging. At their best these films feel like an artistic version of an intervention or a Scared Straight documentary.
Life sometimes finds a way to destroy itself. As we sit there yelling at the characters to “Stop doing that!” we may get the clue. Or we may never realize why we enjoy both the cinematic and our own self-destruction so much.