16 Years of Alcohol is a 2003 drama film written and directed by Richard Jobson, based on his semi-autobiographical 1987 novel. Kevin McKidd stars as Frankie, who is a violent alcoholic, partially based on Jobson and his brother, as the story depicts his mental downward spiral with certain key moments in his life planting that spiral. Having watched the film on Tuesday, I had enjoyed it for what it was, but days after seeing it I had come to the conclusion that it was a visual lesson on being what I call “high on life”.
How it accomplished this
In the second section of the film where Frankie is the leader of three skinheads who are pretty much him without any way of talking like a smooth, yet dry, gangster, they do what they do in the streets of Edinburgh without a real reason. Their reason could be because of them going through a violent adolescence together and suffering from a hormonal imbalance, with the result of that suffering being violent reactions to being slagged off in the men’s room or being denied any drinks.
This violent adolescence is what I call a dangerous way of being “high on life” where the four guys are living their lives on the edge and being ready to kick people’s faces in. It comes to a boiling point where one of the guys slashes Frankie’s hand and attacks him and he fights back kicking him repeatedly before they go their separate ways.
In his way of escaping from this adolescence, Frankie pursues a relationship with a woman named Helen (Laura Fraser) who studies art and works in a record store. They’re compatible and they’re creative in their own ways of expression, but one thing stops it from blossoming into something bigger, and that’s Frankie’s anger, which becomes apparent to Helen at an event where Frankie threatens kick someone from London in the face for being snobbish about a piece of artwork that he likes.
Following this wake up call, Frankie goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and a theatre group and pursues another relationship with another woman named Mary (Susan Lynch), which allows Frankie to exercise his demons as he loses his desire to fight and once again, ends up getting high on life, in a much safer way thanks to the director of the theatre group bluntly telling him that wallowing in his own “self pitying bullshit” is not the group’s fault.
Months go by as Frankie’s relationship with Mary is working out well enough for the both of them and Frankie is more comfortable with the theatre group. With his demons seemingly being put to bed at this point in the film, Frankie is pretty much “high on life” in the safest way that he can be as his relationship with the people from the theatre group isn’t a relationship with strings attached like it was with his parents or his three skinheads.
He’s at peace with himself at this point in the story and one would think that it would end there, but it all comes crashing down when an incident at the pub leads Frankie to believe that Mary is cheating on him with the director, reigniting the feelings he had when he found out that his father was cheating on his mother, and leading him down a downward spiral as he’s let his demons take him over. Whether he dies or not at the end is left up to the viewers.
How being “High on Life” once applied to me
I had started drinking alcohol when I was seventeen and I did it only when I was at parties and I often ended up a mess the next morning with a headache. When the COVID 19 restrictions were being slowly lifted around the middle of 2021, I had started drinking at home and as well as at parties and I ended up being a mess in the morning as well thanks to that.
At the time, I knew why I was doing that, because I liked the sensation of being “high on life” thanks to taking in the liquid and the fumes of the drink, it felt like my brain was loosened (the same would apply to my stomach whenever I’d be stressed). I was just lucky enough to have some self awareness of what I was doing.
I had stopped three nights ago when I got drunk watching a rugby match between Munster (Ireland) and the Bulls (South Africa) and ended up getting sick, and there was something about that night that had sent me into a decision of self regulating and stopping myself from drinking all of the Peroni in the fridge. I realised, that my way of being “high on life” was not doing it for me anymore and that I was just hurting myself.
I think I had realised it on that night after watching the film on Tuesday and remembering how much I enjoyed the section of the film where Frankie and Mary were a thing and that he himself was complacent with himself mentally and he wasn’t kicking people’s faces in. There was something in that very scene where the song Happiness composed by The Blue Nile was playing that had got to me, in terms of evoking a new meaning of being “high on life”.
Knowing where I am and knowing who I am instead of relying on a substance to make me forget about the concept of time popped into my head when I watched that scene for the first time and it is still in my head knowing what happened at the end of the film and by the time I’m typing this, it is still a revelation that I will never forget. Both it being said and done were hard for me.
An example about learning self regulation in children’s media
Snowed Under: The Bobblesberg Winter Games (2004) is a 53 minute Bob the Builder “special” directed by Sarah Ball and Jocelyn Stevenson. Starring Rob Rackstraw, Emma Tate, Neil Morrissey, Kate Harbour, Rupert Degas, Ulrika Jonsson, Kerry Fox, John Motson, and Sue Barker and acting as an ending to the original series from 1999 to 2004, the story of the “special” revolves around Bob (Morrissey) and his construction vehicles being assigned to build a log cabin for the mayor of Bobsville in the mountainous twin town, Bobblesberg, with an extra job of helping with the preparation of the Winter Games being added to their plate as a snow storm has stopped a team of special construction vehicles from being able to do the job, all except one (Tate).
Scoop the backhoe loader digger (Rackstraw), is the main character of the story and he is the character who enforces the message of self regulation as well as being the character who displays what happens when someone pushes themselves too much in a task instead accepting help from others. As Bob the Builder was a children’s television series that had emphasised conflict resolution, co-operation, socialisation, and various learning skills, this “special” leans more heavily into a message that children are told to remember at an early age but don’t understand it because words can’t properly describe it.
As children, it’s a common fact that we are raised our entire lives with everything provided for us by our authoritative figures, and at a certain point in our lives when we finish secondary school, it is cut off and the rest of our lives are in our hands as new adults and the stigma of it can be classified as “There you go you’re officially an adult now, go out there and if you do something stupid, then that’s not our problem if you don’t get a roof over your head”. That stigma as adults in my opinion is what makes us forget to accept help from others.
A similar stigma to that is what makes Scoop tick in the special as he proposes to work with the only special machine who made it through the snow storm (Benny the excavator) while his colleagues help Bob with the construction of the log cabin. The catch is that he only proposes to doing this because of a conversation that he has with Bob an hour before the snow storm happens, worrying about the “special machines” doing better things than they can do until Bob reassures him that he and the others can do anything.
Him working with Benny, is going to prove that they can do anything, in his mind and in another way, is going to be a way to appease Bob and have him respect him more for pushing himself without any help from the others. However that plan is ruined slightly when three of the other machines are sent to work with Scoop as Bob doesn’t need them at the moment. Those machines being Muck the caterpillar-tracked dump truck (Rackstraw) , Roley the diesel roller (Morrissey) and Dizzy the cement mixer (Harbour).
As they don’t take the job seriously as Scoop because he doesn’t give them anything to do, he starts to get more annoyed with them (especially Muck), and is determined to push himself to get it done by sending them to do something else while he and Benny keep on the job.
This comes to a boiling point with an argument between Scoop and the three machines that night and his plan to appease Bob fails horribly when he tries to make an ice rink for the skaters competition and fails because he didn’t accept the help of the other machines.
This is the point in the story where he self regulates and he regrets what he did, apologising to Dizzy, Roley, Muck and Benny respectively. When they see the mess, Scoop asks them with a deep sense of shame, “Can we fix it?” and Muck replies with “Yes, yes we can”.
A complex comparison
The difference between 16 Years and Snowed Under isn’t black and white when it comes to the meaning of self regulation.
Frankie in 16 Years had no interest in self regulating even after hooking up with a woman a second time, and it seemed like he would have started to do that when the theatre director would have bluntly told him that his mental health issues is not the group’s fault, he seemed to be going down a path of self regulation the more he slept with Mary and hung out with the group at the pub, and it seemed that he had changed. And while he had, his childhood trauma was what destroyed his relationship with Mary and his skinheads were what destroyed his legs at the end of the film.
Scoop in Snowed Under was determined to push himself and appease Bob as much as he could when working with Benny and while he had partially achieved that goal with finishing the bobsleigh run and the ski jump without any help, the ice rink was what finished him and he needed to self regulate and put things right. It would be safe to say that he went home, a changed man (machine) because of him fixing his mistakes and coming to terms with what he can do as a construction vehicle, being at ease with himself as a result and being a lot more grateful for the help from his friends as well.
Conclusion
By the time that I had watched 16 Years of Alcohol, I wouldn’t have been inclined to called myself an alcoholic because at that point in my life, I wouldn’t have had a big desire to go for the taste of alcohol and I was slowly starting to self regulate, slowly forgetting about my desire to be “high on life”. Me vomiting in the pub toilet on the day of the Munster game with the Bulls was my proper indication that I had to go through with the self regulation process and not turn back.
I had watched Snowed Under multiple times when I was three to five years old and my opinion of was that it was what it was, a simple story with the characters of Bob the Builder, extended to 52 minutes. Watching it again for the purpose of this article was fun because of how the story closed out the original series of Bob the Builder by making Scoop the main character of the story as he was the main character in the first episode of the series. Pretty much bringing his story full circle.
I guess me coming back to watch it after my wakeup call was the same definition of it coming full circle as well, but I don’t think it’s a full circle because I’m not going anywhere any time soon.
Film and Narrative Studies Paul Redmond
(c) 2024
Paul Redmond 