Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

guy a lot of times, but it’s no good – that other Don always wants us to have a drink”. This
harrowing psychological drama is related in a dramatic noir style, with the city of New
York bearing down on him during his long, isolated weekend. Zooming from a shot of the
Manhattan skyline to an apartment, the scenes below (fig. 52) show the imprisonment of
space and accentuate Don’s drama with a whiskey bottle hanging outside his window.
Figure 52. The Lost Weekend
Although alcoholism has mostly been avoided in film culture (with few exceptions
like Blake Edwards’s Days of Wine and Roses (1962) or Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas
(1995)), the topic was a central strand of American modernist writing, from Hemingway to
Faulkner to Fitzgerald. Billy Wilder managed to adapt Charles Jackson’s novel into a
successful screenplay depicting the sufferings and deliriums of Ray Milland’s alcoholic
desperately searching for a pawnshop to get money to buy a drink. Again the noir element
is the downward spiral of a man whose alcoholism is just a manifestation of much deeper
psychological problems, of repressed homosexuality or fear of that possibility (his dark
silhouette reflecting his shadows on the walls heighten this idea). As the weekend
progresses, we see a character that tries to erase his problems by drink, shutting out any
capacity to relate to others or to the outside world.
The narrative organisation of The Lost Weekend is suggestive of personal conflicts
and Birnam is led to commit crimes and even spends time in a mental ward. His
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