A Look at Two Different Portrayals of "Addiction" and "Codependency"

The term "addiction" is often used in modern day to describe a dependency on and a compulsion to consume alcohol in the form of alcoholic beverages. However, in actuality the term applies to any kind of compulsion to repeat or to continue some kind of act or behavior, often times something that is in fact harmful in nature. The person who becomes a victim of addiction is then powerless to stop him or herself from acting in such a way, regardless of whatever the consequences may be, and is therefore then labeled as an "addict."

When one talks about addiction, another term is often thrown around. That term is codependence, or codependency. Like addiction itself, codependency is a psychological condition which manifests itself as an unhealthy dependency on the behaviors and feelings of another, as well as a need to "feel needed." With addiction someone who is a codependent will likely feel the need to support the addiction of his or her partner, and in many cases become an addict as well to better understand and to better "comfort" the partner. It often goes hand-in-hand with a need to be a caretaker, the need to become almost a "benefactor" to the person who is addicted.

Another term that is often synonymous with addiction is the term "enabling," which is when another person, usually a partner or a friend or family member, allows the addict to continue in his or her destructive behaviors and in some cases even acts as a "supplier." An enabler is the fuel that keeps the addiction going, because he or she ends up supporting the vicious cycles that are often associated with addiction and keeps the addict from suffering the consequences and finding a way to quit. Someone who is a codependent will often also be an enabler, behaving counterproductively by supporting the addiction of his or her partner.

Twister and The Days of Wine and Roses, two seemingly different movies written and produced in two separate time periods, are both studies of addiction and its insidious and seductive ways. However, the messages within the two films are quite different, with one implying that one can overcome addiction only by staying away through self control and determination, and the other implying that one can only defeat addiction by fighting it, by getting to the root of the problem. Both movies depict addiction as a bringer of misfortune and destruction, as an evil that drives people away from their former selves, yet while The Days of Wine and Roses offers a more realistic depiction of addiction and the way to go about facing it, Twister on the other hand retains a more idealized and abstracted view on how to fight addiction, which quite frankly would not likely pan out in real life.

The Days of Wine and Roses, a melodrama on addiction made and set in the 1960s, stars Jack Lemmon as Joe Clay and Lee Remick as Kirsten Clay. Joe works in public relations, his job being, ironically enough, to create "positive and impactful" images to the public for his company's clients. Even in the beginning the character is introduced to viewers as being someone who is never without his liquor, as he has a drink in his hand in almost every other scene in the movie. The character of Kirsten is introduced when Joe meets her, someone who never drinks at all but has a peculiar "addiction" to chocolate, which foreshadows what is to come, implying that she has the propensity to become an addict.

After the two engage in conversation one thing leads to another, and of course, they are married before too long, with a newborn child to boot. Joe then ends up facing serious pressures due to his work for his business, and this leads him to his source of comfort and solace, that being liquor, of course. Kirsten also starts to feel the effects of depression and the fear of instability, and when her father rejects her after finding out she had secretly married Joe, that becomes the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. This starts her on her own addiction, as she joins Joe in his drinking sessions, both acting as codependents for the other, and soon she herself becomes an alcoholic. After being fired from his job for excessive alcohol consumption, Joe and Kirsten seek help from her father, who takes them in by trusting their desire to change. However, Joe ends up sneaking a bottle of liquor up to his room and convinces Kirsten to drink it as well, once again enabling her to follow in his hellish habit. Both become drunk for more, and Joe ends up destroying the father's greenhouse searching for the bottle he had hidden.

Afterwards Joe is restrained and put into containment; after he gets out he tries to turn his life around by attending AA meetings, but he is unable to convince Kirsten to do the same, who becomes a codependent, begging Joe to drink with her because she doesn't want to drink alone. Kirsten ends up clinging to random guys who offer her drinks, spending the night with a different person every night, basically whoever will drink with her. When Joe gives her an ultimatum - give up alcohol completely or he leaves her, Kirsten chooses her addiction over her family. She compares drinking to looking out into the ocean; when she looks at the water up close she sees the pollution and the dirtiness, but when she looks out towards the distance the water looks clean. Similarly, when she is sober she sees the world as a "dirty" place, but when she is drunk that view changes into something more pleasant. There is no conclusion to this at the end of the movie, because just like in real life, such tragedies in life do not often end "happily ever after."

Twister is a different kind of film hinting more subtly on addiction and stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as the storm chasers Dr. Jo Thornton-Harding and Bill Harding, respectively. A former weather researcher turned weather reporter, Bill is engaged to his soon-to-be wife, played by Jami Gertz, and searches for Jo in the fields of Oklahoma, seeking her signature on their final divorce papers. Jo, along with a team of storm chasers, is determined to launch DOROTHY, a device originally designed by Bill, which when released will launch hundreds of tiny sensors into the heart of the tornado, thereby allowing them to obtain crucial data from the twister once elusive to scientists. To Jo, it becomes far more personal, as her father was killed in a tornado attack when she was a child, prompting her obsession with tornados and her addiction to her unending quest to stop them.

Her belief is that if they are able to deploy DOROTHY successfully and in time, the information gathered from the tornado would undoubtedly save countless lives by significantly increasing warning times. Jo is in fact codependent, because as Bill joins her team in an effort to keep his rival from getting to the tornado first, she becomes much more confident and much less hesitant. In fact, because of their rash decisions together, they are almost killed by the tornados they chase on more than one occasion. After seeing that she is willing to give up her own life to get the sensors inside the twister, Bill realizes she is obsessed and tells her to stop living in the past and to focus on what she has in the present.

After realizing the chemistry that still exists between the two, Bill's fiancé leaves him, because being someone who has never had anything to do with tornados, she cannot understand the heart of a "storm chaser," much like a normal person looking in cannot understand the mindset of an addict. When a powerful tornado rips through the town of Wakita and nearly kills Jo's aunt, she becomes more determined than ever to succeed. Her aunt acts as an enabler, blatantly encouraging her to go "stop" the tornado once and for all, even though Bill urges her otherwise.

Jo is determined to succeed in deploying the sensors no matter what, and Bill decides that he will help her no matter what; in this sense he has become the codependent. They both realize they will need to get dangerously close to the twister in order to release the sensors successfully, and in the final climactic scene of the movie, Jo and Bill put their lives on the line to deploy DOROTHY, with her holding on as the twister tries to pull her in, staring into the eye of the tornado, which quite obviously represents her staring addiction in the eye and overcoming it. The sensors are deployed as she and Bill both survive the twister, which means that she has indeed overcome her addiction not by running from it, but by confronting it.

Although both films showed the consequences that result from addiction, each film used a unique approach in doing so. In The Days of Wine and Roses the viewer was shown how a person can be driven to an addiction to alcohol when that person starts out completely abstinent from drinking. The film shows how through outside influences and forces beyond that person's control, she can easily be swayed into temptation and eventual and inevitable addiction. Twister starts out by showing someone who is obsessed with her work, her goal in life even, someone who is already an addict, eventually overcome her addiction by fighting it, by confronting it head-on.

Both films portray enabling as the behaviors of the people around the addicts that allow them to avoid or to overlook the negative consequences of their actions as a result of addiction, and the codependent as being someone who is overly involved in the person's addiction and is preoccupied with helping her to feed that addiction. In The Days of Wine and Roses the character of Joe is actually the main enabler as it is the booze that he sneaks up to Kirsten that gives her another road to walk back into her addiction. He stops being her codependent when he refuses to let her move back in with the booze still in her hand. The one time he is finally helping her to overcome this addiction is when he kicks her out of the apartment until she admits that she is an addict and needs help. Whereas in Twister the character of Bill acts as Jo's codependent, the person who acts almost literally as her support when she and he together chase after the tornados, enabling her to continue despite nearly dying. The difference lies in the fact that she is addicted to it on a psychological level, and after Bill finally realizes that it is not only her life's work, but her obsession in life, he tries to convince her to stop and to let go. Of course, the film ends the story with closure, giving the story of addiction a happy ending, one that is achieved when Jo charges straight into the tornado head on, not when she finally learns to resist and stays away. For that reason The Days of Wine and Roses offers a perhaps harsher yet undeniably more realistic, more believable, and less Hollywood-tainted ending to the tale of addiction.