What HBO’s The Flight Attendant Gets Right (and Wrong) About Alcohol Use Disorder
Drinkers create drama, but not all characters with an Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) are created equal. Cassie the titular problem drinker in The Flight Attendant is in a class of her own. Glamorous, beautiful and stylish, she is also mean, inconsiderate and chronically self-involved. Like far too many people on earth, and perhaps in your immediate vicinity, alcohol is ruining her life, and she has absolutely no idea.
There are many things The Flight Attendant gets right about alcohol-use disorder, but there are a couple of unhelpful missteps too. Read on to see if you agree.
What the Flight Attendant gets right
1. Good at apologizing, unable to take responsibility
Cassie sees responsibility as a black mark on her freedom and runs in the opposite direction, fast, whenever possible. This allergy to duty makes her fascinating company when you want to cut loose on a Saturday night, but she isn’t going to be the one nursing you through a crisis.
Drinkers are often great at apologizing but terrible truly taking responsibility, i.e. recognizing when they’ve messed up and committing to change.
They will often be able to see the mistake they made but will not be able to connect the dots regarding how they are responsible for it. They will swear it was bad timing. An unfortunate coincidence. Not. Their. Fault.
People with a serious drinking problem are unable to see that they are the common denominator in numerous sequences of unfortunate incidents. The Flight Attendant pushes this truth to the limit and is well worth watching as a result.
2. Popular
Everyone knows who Cassie is. Her popularity is really a form of notoriety.
This is how she gets away with awful behaviour. People find her recklessness dazzling. They are delighted to see a laughing, playful adult seemingly living fully in the present and constantly looking for adventure.
Drinkers at optimum drunkenness can be fun and charismatic and carefree. Bartenders, in particular, are happy to see them because it means a more interesting shift. Drinkers make things happen. And so people are drawn to them.
Unfortunately, drinkers are not in control of whether the things they make happen are good or bad. The Flight Attendant definitely does not shy away from this.
3. Live in a different world to non-drinkers
The Flight Attendant contrasts Cassie’s hectic single existence with her sober and responsible brother Davey’s family life. It isn’t only that Davey has a husband and kids while Cassie is single and child-free; he also has faced up to the reality of their past while she is still trying to outrun it.
Davey has identified some of his issues — trauma and potentially a diagnosis of OCD — and is working on them, while Cassie remains oblivious to the fact that she even has any problems.
Cassie and Davey’s memories of the past are so different that they struggle to relate to each other at all. She thinks he is a neurotic over-worrier, while he keeps her at a distance because he knows she isn’t an entirely safe person for his family. He recognizes that she, like he, has been seriously damaged by their upbringing, whereas she thinks Davey is the only one in the family with issues. Why can’t he get over it?
4. Believe being drunk is a valid excuse for bad behavior
How many times have you said, “I was drunk” meaning “don’t blame me!”? People with an AUD do this all the time. They have slight insanity when it comes to booze and it seems to damage their understanding of cause and effect.
Cassie says this throughout the series and always expects forgiveness as a result. Demands it, actually, and is furious when it doesn’t come. I used to do this too, thinking that because I didn’t mean to drink all of the alcohol I was not to blame for the ensuing drunkenness/mishap.
To a person with an AUD this infuriating behavior makes perfect sense because they have little to no control over how much they swallow once they take the plug out of the jug.
5. Friendships lack consistent presence, support and commitment
“I guess this relationship only works because we don’t share the bad parts,” Cassie’s best friend Annie tells her mid-season when the shit is really starting to hit the fan for Cassie.
Cassie is dumbfounded. Her inconsistent fair-weather friendship has been perfectly adequate before. What’s the problem now?
Healthy relationships demand a lot of just quietly being there. Checking in. Following up. Remembering details. Drinkers often haven’t learned this, due to chaotic upbringings. As a result they are often not capable of this level of consistency and might even find this sort of gentle and longstanding commitment boring, offputting or unsettling.
Family and friends loyal to the drinker accept a certain amount of flakiness. Sure, it’s sad and disappointing, but hey, that’s [insert drinker’s name here]!
6. The drinker’s pain goes unnoticed (and that is OK with them)
The Flight Attendant shows the effects of trauma in a creative and entertaining, yet accurate way. Cassie frequently flashes out of her body into a limbo world where her murdered lover talks her through her own neurosis and paranoia.
Just before we cut to these scenes we see Cass’s eyes glaze over and her mouth fall slack. She’s jolted into her hellish inner world, the trauma that she drinks to escape takes hold of her without her permission. Nobody drinking with her seems to notice. This is part of the plan of drinking to obliteration, it turns out.
7. Undealt with childhood trauma blocks maturity
It may come as no surprise to learn that Cassie had a heavy drinking dad who bullied and belittled her older brother, Davey. Her dad let her drink beer and treated her like a drinking buddy though she was not even a teenager. Cass was encouraged to go along with her dad’s bullying, and often this made Davey’s life even worse.
It isn’t until her life begins to cave in on her that Cassie is able to recognize any of this. Historically, she has blamed her brother’s difficulties and ‘overseriousness’ on his mental health problems, refusing to accept that his issues stem from growing up the way they did.
Like most heavy drinkers, Cassie uses alcohol to try and swerve the painful stuff in her life. This works kinda, but at the cost of her maturity, and thus her ability to build a fulfilling life that is manageable.
The thing it gets wrong…?
1. Drinking needs to be dramatic to damage relationships
TV demands drama. Writers constantly ask how we can raise the stakes. What will the character lose if they don’t get what they want?
This essential recipe for drama means that the lower key, unglamorous stories of damage caused by alcohol rarely gets told. These are the stories of the dad who doesn’t pay enough attention to his kids. The mums who put drinking wine before checking their teen’s maths homework. TV needs more drama than this and so it accidentally spreads the message that it’s okay to be pretty alcoholic so long as you seem to be functioning.
Cass is fine until she wakes up beside a dead body in a fancy hotel on a date with a rich white dude in Bangkok. But actually, her life was a mess even then. Just nobody noticed. I say this a lot because it’s important. Heavy drinking damages relationships even when the father isn’t seriously mean like Cass’s dad. Even when he doesn’t get his ten-year-old kid drunk. Even when he doesn’t drink throughout the day.
My drinking story is so free of drama, but it has so much in common with Cass’s story too. And I truly believe that’s why it’s important. That commonplace-ness is what makes me keep wanting to tell it.
Is it possible to show the less glittering sort of alcohol-use disorder that I experienced? Can you think of TV or book examples that manage it? Would you want to see/read that? Or am I the only one who wants to see this?
If you need help to cope, you’re not alone.
If you’re ready to try something different, subscribe to Beautiful Hangover and discover what I did to get freedom from alcohol. Do whatever it takes to stay sober for 30 days: go to your doctor, try Smart or AA or Hip Sobriety or Soberistas. Listen to Recovery Elevator and SHAIR podcasts. Read This Naked Mind. Try Moderation Management.
There is a whole community of people waiting to help you. Reach out. Something better is waiting.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might like these:
How to Tell if You are a High-Functioning Alcoholic
Six things to look out for if you’re worried about your drinking.medium.com
Five Things You Need to Know Before You Get Sober
1. Life might get worse before it gets better. And then it might get worse again.medium.com
Chelsey Flood is the author of Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a lecturer in creative writing at Falmouth University. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love, and is working on a non-fiction book about getting sober, and a new YA novel.