Author: Tim Tomlinson
In Fatih Akin’s Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (2004), blackout drunk Cahit Tomruk drives at high speed straight into a brick wall. A suspected suicide (his vehicle left no skid marks), he recovers in the psych ward of a Hamburg clinic where he meets Sibel Güner, a repeated suicide. Both are Turkish born Germans. Cahit, in his early forties, grieves over the death of his German wife. Sibel, in her early twenties, rages over the oppressive nature of her family. Her father maintains Muslim orthodoxies; her brother polices her experimentation with western pleasures. (Her disfigured nose, she explains to Cahit, is due to one of her brother’s beatings). Both characters show signs of serious depression. In something of a rom-com cute-meet, Sibel convinces Cahit to ask for her hand in marriage. She’ll escape her strict family, and he’ll get a cleaner flat with no strings, no expectations. Reluctantly, he agrees.
There are obstacles to happiness in any marriage. This one has several. Cahit heavily abuses substances, most particularly alcohol, to which, it’s safe to say, he has formed a dependence. And on the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief model, he vacillates between anger and depression—terms that understate his behavioral modes, which might more accurately be called rage and suicidality. Meanwhile, his bride commits to her long dreamed of program of promiscuous sex in order to make up for all the sex she’s missed under the watchful eyes of her father and brother. Every nightclub, and every (western) stranger, presents a new opportunity. Soon, though, in the way of romantic comedies, a larger complication develops. The newlyweds discover that they share something deep: the Turkish heritage that they’ve both worked so hard to either escape or expunge. And this awareness leads to the largest complication of all: love.
I use Head-On in the second half of my seminar called The Addict: Representations and Considerations, a hybrid course that mixes fiction, poetry, memoir, film, and song with scholarship from the more academic fields of addiction studies.
Questions the course raises include: When did an awareness of addiction develop, and how was it inflected? How has addiction been represented (in song, film, fiction, advertising, recovery movements, television programs, etc.)? What is the relationship between depression and addiction? Are there socioeconomic preconditions, psychological paradigms, and/or cultural predilections that engender addiction? Where is the line between benign pattern and unhealthy habit? Between occasional experience and compulsive need? Between pleasure and pathology? And what would drive a person, anyway, to repeat something s/he knows is both destructive and self-destructive?
The course builds a baseline understanding of addiction’s hallmarks (tolerance, withdrawal, recovery, relapse). It looks at portrayals of substance and/or behavioral addictions, and it compares those with studies in psychology, psychopharmacology, neuroscience, sociology, and the law. Early on we consider the relationship between addiction and depression. It’s sad to note that for many students, the chapter called “Addiction,” from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, is revelatory; it holds up a mirror. “Depression and substance abuse form a cycle,” the chapter begins. The subject is depressed, s/he self-medicates. The medication provides momentary solace, followed by deeper depression, which necessitates more medication, which leads to greater tolerance, which leads to larger and more frequent dosages and/or riskier behaviors, which result in deeper plunges into depression, and so on, until the problems that led to the substance abuse are replaced by the new problem of dependence.
It should come as no surprise that the data on substance abuse and depression are alarming. One in three of those who’ve experienced major depressive disorders engage in substance abuse[1]. Thirty percent of college students report struggles with anxiety[2]. In the US, half of all full-time college students binge drink, while one in four (22.9%) meet the medical criteria for substance abuse[3]. In light of the current opioid crisis in the US, these figures—coming from a few years back—strike me as almost quaint.
By the time the course reaches Head-On, students are well beyond seeing the behaviors of, say, The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009) as kooky (or obnoxious) “fun.” Otherwise, Cahit might appear to be a rebellious free-thinking punk rocker, instead of a suicidal alcoholic, and Sibel might appear to be a rebellious free-loving sexually vital young woman, instead of a clinically depressed self-destructive compulsive. To these concerns, Head-On introduces a new consideration: dislocation.
In his pioneer study, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study of Poverty of the Spirit, Dr. Bruce K. Alexander defines dislocation as a rupture of the complex linkages that normally connect people with their societies on a local, national, and international level. Dislocation is the antithesis of psychosocial integration, which Alexander defines as the complex and supportive interrelationship of human beings with the basic components of their society on a local, national, and international level. Any connection Cahit and Sibel might have had with their place of origin has been effectively supplanted by life in a new nation, a new culture. Cahit has quite nearly (and somewhat deliberately) lost his Turkish. And Sibel desires and submits to the otherness of white European Germans. Dislocation, the film suggests, contributes largely to their respective pathologies.
For many students, dislocation is a significant feature of the first year. Imagine its effect on the first-year NYU student arriving from small-town Oklahoma. Imagine its effect on the small town Oklahoma student who chooses a global site for her first year. Imagine its effect on the small town Chinese student arriving for the first time in New York.
Following a story turning point in Hamburg, the film’s action moves to Istanbul where Cahit and Sibel come to terms with their original culture, and with, arguably, their original character/s, stripped, as they are, of their desperation to assimilate, and free from the substances and compulsions that drove much of their German behaviors.
Like the course (one hopes), the film raises as many questions as it answers. Some of those include: how does the issue of addiction complicate the experience of migrant populations? Is less pleasure better than more? Is excessive pleasure actually pleasure? How do we define pleasure? I’m reminded of the title of a David Foster Wallace (himself a clinically depressed addict) essay: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” This is a title our students might consider every time Thursday night (also known as “little Friday”) rolls around.
Footnotes
1| Note: From “New Data Show Millions of Americans with Alcohol and Drug Addiction Could Benefit from Health Care Reform”. (2010). DrugFree.org <https://drugfree.org/learn/drug-and-alcohol-news/new-data-show-millions-of-americans-with-alcohol-and-drug-addiction-could-benefit-from-health-care-reform/>.
2| Note: From “College Students and Drug Abuse”. (2019). AddictionCenter.com <https://www.addictioncenter.com/college/>.
3| Note: From CenterOnAddiction.org. <https://www.centeronaddiction.org/>.
Works Cited
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Akin, F. (Director). (2004). Head-On. Germany: Timebandits Films.
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Alexander, B. K. (2008). The Globalization of Addiction. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Granfield, R. & Reinarman, C. (Eds.). (2015). Expanding Addiction: Critical Essays. New York: Routledge.
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Rich, A. (1991). “(Dedications).” An Atlas of the Difficult World. New York: Norton.
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Solomon, A. (2001). The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, New York: Simon and Schuster.