Ode to Joy: Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)
The Danish film explores the pleasures and perils of drinking—and asks us to interrogate our own relationship with alcohol.
CW: discussion of addiction and suicide. This one’s also more spoilery than my usual newsletter.
At some point in my mid-30s, I looked around and found that everyone I knew seemed to be reconsidering their relationship with alcohol. Some were only cutting back, asking the server for sparkling water or iced tea when normally they’d have ordered a second beer or glass of wine. Drinking only on the weekends, or on special occasions, or only when they went out. There were dry Januarys, Whole 30s—followed, generally, by some kind of return to old habits. Others were going completely sober, posting selfies on social media where they shared how long it had been since they’d last had a drink: days, weeks, months. They went to meetings, used the language of addiction. Said that it was hard, but good.
I was cutting back too—I was a dad now, there were two little kids at home, sleep had become a precious commodity, and drinking just didn’t do it for me the way it once had. I used to be able to have a few beers and hop out of bed the next morning no problem, but suddenly if I had even one drink at the wrong time of the evening I’d wake up the next day feeling like my head was stuffed full of cotton balls. With a baby crying in the next room most mornings, a toddler demanding toast, and daycare dropoffs to do before I got to work, feeling like shit on a regular basis was a luxury I could simply no longer afford.
Even so—even though I was one of the re-evaluators, the cutting-backers—I felt unmistakably unnerved by each new friend waving away that second beer, ordering an Arnie Palmer instead of a cocktail, confessing that they weren’t drinking so much these days. I was doing it myself, yet these revelations still felt like a betrayal of some sort of unspoken previous arrangement, an agreement we’d all made with each other without knowing we’d made it. In our 20s our social lives had revolved around after-work happy hours, wine-soaked dinners out, beers on the patio, catch-ups over cocktails and small plates. But now things were changing, we were altering the terms, and in some cases it might have seemed that we were even becoming different people.
We were getting older, is what was happening, and maybe wiser too. Reevaluating our relationship with alcohol was necessary, and good, and healthy. But there was discomfort and even grief that came with these changes too, because quitting or even just cutting back seemed to carry with it an admission that things could never again be as they were, that our lives were going to become dull, lacking the intensity they’d sometimes possessed when we didn’t have as many responsibilities and could cut loose on a Tuesday night if we felt like it. We had jobs, and kids, and mortgages now. Our lives were becoming stable, predictable, and even though that was probably for the best it was hard at times not to worry that all this stability and predictability would come at the expense of spontaneity, of surprise. Of sudden and unexpected visitations of joy.
Another Round, the Danish film by director Thomas Vinterberg, considers drinking along similar binaries: age vs. youth, predictability vs. spontaneity, boredom vs. joy. The film opens with a quote from Kierkegaard:
What is youth?
A dream.
What is love?
The content of the dream.
From there the film makes a hard cut to a group of teenagers running a relay race around a lake while pounding bottles of beer, vomiting in the bushes, collapsing with laughter and exhaustion at the finish line. It’s one of those alcohol-fueled rites of passage that looks pretty miserable, actually—except that Vinterberg films the ritual as a sort of pastoral idyll, overlaid with a honeyed scrim of sunshine. Later, the teens pile drunk onto a passenger train, where they hug strangers, handcuff a dour transit cop to a handlebar, and dance. This is youth: stupidity and recklessness and dangerous behavior, yes, but also fun and dynamism and happiness and friendship. Love. The content of the dream.
Another hard cut brings us to the adults, the teachers, gathered in a staff meeting to lament the drunken behavior of their students. The grownups are responsible and stable and sober in every sense of the word, but in terms of the Kierkegaard quote, they’ve strayed so far from the dream of youth that they can’t even remember it anymore—they’ve forgotten life, they’ve forgotten love, they’ve forgotten joy. And one man in particular, Martin (Mads Mikkelson), has forgotten it more than most. He’s sleepwalking through his life, and everyone knows it. His students don’t think he’s a good teacher; he rarely sees his wife, who works most nights; his kids barely seem aware that he exists.
Martin begins finding his way back to himself at a birthday dinner for one of his friends. Champagne and vodka flows freely at the table, but initially Martin balks—he’s driving. But then the conversation turns to the group’s desire for more liveliness and spirit in their day-to-day lives, and then to Martin’s problems at school. Suddenly Martin’s asking for a glass of wine and downing it all in one long pull, then getting a refill and bolting that too.
What follows is an astonishing and memorable scene. Mikkelson plays the moment as though Martin is surprising himself with something long forgotten, asserting himself and succumbing at the same time. Tears leap to his eyes as he confesses to his friends that he’s been struggling with a lack of spark in his life. It’s as though the alcohol has loosened something inside him that’s been blocked, giving him access to emotions long-buried. The first feeling to come is one of sadness, perhaps even of grief at the small, reduced thing his life has become.
Vinterberg, meanwhile, deftly draws our attention to the sensory details surrounding the rituals of drinking: the pop of a cork, the burble of red wine as it hits the bottom of the glass, the first sip. Details drift in and out of focus as the alcohol hits Martin’s bloodstream. What Martin seems to experience is not a dulling, however; more of a sharpening, the falling away of some details so that others can come into focus. At one point he glances across the restaurant, his friends and their conversation gone momentarily blurry, and perceives with stunning crispness the beautiful singing of a vocal quartet on the other side of the dining room. His attention coming back to the table, he begins to joke with his friends, a real smile coming to his face for the first time in the film’s runtime. Sadness and beauty and friendship and love, all flooding over him at once.
It turns out to be an epic night for Martin and his friends, a night of rediscovered youth and joyful abandon, all accessed through the pop of a couple corks and a few drinks—probably a few too many. But there’s nothing bad about it, nothing bad at all, and the scene reminds me of my own epic, youthful nights, many of which were, yes, accompanied by alcohol: nights of staying up late and winding deep into conversations with people who would become my dearest friends, nights of feeling charming and funny and accepted, nights of letting myself go enough to become a what felt like a better version of myself—a version of me who could laugh, and be free.
Or even the very first night I remember having too much to drink. I was in college, on a study-abroad program, we went to a pub, I had a few pints, and at some point I realized that I was speaking to a rapt table without an ounce of self-consciousness. We stumbled home safely that night and I let myself fall into bed, arms splayed out, staring at the ceiling. I closed my eyes. The room spun around me, but I wasn’t scared. I felt as though I was being cradled safe at the heart of the universe.
If all it takes to access that kind of feeling is a few drinks, who wouldn’t want to do it all the time?
And that’s precisely where the trouble begins.
Martin decides that one night isn’t enough—he wants to feel this way more often. And so he and his friends decide to conduct an experiment, to test the hypothesis of a philosopher Martin’s friend mentioned at that birthday dinner: that the blood alcohol content of humanity is perpetually .05% too low. That humans would be happier, healthier, more creative and joyful, if they were a little buzzed all the time.
For a while, things are okay. Martin is looser in class, more effective, more engaging with students. At home, he begins to reconnect with his wife, his kids. His friends do well too—Peter, the music teacher, gets his choir to sing with real feeling; Tommy, the soccer coach, coaxes a shy kid to confidence.
But it isn’t long before the negatives begin compounding. The men keep pushing the experiment further, daring themselves and each other to function with higher and higher blood alcohol levels. Bottles are discovered at school; Martin runs into a wall in the teacher’s lounge and gets a bloody nose; wives and friends and kids start to notice they’re drinking a lot. Each step of the way, the four men have their rules, their systems, their plans, which they tap out on a laptop and use to prove to themselves that there’s no problem here. They’re not alcoholics, they insist—they’re scientists, doing an experiment. But “we’re not alcoholics” is something alcoholics say, and by the time the group of friends is wetting the bed and waking up on strangers’ porches, all their rules just seem like advanced forms of bargaining, ways of distancing themselves from the extent to which they’ve got a real problem.
And this is the tricky thing about drinking—and not just drinking, but about any method humans use to access joy, to loosen up, to feel okay for a second: eventually, these methods stop working. You have a good night, a fleeting experience of transcendence or acceptance or just plain happiness, and the normal human thing is to want to make that happen again, to bring back that feeling. Except the next time you do it, it doesn’t work, or it works a little but still doesn’t feel quite the same, so you sort of fake it, you pretend to be having a good time like you did that one time, and maybe the people you’re with are pretending too—chasing that feeling, the feeling you were able to access long ago. You know you’re faking it, every one of you, except nobody wants to be the first to say it, because if you do then the whole production will suddenly feel ghoulish and sad, and you’ll have to give it up, and that—the giving up—is even more terrifying than the fact that you can’t get yourself back to joy, because by now the sad farce is all you know, and if you leave it behind who knows what you’ll be left with?
When I first began to toy with the idea of cutting back my own alcohol consumption, I thought a lot about what it was I liked about drinking in the first place. I thought about the fun nights with friends, the feeling of community, the sense of abundance, the confidence, the occasional conviction I had that I was exactly who I wanted to be, exactly where I needed to be. Did that come from the alcohol? Or did beer, or wine, or liquor just happen to be there when joy made its unexpected visitation upon me? Was it the taste I liked, or the feeling it gave me? Could I find that feeling without it?
Ultimately, keeping alcohol in my life was a matter of finding that joy—and ease, and a release from anxiety, and a sense of being at home in my own skin—could come from other sources. That I could find it within. If I could get to that place, then I could keep having a drink from time to time and things would be all right. But if alcohol became my only path to feeling okay, then it would have to go.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King writes with characteristic directness about his past struggle with addiction. An anecdote that’s always stuck with me is King’s description of being in a restaurant, seeing another diner with a half-finished glass of wine, and wanting to shake them by the lapels and ask them why they don’t finish it. That, and his answer to the question of how much he drank: “All of it.”
The fundamentally unfair thing about addiction is that it touches some people while inexplicably passing over others. Some people can stop, put the glass on the table and say “no more”; others have to drink all of it. This is the thing that makes Another Round feel slightly transgressive, that made me a little afraid to write about it at all: that, simply put, alcohol is something that kills some people, spares others, and there is very little overlap between those two experiences. A thing that can simply be a part of my life—alongside all the other things on my table, alongside my job, my kids, my wife, my writing, my spirituality and sense of meaning in the world—is something that could consume and destroy the person walking next to me. It feels crass to rhapsodize about the joys of drinking when there are some in the world for whom such an ode can be harmful; for whom “this far, and no farther” is simply not viable.
Another Round is attuned to the pleasure of drinking—to the pain, too. Because there is one of the friends who cannot come back when the men decide to quit their experiment “due to overwhelming negative social consequences.” Tommy, the soccer coach, keeps on drinking heavily even after the others have stopped, walks into a school staff meeting drunk, and ultimately loses his job. “You don’t want this,” Tommy says when Martin visits to clean up his house, recycle all the empties. You don’t want this—except Martin did, he wanted it, which was exactly why he suggested the experiment in the first place. Only it didn’t turn out to be the alcohol Martin wanted. It was the joy. Life in all its fullness. That was what Martin was after. But then joy curdled, turned to its opposite.
Tommy dies, ultimately, of his disease. Takes his boat out, drowns. It’s not clear whether it’s an accident or suicide, but in either case it’s clear that it was the addiction that killed him. There’s a funeral, and afterward the remaining friends meet up to remember their lost friend.
To toast him, with—what else?—a drink.
And how unjust it is, that the very thing that can be an avenue to joy and solace and connection for one, should be isolation and destruction for another.
Music is used at key moments in Another Round, signaling the presence of some inarticulable beauty lying just beyond the characters’ reach. There’s also Martin’s dancing, a past pursuit he trained in and something the other characters keep trying to coax him back into. To hear the music of life and respond to it—this is what any person wants. But Martin resists.
Until the final scene, when, celebrating graduation with his students, Martin gives himself over to their drunken revelry, and allows his body to move with the song.
And it’s a bizarrely compelling thing, Mads Mikkelson’s dancing. It seems somehow both trained and instinctual, polished and raw at once. A melange of styles, ballet and interpretive dance and maybe jazz and a few others I can’t quite put my finger on. He dances both as someone who is in control, and someone who is succumbing to something beyond him. It’s a dance of joy and of grief. A dance he can only engage in, now, because he’s reached some sort of hard-won understanding, found his way back to joy but lost a friend in the process. And then he takes a flying leap into the bay—into the same murky waters that killed Tommy.
Joy and its opposite are so infinitesimally close, a mere tick of the dial apart, and our efforts to strain toward one so often lead to the other. Human beings are tragic animals, evolved enough to want something more than mere survival, something ineffable and transcendent—but not so evolved that we now how to get to it consistently, or to be content with what measure of it we receive in the natural course of our lives.
Instead we grasp, and we grasp, and we grasp, and the thing that works for us one day stops working the next, and maybe it even starts to hurt us. But not reaching at all, not straining for joy—that’s a different kind of death. A living death, a walking death. So we keep trying—trying art, trying spirituality, trying new experiences—looking for the one thing that reliably connects us to life’s music, the thing that makes us dance but doesn’t destroy us in the process.
Knowing, always, that the method is not the same as the unnameable thing we strive for. Living wild and free and sober, all at once.
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This is excellent and gets my experience of this movie perfectly