What HBO’s The Flight Attendant Gets Right (and Wrong) About Alcohol Use Disorder
Drinkers create drama, which is why TV is full of them.
Drinkers create drama, which is why they are so prevalent on TV, but not all characters with an Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) are created equal. Cassie the titular problem drinker in The Flight Attendant is 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.
As a five-year sober ex-problem drinker myself, I am happy to see there are many things The Flight Attendant gets right about alcohol-use disorder. But there are a couple of unhelpful missteps too. Read my list, and let me know if you agree.
What the Flight Attendant gets right about AUD
1. Good at apologizing but unable to take responsibility
People who love to day drink veer away from responsibility. Seeing it as a black mark on their freedom they might run in the opposite direction, fast. Alternatively, they will do things so shoddily, you stop asking them.
This allergy to duty can make them pretty good company when you want to cut loose on a Saturday night. But it makes them terrible at holding their hands up when they upset you or hurt your feelings or ruin something you care deeply about.
They will possibly be able to see the mistake they made but they will not be able to connect the dots regarding how they are responsible for it. They will swear it was bad timing. That the train was canceled. That they thought your friend was you.
Something beyond their control made the bad thing happen. People with a serious drinking problem are unable to see that they are the common denominator in numerous sequences of unfortunate incidents.
2. Lots of people like the drinker’s drinking personality
At the start of the show Cassie is popular, which is really a form of notoriety.
This is how she gets away with it. People find her recklessness dazzling. They are delighted to see a laughing, playful adult living fully in the present and 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, they are indiscriminate in whether the things they make happen are good or bad. The Flight Attendant definitely does not shy away from this.
3. Serious drinkers live in a different world to non-drinkers
The Flight Attendant contrasts Cassie’s hectic reality with her more sober and responsible brother Davey’s. It isn’t only that Davey has a husband and kids while Cassie is single; he also has faced up to the reality of his past while she is still trying to outrun it. Davey has identified some of his issues — potentially a diagnosis of OCD — and it is implied is working on them, while Cassie remains clueless about whether she even has any problems.
Cassie and Davey’s realities don’t match up to the extent that, at the start of the show, they struggle to relate with each other at all. She thinks he is a neurotic over-worrier, while he cautiously keeps her at a distance because he recognizes that she is seriously damaged by their upbringing.
4. Being drunk is actually an 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 it time and again throughout the series and on each occasion, she expects forgiveness. Demands it, really. I used to do this too, somehow not realizing that since I drank all of the alcohol I was to blame for the ensuing drunkenness.
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. Closest relationships contain a total lack of consistent 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.
Cassie is dumbfounded. Her inconsistent fair-weather friendship has been perfectly adequate before. Why is there a problem now?
Healthy relationships in which you show up for each other demand a lot of just quietly being there. Drinkers often haven’t learned this, and as a result find this sort of gentle and longstanding commitment boring, offputting or downright 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. Your pain goes unnoticed (and that is OK with you)
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 nonsensical limbo world where her dead 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, and nobody drinking with her seems to notice.
7. You haven’t dealt with your childhood trauma and so you can’t entirely grow up
Cassie had a heavy drinking dad who bullied and belittled her older brother, Davey. Her dad let her drink beer and treated her like his drinking buddy though she was not even a teenager. Cass was encouraged to go along with her dad’s bullying, and often this made it 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 used alcohol to try and swerve the painful stuff in her life. The Flight Attendant successfully dramatizes how this finally catches up with her.
Still there’s one important thing it gets wrong…
And TV is likely to always get this wrong, due to it’s need for high drama. Heavy drinking damages relationships even when the father isn’t seriously mean. Even when he doesn’t get his ten-year-old kid drunk. Even when he doesn’t drink throughout the day.
And heavy drinking damages a life even if you never wake up beside a dead body in a fancy hotel on a date with a rich white dude in Bangkok.
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?
The essential recipe for drama means that the lower key, unglamorous stories of failure caused by alcohol rarely if ever get told. These are the stories of the dad who simply doesn’t pay enough attention to his kids. The mums that prefer to spend time with their friends at the pub than check their teen’s maths homework.
This month I will have been sober for five years, and I still find myself fascinated by society’s tolerance for problem drinking. I was a quiet sort of problem drinker. Nobody noticed my issue. Barely even me! But my relationships were in a terrible state by the time I quit. And it was easy to see the part alcohol had played in that once I was sober. Unfortunately, many people never make the connection. Unlike Cassie, their lives don’t spiral to the depths of prison, and so they never awaken from the dream of dysfunction. This is the sad and less easily told story of alcohol use disorder.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible to show this less glittering sort of alcohol-imbued descent to the audiences of today. Perhaps I’m the only one who would like to see it.
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.
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