Debunking the American Hero: The Topos of Intoxication in One A.M. (Chaplin 1916), Wings (Wellman 1927), Major Dundee (Peckinpah 1965)

This paper aims to discuss the screening of trouble with our senses as spectators which is not only visual but also tactile and aural, in the topos of drunkenness. Silent cinema has interesting films on the subject, among which Chaplin’s One A.M. (1916). Drunkenness is highly spectacular; space and time are altered, and things are unrecognizable. Its chaotic world is predominantly burlesque, but it also provides cinematography for a mise-en-scène of melodrama, as in Wellman’s Wings (1927). Appearing in many films, as Dick Tomasovic shows, drunkenness relies on strongly contrasted moods, between extreme happiness and violent despair. In Samuel Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, (1956) drunkenness goes one step further as it expresses the disintegration of one’s social and psychological identity. From a reflexive point of view, such blurring of our apprehension of the real is a vehicle for an illusory escape from everyday frustrations, thus encouraging criticism of cinema as intoxication in itself.