ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role that 12-step recovery programs have played in the widespread proliferation of the metaphor of waste in twentieth and twenty-first-century American culture. The generic moniker, drunks, is reductive, cancelling out the individual and lumping all alcoholics into a single category that is defined exclusively by a shared affliction. By locating the addiction within the individual, the alcoholics definitive and exclusive trait, the term drunks further suggests that alcoholism is an identity an innate and therefore inescapable one, at that rather than a compulsive behavioral pattern. The stagnancy of the characters is mirrored in the narrative trajectory, a characteristic that both Blackout and Drunks share. Cinematography further implies much about the films laudatory attitude toward AA and 12-step recovery programs; simultaneously, cinematography reveals some of the ideological fault lines shared by 12-step programs and the metaphor of waste. The scenes that take place in the church basement where the AA meeting is set feel cramped, almost claustrophobic.
