This 2016 film was produced with the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the United States’ National Institutes of Health and the largest source of funding for alcoholism research in the world. So I’d expect the film to represent current thinking about alcohol abuse and alcoholism rendered with high production values and dramatic flair.

Check and check. The film shows us five Americans representing four different demographics and four different risky drinking patterns. Each segment features a story arc with a cast of characters, not just to provide drama, but to emphasize the social networks that affect, and are affected by, risky drinking. The hand-held camera brings you into each social world, where the inhabitants talk to you as though you’re part of that world. It’s skillfully done and avoids the lurid voyeurism of shows such as “Intervention.”

The current thinking is best represented by a graphic to which the film returns again and again, the “Spectrum of Problem Drinking.” It’s a semi-circular gauge roughly divided into thirds: “no risk,” “low risk,” and “alcohol use disorder.” That last is itself divided into thirds: “mild,” “moderate,” and “severe.” Past “severe,” below the black horizon, is “death.” Before that, though, the color of the gauge is gradual: white shades into pink, pink into red. All of these features emphasize that drinking behavior is not binary—normal versus alcoholic—but falls along a spectrum, a point that would seem obvious and barely worth making, were it not that the alcohol and recovery industries have been dominated by the binary model for the last 80 years.

If most people believe that the earth is flat, then, yes, you have to make a big fuss over global roundness and bring on experts to testify to it and devise cunning graphics so that, when people think “earth,” they think “soccer ball” and not “placemat.” So “Risky Drinking” does that.

In making this point, the NIAAA is only about forty years behind researchers such as Alan Marlatt, Mark Sobell, and Linda Sobell, who were making similar arguments in the 1970s and 1980s despite getting roundly thrashed for it by “mainstream” scientists, including those at the NIAAA. Forty years to catch up with the cutting edge of research: that’s pretty good, right? Way to go, NIAAA!

Are you now wondering what cutting-edge research the NIAAA will catch up with forty years from now? Me, too! I wonder that all the time!

But we should get back to the film. I think the main audience for this film is people who suspect they drink too much but hate the idea that they may be “alcoholic” or have to stop drinking. Four of the five main characters are definitely in this category, and the film lets us draw our own conclusions about whether or not they have a problem and what they should do about it.

We get little nudges, of course. One character predicts she will binge on five drinks per weekend night as we watch her down three times that number, her score kept by a digital tracker in the corner of the screen. Except for the last guy, whose place on the spectrum is in the deep red just north of “death,” we could see these people modifying their drinking in some way and moving back along the spectrum to a point that’s more pink than red. I never could do that myself, but I don’t believe in over-generalizing from my own experience. I’ve seen bottle-a-day whiskey-swiggers become two-glasses-with-dinner wine sippers, so I’ve long known that some heavy drinkers can cut down. I’m just not one of them.

For me, the most interesting part of the film is the tension between the binary model and the spectrum model that plays out in the Moms’ Happy Hour segment. It’s actually kind of dramatic—and very revealing about alcohol culture—so I’m going to talk about it for the rest of this essay.

The Moms’ Happy Hour is exactly what it sounds like: a weekly gathering of mothers who drink. Its leader, Rhonda, writes a blog called “Mom Who Drinks and Cusses,” not to be confused with “Moms Who Drink and Cuss” or “Mommy Drinks Wine and Swears” or one of the many other Edgy Mommy blogs, which are the social media equivalent of buying a sports car to park beside your embarrassing minivan.

After a commercial for the blog,[1] Rhonda explains that she uses wine as a coping mechanism, as do millions of other women, though “only a small percentage admit it.” Huh? Anyway, Rhonda sees herself as championing the cause of therapeutic wine-drinking, which I wasn’t aware needed a champion, but what she really champions is the importance of the old, binary model, wherin you are either a social drinker or an alcoholic, not floating around some fuzzy pink spectrum.

She is insistent about the difference between herself and an alcoholic. “I do not want to become an alcoholic,” she emphasizes, “so I will do whatever I have to do to not get there.” As she delivers the line in voiceover, the screen shows her in a leotard doing tippy-toe squats at a barre because everyone knows an hour of dancercise a day keeps addiction away. Some of her other strategies include redefining the Moms’ Happy Hour,” which is entirely dedicated to wine-drinking, as a “therapy session,” or tippy-toe squats for the psyche. But Rhonda’s main strategy for defending the social drinking/alcoholism binary is scapegoating.

“What do you do when one of your friends seems like they’re losing control?” Rhonda asks. “And how do you know when things have gone too far?” The camera focuses on dark-haired Noel, who is explaining that she doesn’t like to eat when drinking because “it messes up my buzz.”

By acknowledging that she drinks for the buzz, Noel breaks a taboo and so practically begs to be scapegoated. Everybody who drinks more than an occasional glass gets buzzed, of course, but you’re not supposed to talk about it, except obliquely. If they absolutely must refer to alcohol’s pharmacological effects, they say (as another woman immediately does) it’s “relaxing.” Poor Noel: the women pile on, and Noel piles on herself, telling a story about missing her daughter’s fifth-grade graduation because she drank a bottle of wine. Yet the right-side-of-the-line women are imbibing just as much; there are six of them at Rhonda’s dining room table and eight empty bottles on the sideboard, and everyone’s speech is getting a little sloppy, not just Noel’s.

Noel eventually decides, with Rhonda’s encouragement, to investigate moderation management, which she announces at yet another Moms’ Happy Hour. At this one, the same number of women have consumed at least nine bottles of wine when Noel makes her announcement, though they immediately break out another bottle to toast Noel’s decision.

Rhonda says she hopes Noel will still be able to “get together on the porch and have a glass of wine.” Rhonda always says “a glass of wine” whether she means one glass or eight glasses.

“We may or may not stay really close friends, I don’t know. As long as she’s okay, that’s fine,” meaning Rhonda is prepared to sacrifice the friendship if Noel doesn’t stop holding an uncomfortable mirror up to the Mom Who Drinks and Cusses.

Spoiler: she doesn’t actually cuss, which is disappointing.

Scapegoating is a common technique in hard-drinking families and social groups. You pick out one person to be “the alcoholic,” focus on that person’s weaknesses, and draw a hard line between her and everybody else. “Hooray! We don’t drink as much/often/early, and we don’t get as belligerent/tearful/slutty, so we are not alcoholic! Let’s celebrate with another round!” The designated alcoholic then internalizes the notion that there’s something fundamentally different (and defective) in her, rather than questioning the behavior and values of the group or the role of alcohol itself.

Looking at Rhonda, I saw a woman pathologizing Noel in order to protect her drinking-cussing-Mommy brand. Looking at the whole group, I saw how scapegoating Noel protected them from having to recognize their own excesses. They could have seen her as a canary in a coal mine, a signal to examine their own consumption; instead they made her the alcoholic “other” who confirmed that their drinking was fine and didn’t need examination.

To get sober, really sober, I have to recognize scapegoating, especially when it’s happening to me. I have to ask what people are disowning in themselves and exaggerating in me so that I don’t internalize the exaggeration. In getting sober, my worst enemies can be people worried about their own drinking, sometimes without realizing it. To feel better, they convince themselves that there’s something uniquely and terribly wrong with me, something from which they do not suffer. I have to reject that idea without overtly challenging it and without mentally condemning them for the way they see things. Such projection is human nature and nothing to take personally. In sum, I don’t need to police other people’s ideas, but I do need to avoid assimilating the ones that hurt me.

Do I think the film’s makers wanted us to notice the scapegoating? No, I don’t. I think we were supposed to notice the similarities between Noel and the other women and see her as a little deeper into the red zone. She was, of course, but that’s only the surface meaning of the scene. If you want to understand the culture of alcohol abuse, you have to look more deeply.

At one point in the conversation, a woman with a blonde shag insists that Noel is on the wrong side of a fundamental approach to life. Pointing to herself and Rhonda, she says “We enjoy life.” Then, pointing to Noel, she stage-whispers to Rhonda, “She makes it through life.” Though she immediately claims to be kidding, it’s a classic scapegoating move: she’s the one with the problem, not us.

This site has other snarky essays on alcohol and media, if you’re interested. Topics include:

• Stupid web sites dedicated to “responsible drinking“
• Pro-drinking propaganda on the TV series “The Good Fight”
• Voyeurism and recovery industry propaganda on “Intervention”
• Taking drunks out of bars on “Bar Rescue” (this one’s funny)

[1] Alas, the blog is by invitation only, so I was unable to assess its literary merits. The screen shot in the movie was the beginning of a column on “getting older” in quotation marks, presumably to suggest that aging is optional.