Review

Addiction

Culture

Film & TV

11 April 2023

6 min read

Who’s by your side?

It’s tough to watch A Good Person. Its laser focus and tenderness prompts Lauren Windle to recall her experience of addiction and recovery.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

An old man accompanies a young woman into a wood-panelled hall, both look aprehensive.

Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh in A Good Person

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

I don’t watch films about addiction. When I first got clean and sober almost nine years ago, I soaked in any piece of content I could find on drugs, drug use and recovery. At the time it was just YouTube clips of Russell Brand and the occasional memoir of a starlet who turned to cocaine before discovering yoga. After going to a 10:30am showing of Amy Winehouse documentary film Amy and bawling through the entire film, I decided to call it quits. I don’t need to see horrific stories of desperation – I’ve lived one. I am not a casual observer of addiction narratives; I’ve got skin in the game.

In 2018 I went to see A Star Is Born thinking I was watching a rags-to-riches tale of an unlikely popstar. I quickly realised we weren’t there to witness the female protagonist’s ascent, so much as the male protagonist’s decent. I got back in my car and had to wait a quarter of an hour for the fit of hysterical tears to pass before I drove home. I had the same realisation watching A Good Person.

Going in I knew that I had signed up to a film with Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh. I knew that Pugh’s character Allison “had it all” before a “dramatic accident changed everything”. The ground here sounded so well-trodden that I thought I may need my wellies to navigate it. I knew that there was some element of addiction, but I envisaged a reasonably light touch depiction of a few too many nights on the sauce.

I knew I was wrong when, about half an hour in, Allison lay on the cold bathroom floor to soothe her withdrawal from prescription opioids. She was sweating, shaking and breathless and from then on, it all felt distressingly familiar. The trajectory of her decline was too quick, too obvious, too accurate. As Allison bargained, manipulated and begged for drugs, I saw myself. As Allison looked directly into the mirror and said: ‘I hate you’ to her own glazed reflection, I saw myself. As Allison was dragged out of a stranger’s house party unable to stand up straight, I saw myself.

The hopelessness, the false starts, empty promises and rare moments of lucidity rang so true, that I would find it hard to believe writer Zach Braff hadn’t experienced his own similar hardship. Either that or the recovering addicts they hired to consult on the project deserve a bonus of investment banker proportions.

When Allison eventually reached out for help and asked a woman to sponsor her, the loving directness that came back was reminiscent of those I was given by my first sponsor. It was virtually word for word what I remember being told when I, nine days sober, made the same terrifying request. The experienced mentor told her: “Some beat it, some die.” And she’s right.

Any of my friends who went to an in-patient treatment centre were told to look around because in five years a decent number of their cohort would be dead. And they were always right. Some people give up and let the tide of addiction pull them under. They feel exactly as Allison did when she told Daniel (played by Morgan Freeman): “I’m not sure I have the will.” And when she confessed in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that: “Without [the pills] I want to die.”

In the 2015 film Amy, the one that convinced me to stick to rom-coms, there’s a scene that stuck with me. Amy had been invited to perform at the Grammy’s but was denied a visa because of her well-documented drug use. It was arranged for her to live perform in London and it would be broadcast on big screens at the event. When the date came around she was in a stint of sobriety. She performed beautifully and won five Grammys. One of her friends burst into her dressing room to celebrate the momentous achievement but all Amy said was that it wasn’t as good without the drugs.

You learn to love the cage you built around yourself and stop dreaming of more, because you are blind to anything beyond the walls you’ve created.

Getting into addiction means silencing that feeling in your Spirit that says that something isn’t right and you should go home. It’s consistently pushing through when you get a pit of your stomach urge to cut and run. Because you want the drugs, so you know you’ll have to take the chaos they’re packaged in. At some point you stop remembering that you ever felt uncomfortable, and you start to think you enjoy where you are, what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with. You get Stockholm syndrome and life before your captor is a distant memory. You learn to love the cage you built around yourself and stop dreaming of more, because you are blind to anything beyond the walls you’ve created. You’re not happy, but what other options do you have? You could trade the misery of addiction for the misery of abstinence, but either way you’ll be miserable so you might as well do it with the drugs.

Except, that’s not true. When we’re living our lives right, we’re living them in complete freedom. Slaves to no substance or behaviour with the freedom to say yes to what we want and, crucially, the freedom to say no. It’s the present Jesus gave us in the resurrection but so many of us, myself included, hand it back like it came with a gift receipt.

I wish I’d known the dreams that would be realised, the friendships forged and the profound moments I would experience on the other side of those first, excruciating months of sobriety.

What I wish I could have told Amy at the Grammy’s, Allison in that NA meeting and myself when I first said the words: “I think I’m addicted”, is that there’s so much more than what you can currently see. I wish I’d known the dreams that would be realised, the friendships forged and the profound moments I would experience on the other side of those first, excruciating months of sobriety. I would have wanted to know that in time my grip would loosen, my knuckles would go from white back to their fleshy hue and I would be able to breathe again. It wouldn’t feel like a compromise or half a life or as though something was missing, but I would feel more fulfilled and alive than any drug would ever allow me.

A Good Person demonstrates the chronic and repetitive condition of addiction with a laser sharp accuracy that, for someone with lived experience, could burn. But it’s also a tender reminder of the power of unlikely friendships forged from a mutual understanding of adversity. It made me think of the woman who scooped me up as I backed away from my first ever support group meeting and said: “You can sit next to me.” It made me grateful for the woman who mouthed “it’s going to be OK,” at me across the table as I sat there listening with tears rolling down my face. It reminded me of the awe I felt the first time I heard someone speak about the insomnia, shame and self-hatred of drug addiction, and I realised I wasn’t the only one. The film showed the transformative effect of consistent community in a way that I hope encourages people to turn up to one of those meetings like Allison and I did. I pray that it is the turning point in many people’s lives.

Should you go and watch it? Absolutely. Just don’t ask me to go with you.

Review

Culture

Re-enchanting

14 March 2023

7 min read

Re-enchanted: swimming with Charlie Mackesy

Fascinated by the astonishing success of the whimsical The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse, Belle Tindall probes at the deep wisdom of Charlie Mackesy’s enchanting, not to mention Oscar-winning, modern fable.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

An illustration showing a horse standing, sniffing a mole held by a boy while a seated fox looks on.

Macksey's modern fable.

BBC.

Four million of us dedicated half an hour of our Christmas Eve to watching Charlie Mackesy’s Academy Award-winning animated short film, The Boy the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, making it the most watched programme on that day. (Not to mention the five million of us who have streamed it since, making it the most watched film in its category at this year's Oscars).

More than two million of us have his illustrated book of the same name sitting somewhere in our homes, placing it firmly on both the New York Times and the Sunday Times best-sellers list.

Over one-and-a-half million of us have decided to make Charlie’s work a daily staple of our lives by following him on Instagram.

'Lives have been profoundly touched by the effect that Mackesy is having upon the world.'

And then, of course, there’s the impact of these lofty statistics, the depth of success that is running parallel to the breadth, the Mackesy Effect that can’t be quantified. I defy anyone to scroll through the online comments on his social media pages, browse the reviews of his book, or explore the Twitter hashtag pertaining to the short film, and not be struck by the stories of seemingly endless people whose lives have been profoundly touched by the effect that Mackesy is having upon the world.

My morning peek into the Twitter-verse shows that today alone, the animated film is being watched in schools as an exercise in mental and emotional well-being, copies of the book are being distributed to sufferers of PTSD and gifted to residents of care homes, while the distinctive drawings are adorning the walls of therapy rooms and hospital wards.

Fascination at such an impact can be reduced to a singular word: why?

This isn’t a question dubiously asked from a safe distance, surveying the astonishing success and scratching my head with scepticism. I am by no means unconvinced by the genius of it all. Quite the contrary, my copy of the book is one of the most well-thumbed books I own. I pull it off my shelf and open it up more regularly than I care to admit, each time utterly bewildered as to why it feels as though it was written just for that precise moment.

And so, to ask the question once more: what is it about this simple fable, in all of its various forms, that is continuing to captivate us? I have a theory. One that was somewhat hidden in plain sight all along.

There’s a phrase that has been whirring around my mind as I’ve been probing at Mackesy’s enchanting work: it is a fable in which children can paddle and elephants can swim. This phrase has been frequently used to describe a particular biblical book, the Gospel of John.

John’s Gospel has a reputation for being somewhat of a literary and theological enigma. Therefore, whether it be in pure delight or utter defeat, John’s Gospel has been described in this way – as a text in which children can paddle and elephants swim.

Far more than a whimsical-sounding review, this rather endearing visual very succinctly sums up the paradox that is the literary nature of the fourth Gospel. It can be read and understood at a surface level, each scene working together to create a tapestry of moments, curated to tell the tale of a life that caught the attention of everyone around it. And of course, a death and resurrection, painstakingly recorded to ensure that the impact of such a momentous life moves beyond the confines of first-hand witnesses. This is how the fourth Gospel has been paddled in for two millennia.

'This work is a text in which children can paddle and elephants can swim.'

But then there’s the ever-present invitation to swim with the elephants. In reality, this invitation is to sit and dissect every micro-detail, to delve into the intention undergirding every word choice, to pour over the precise placement of every narrative. It is an invitation to find meaning hidden within meaning hidden within yet more meaning, it is an invitation to surrender to the sheer genius of what John has produced and work out how to rightly respond to it.

And with this in mind, I return to the work of Charlie Mackesy. This is not to suggest that through The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Mackesy has created, or attempted to create, some kind of Biblical text. Surely, he, more than anyone, would positively balk at the idea. What I’m suggesting is that this work is a text in which children can paddle and elephants can swim.

The pages of the book, the scenes of the short-film, the images on the Instagram account - they can be consumed at a glance, they can be paddled in. The simplicity of them offers an antidote to our crowded lives, the whimsical nature of each character appeals to our desire for escapism, and the relatable nature of Charlie Mackesy himself (a self-proclaimed ‘grubby artist’) allows us to feel that his content is a safe place. And then there are the words that accompany each drawing he offers us; in the animated film, actors such as Idris Elba and Tom Hollander have been enlisted to bring the voices of the four beloved characters to life. In the book, Charlie’s own handwriting is tasked with doing all the talking. These messages, presented as brief conversations between the characters, are notably short in length and simplistic in nature, but let’s not allow that to fool us into assuming that they lack substance. On the contrary, there is sufficient depth to be swam in, and the invitation to do so is present on every page.

'What can be found by those who are wading away from the shores?'

And herein lies the theory: the invitation to paddle in the waters of this whimsical world may be what is attracting the world to Charlie’s work, but the opportunity to swim in its very applicable depths is what is keeping us captivated. Therefore, a question remains: what can be found by those who are wading away from the shores? I have a suggestion: re-enchantment of the most theological kind.

We’re living in an age of ‘disenchantment’ in the West, a societal state that was predicted by Max Weber in the early 20th Century, and profoundly resonates with our reality today. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to denote a time when society will have discarded our reliance upon, and appreciation of, the mysterious, the spiritual, and the transcendent.

But are we satisfied with disenchantment?

Our apparent captivation with content such as Mackesy’s, which is intent on re-enchanting us, would imply not.

The longer you sit with Mackesy’s work (or swim in it, to keep a hold of the Johannine metaphor), the more apparent it becomes that neither the boy, the mole, the fox, nor the horse are actually the central characters. Rather, the things that hold the entire body of work together are the exact things that disenchantment refutes: the mysterious, the spiritual, the transcendent. Things that, to quote the book itself, ‘sit beyond all things’. Perhaps our appreciation of such things has not been disregarded, but profoundly underestimated. It could be suggested that our reliance upon such things is more intrinsic than we ourselves acknowledge, and every now and again, something as unlikely as a talking mole makes a profound mark on culture and subsequently proves it.

Charlie Mackesy has ultimately provided us with an invitation into re-enchantment.

'He wanted to reach out to a loved one in distress, but words kept falling short.'

The thing to note about re-enchantment is that it is, by its very nature, a return to something familiar; a previous perspective or an ancient wisdom perhaps. The vehicle is intriguingly new, but the cargo feels ancient. Or to be more specific, the cargo feels biblical.

Mackesy’s relationship with his Christian faith is paradoxically complex and enviably simple. He’s spoken many a time about the way he both perceives and receives the divine love that is at the core of the Christian faith. He has also given us a glimpse into how it tends to fuel his work. In an interview with CBN, Charlie tells the story behind one of his more explicitly biblical pieces of art entitled 'The Prodigal Daughter' . He spoke about how he wanted to reach out to a loved one in distress, but words kept falling short, so he painted her a picture. He said ‘I was just trying to show her through imagery where, you know, to be held is something she always wanted. So, I said, “This is what God is like”’.

Whether or not he has the same intention when it comes to his more commercial work, as you flick through each page of his best-selling book, that is exactly what you sense the characters within the book, and the man behind it, to be saying: this is what God is like.

Whether it be the horse, who is ‘the biggest thing they have encountered’ and takes it upon himself to carry the other characters physically and emotionally through the wilderness. Or the constant re-iteration that love is the means and the end to all things. Or even the narrative detail of each character becoming known, deeply, and honestly known, on levels that they had yet to experience. You could write ten books of theology or philosophy in an attempt to expound each theme.

And I, for one, hope it’s a place where children continue to paddle, and elephants continue to swim for a long time to come.