THE HANGOVER EFFECT
How a movie changed the way we look at binge drinking.
In Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for a Cure, journalist and raconteur Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall explores what happens to our bodies and minds when we over-imbibe and all the ways, over time and through different cultures, that we’ve tried to fix it. He delves into the infamous consequences of those rough mornings experienced by the greats of the past — from Noah to Churchill to pitcher David Wells — and reveals his own personal quest to find relief, and quite possibly his own cure.
To briefly recap, The Hangover is a 2009 film about an ill-fated bachelor party and the groom’s friends from out of town — including the wacko brother of the bride, a well-groomed professional and a guy so nondescript he’d make a pretty good spy. They raise a glass to the groom at their hotel, then the rest is madness and mayhem.
It involves erotic dancers, newborn babies, sports cars and a Bengal tiger; hotel managers, cops with handcuffs and incriminating videos; a fetal lunatic in nothing but his socks, a breakdown in the desert, heatstroke, a rooftop … and don’t forget that tiger.
It is a brilliant, and arguably prescient, film, but there was still no sober, predictable reason for the mind-blowing degree of its success. It’s not like the subject broke new ground. The fallout from prenuptial debauchery is, after all, terrain so well trampled by Hollywood — from The Philadelphia Story to Bachelor Party, Very Bad Things to Wedding Crashers — that it is practically a genre unto itself. But nothing, including the crummy sequels, can diminish the legacy of Todd Phillips’s original masterpiece.
Not only did The Hangover break every box-office record for an R-rated comedy, slingshot Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms onto the A-list, spark a Hollywood renaissance by reminding production companies that great comedy requires high risk, and even provide Mike Tyson a much-needed bit of levity, but it also changed the modern culture of hangovers.
Dr. [Jason] Burke, of Hangover Heaven in Las Vegas, suggested that our present preoccupation with the condition was due to three concurrent semi-revelations: state-sponsored statistics on the cost of hangovers to the economy, a study by Dr. Jeremy Wiese of New Orleans suggesting the remedial efficacy of prickly pear and — of course — The Hangover.
And it’s possible that those first two bits of news might have gone practically unnoticed if not for the overwhelming, undeniable, somewhat surprising effect of The Hangover on our vast collective consciousness. More statistical studies on hangovers were started within a year of the film’s release than in the previous century, and a record number of hangover products hit the market. Along with Chaser, made by Manoj Bhargava, and NoHo, created by Dr. Wiese, one of the most successful sellers, at least for a while, was Hangover Joe’s Recovery Shot — the label boasting “Officially Licensed by the Movie The Hangover.”
Another thing the movie did, in a psychologically roundabout way, was normalize the morning after. Not only did it set a bar (albeit fictional) so impossibly high (or maybe low) that most human hangovers seemed comparatively innocuous, but the now-aging genre of hangover stories had a new, all-encompassing reference point.
Almost a decade later, a basic internet search for anything to do with hangovers is still an exercise in filtering out an ocean of marketing, buzz lists and blogs about the Hangover trilogy.
And then what you’re left with is a swamp of products and personal confessions — most of which still reference the movie as a way of relativizing the experience — even more so when it comes to the endless trove of wedding-day hangover reportage. It is safe to say that at no time in history has there been a more comprehensive record of people throwing up in church.
It’s also worth mentioning that the limit-pushing, far-reaching success of The Hangover depends, in part, on a happy ending and a wedding saved. But in life, of course, it doesn’t always go that way. Even among so many daily miseries, one of the most depressing stories ever run in the British tabloid the Sun is surely that of Siobhan Watson’s wedding day.
The day began with Siobhan waking in astrange budget hotel room at12:30 p.m. — just a half-hour before she was supposed to get married. Absorbing in a flash this awful information, she lurched to the bathroom, vomited, then promptly passed out for another hour. And in those 60 little minutes — her rosy cheek pressed against the bathroom tiles in a baby-like puddle of drool — Siobhan’s entire life was changing.
One can only imagine how it must have felt: to wake once more, to stagger and stand, then read, and comprehend, the numbers on that bedside digital clock …
For years, Siobhan’s parents had worked and saved so that she could have a dreamlike wedding — the culmination of every happy inspiration, any vision of the future she’d ever conjured up. For the past few months, she’d had trouble falling asleep — not from anxiety, but excitement; she imagined it all in vivid detail, even the script of her father’s speech, right down to the proud, silly jokes he’d make. The future seemed limitless, wonderful, so very close — and she’d giggled and cried in bed, just thinking about today.
And now it was here. And now it was gone.
She wasn’t even a drinker, didn’t even like the stuff. But far more than that, she hated disappointing people — and so had finally given in to her friends when they begged to take her out for bache- lorette drinks the night before. And then the drinks hadn’t tasted too strong … but by the third one, Siobhan was drunk, for the first time ever. And the fourth one blacked her out. No one would ever know what happened after that — how she ended up here, passed out in this room, instead of at her wedding. After a while, Siobhan left the hotel and started to walk.
The shock kept her legs moving — without rest, water or a sense of direction — for five full hours while family, friends and local police searched the city streets. And though she finally did show up, just as the sun was setting, there would be no happy ending.
Her fiancé broke up with her, and then it took her parents a formidable while to let her move back home — a wedding and future so beautifully conjured up, then simply made to vanish.
“I can’t believe I ruined it,” Siobhan told the Sun, “by having one too many piña coladas.”
After watching The Hangover like some kind of Pavlovian aversion therapy — shaking under wet towels, laughing and coughing up drops of leftover bile — I watch it again when my gal gets back from the rehearsal dinner.
“You’re really going to like this,” I tell her.
“You really should be dead,” she says. And then we snuggle up. She’s right, of course.
And it’s this that can make the worst of hangovers dangerously invigorating — like coming out of a fight, or an unspeakable loss at the poker table. It feels like you should be dead, but somehow you’re still alive. And for a little while, in the painful afterglow, anything seems possible.
After the wedding, we’ll drive together down Route 66, back to Las Vegas, to catch our flight home. I don’t know it now, my hand on her belly as my darling watches The Hangover, but when next I return to these deserts, it’ll be as a single dad — with a buried friend, a new book to write, a new girlfriend to lose and a spot reserved in Hangover Heaven. Excerpt from Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for a Cure by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall ©2018. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
It is safe to say that at no time in history has there been a more comprehensive record of people throwing up in church