The most cringe-worthy scene in Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is when Jackson Maine wets himself on stage at the Grammys while his wife Ally (Lady Gaga) is collecting the award for the Best New Artist. A memory which should have been a glamorous, wonderous moment for Ally is now tainted with embarrassment and shame. The scene is all too familiar for many who live their lives in the shadow of addiction. Most of us haven’t gone, and never will go, to the Grammys, but what the film shows so authentically is how difficult life with addiction is not just for the addict, but the person next to them.
We first meet Jackson Maine already on stage, washing down some pills with gin. Oozing charisma, Maine is effortlessly cool with his guitar and husky voice. After the concert, it’s almost a completely different Jackson Maine that gets in the back of a black SUV; hunched from fatigue, with greasy hair and that constant redness from too much booze. You can almost smell the old liquour on him. He demands to be taken to a bar and in that bar he meets Ally. When we first meet her, Ally is breaking up with a guy over the phone in a bathroom cubicle at work. Her boss is rude, her job is a drag but she finds freedom in singing. She performs in the drag bar Jackson stumbles upon and their eyes meet as she throws herself on the bar singing La Vie En Rose. Their relationship has been defined by alcohol from the beginning. After all they would have never met if Jackson didn’t obsessively need another drink that night.
Any film depicting addiction and relationships always has one tough sell; how do you visually and narratively convey the desire to stick by what often comes across as a monster rather than a human, a shadow of the person the character once fell in love with? It’s easy to criticise why anyone would stay with an alcoholic or a drug addict, but millions of people do. Cooper subtly makes the relationship between Jackson and Ally believable by letting us in on the things that make Ally’s previous life unsatisfactory and what Jackson can offer Ally. I’ll tell you now; fame isn’t it.
Ally is haunted by a feeling of not belonging; she is literally in masquerade with her taped-on eyebrows and painted hair, having found a sense of inclusion with the drag queens at the club. She’s almost “The Other” but she’s not even that fully, not quite alienated or different enough. She exists in a void-like space. Her home life is no better: her house is cluttered with pots and pans, unopened letters and day-old coffee mugs. The house is constantly crowded by her father’s work colleagues with her recovering alcoholic father constantly boasting about this or that, mostly about Ally’s talent, which only seems to remind Ally of everything she hasn’t accomplished. It’s constantly loud whether she is at home or work; the whole world around seems overwhelming and uncomfortable. It only ever gets calm and quiet when she’s with Jackson or she’s singing.
Shallow As An Anthem About Addiction
The multiple award-winning song Shallow is possibly the most important song in the film. Not only is it an absolute banger, the way it fits within the story and acts almost as a piece of dialogue is fascinating. The song is first conceived on a parking lot of a supermarket after Ally has punched a guy in the face in a cop bar.
“Tell me something boy, aren’t you tired trying to fill that void?” she sings to Jackson, addressing his need to drink himself into oblivion, obvious even to Ally who has only just met him. Little does she know that Jackson has taken the song to heart and surprises her by singing it on stage the next night.
“Tell me something girl, are you happy in this modern world or do you need more, is there something else you’re searching for?” he bellows, singing it directly to her while his fans obliviously listen and chant his name, effectively flipping his and Ally’s roles within the song. If Ally had the balls to call him out for his drinking on that parking lot, he will also point out her unhappiness using her own melody.
“Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us. We’re far from the shallow now” Ally sings into the microphone while the crowd screams. Without realising she is diving deep not only into fame but also Jackson’s addiction and the fatal consequences of it. In Jackson she believes to have found companionship, someone who can offer her the world, the music. Shallow also contains lyrics about longing for change and fearing one’s self in the bad times, presumably Jackson addressing his alcoholism through music.
After the concert, Ally is overwhelmed by a crowd of Jackson’s fans. She loses him and panics, but he reappears and pulls her through the crowd, seeing just her in the midst of the faceless crowd. They go back to Jackson’s hotel where an already drunk Jackson fumbles with the hotel room key. Ally disappears in the bathroom to freshen up, expecting a hot night with one of the biggest music stars. Ally comes back to find Jackson’s brother Bobby putting a passed-out Jackson to bed. This is only the first in a constant string of disappointments Ally will face with Jackson while dealing with his alcoholism.
The film deals with the toxic cycle of fame and validation. Jackson’s star is fading while Ally’s is rising. Ally’s fame seems to have a triggering effect on Jackson. He passes out on the front lawn of his friend Noodles after Ally’s first solo performance. They get married and he seems to be cleaning up his act, but after she performs a sexy routine to her new song at Saturday Night Live, he picks up another beer and the cycle starts again. He sees himself become irrelevant and hopes to still matter through Ally, who disregards his advice and abandons their more country style in favour of commercial pop music.
Everything Is Fine
The film’s most shocking, quietly angering moment happens before the aforementioned Grammys. Jackson has found out Ally has been nominated for three Grammys while he has been reduced to a supporting act in a Roy Orbison tribute and confronts her in the bath, disapproving of her new look and her music. Ally avoids Jackson’s eyes as he questions her, but Jackson presses on. He ridicules her songs and the lyrics and finally calls her ugly, his speech filled with the tinge of a slur from the alcohol, the kind of slur that only seasoned alcoholics attain.
It’s not cheery, happy slurring, it’s the kind where your voice becomes someone else’s. Ally jumps up and orders Jackson to get out. He’s finally hit her where it hurts; her appearance and self-confidence. Jackson slams the door shut as Ally stands naked in the tub, angry and frustrated that the person she married has become the evil and jealous villain in their story.
If the Grammys scene is the most-cringe worthy in the film, what follows it must be the most heartbreaking. As Jackson is being dragged into the shower, while being berated by Ally’s father, Ally screams in the background. She screams it’s her job as his wife to take care of Jackson when he’s like this. She pushes everyone else away, turns the shower on and tries to pull an unconscious Jackson up from the floor. He’s limp in her arms, as if he is already dead as she turns the shower on and the water soaks both of them. She keeps hysterically screaming everything is fine, although it is painfully clear everything is not fine and has never been fine in a relationship defined by alcohol, pills and the toxicity of fame.
This isn’t the first time she’s claimed everything is fine after Jackson has stumbled drunk. She does it earlier in the film at a party after Ally has performed Always Remember Us This Way on stage. During the song, Ally’s face appears on a giant screen behind Jackson, signifying how she is now bigger than he is, the crowd chanting her name instead of his. Cooper smartly never shies away from how long people are willing to pretend everything is fine.
After Jackson finally seeks help, though it’s unclear whether he does it voluntarily, he tearfully apologises to Ally for embarrassing her in front of everyone. She says there’s no need to apologise. Just as much as A Star Is Born is about love between a man and a woman, it’s about a man’s love for the bottle. That sense of satisfaction as the ice cubes clink in the glass and the burn of the alcohol hits your throat followed by the intoxicating sense of freedom and disconnect from your body and mind. Ally falls in love with Jackson while he is drunk, the seed of infatuation is planted on the parking lot of a supermarket when she sings to him and he hears her, really hears her, like no one has before. He feeds her need to be acknowledged and found. She clings to him as the gin-infused saviour that he appears to be. Drunk or not, Jackson Maine has what she wants: an audience willing to listen.
What Bradley Cooper does so brilliantly in A Star Is Born is injecting just enough charm and likability to his performance as Jackson that the audience will believe why Ally would stay with him. The film sends a strong message to those affected by substance abuse and addiction, without ever making Jackson into the cartoon-ish villain of the story. Ally is able to see through the haziness of the booze, she sees the real Jack beneath the disease. Jackson is not a bad person, just a sum of all the bad things that have happened to him and Ally recognises the human through the high that is still worth fighting for.
Let’s Talk About That Ending
The ending of A Star Is Born is a controversial one. As in all the previous films, Jackson Maine dies in the end. In the 1937 and 1954 versions Norman Maine drowns himself in the ocean and in the 1976 version John Norman Howard drives recklessly and is killed in a crash. In Cooper’s version Jackson Maine hangs himself while Ally is performing in a concert. The film’s conclusion seems like a reckless one. At first glance it seems to suggest suicide as a way out, as an answer to Jackson’s problems. But looking closer at the film as a whole and Jackson Maine, it’s a much more complex ending than one assumes.
Jackson reveals that he has attempted suicide, having tried to hang himself years before. It’s also stated how abusive his and Bobby’s father was and how damaging this has been for the brothers. Jackson has a lifetime of mental health issues, topped with the ever-present tinnitus, all of which assumedly led to his addiction. The biggest lesson A Star Is Born conveys is that Jackson seemed to already be beyond Ally’s reach. After Jackson’s suicide, Ally angrily smashes things in their house and shouts angrily into the void. Bobby and Ally talk about Jackson and his love for Ally, his love of her music. Ally feels guilty that she couldn’t do more, that she couldn’t save Jackson, but Bobby assures her it wasn’t her fault. It’s a devastating ending to such a beautiful story and it would have been great to see a version where the fading rock star shouldn’t have to die.
Suicide is never the answer and while the ending isn’t perfect and could act as a trigger to a lot of people, Cooper does a fine job establishing a history of mental health issues rather than assuming his suicide is a heroic act to save the career of his wife which he would have otherwise ruined. It also shows the pain Ally suffers after Jackson is gone, proving his death hasn’t helped her but hurt her profoundly. At the end of the films she walks out on a stage alone to sing a tribute to her late husband. Their love story might be a tragic one, but A Star Is Born is a powerful showcase of what it looks like to be the person next to an addict.
How did you feel about A Star Is Born and that controversial ending? Does it accurately portray addiction and alcoholism? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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