John O'Brien was a born in 1960 and got married at nineteen. A resident of Los Angeles until his suicide in 1994. Very little commentary exists on the writer on the Net, and it is likely his work would remain fairly obscure were it not for the Mike Figgis film of John's best-known novel, Leaving Las Vegas. The film is a superb interpretation, with more emphasis placed on the love affair between Ben and Sera than the book, and a more gaudy, less grimy atmosphere. Nicholas Cage is solid as usual in the lead, sweating and stumbling his way through Ben's deterioration and managing to play a screen drunk who is not a clown.
Elizabeth Shue is tender and convincing, bringing humanity to a part that could easily be clouded in cliche, as tart-with-a-heart Sera. As an interesting boozy link, the barman in the Los Angeles introduction is played by the guy who was Jim Morrison's drinking comrade Dog in the Oliver Stone movie, although I certainly cannot be arsed to look up his name.
The novel is darker and more involved in its depiction of despair than the Hollywood version. Because of the constraints of movie timing and focus, the haunting, helpless romance provides the film's energy and structure. In the novel, we see instead three stories. Al, Sera's pimp, is a fuller character and his tale is entwined with Sera's, who's tale in turn becomes entwined with Ben's. The monotony and isolation of the full-time drunk are given more time in the novel, and yet this does not alter the basic theme of the work. Essentially, Ben rejects life in the way that only someone who cannot see it clearly can. He allows drink to be the meaning of his life, and takes on board the inevitable end this entails. His life without booze is not referred to, suggesting perhaps that John O'Brien buys into the idea that drunks are born and not made, waiting to slip through the net of their circumstances from an early stage. In the end, it is Sera's loneliness that hints that what Ben has done is taken control, freed himself from a life of uncertainties and insecurities by setting a course with a definite and visible end and no reliance on others.
The Assault on Tony's is a drinking story proper, with no romance, freedom or beauty of any kind. Set in a bar not unlike one that John worked at in LA, it is the story of a group of men who are trapped in their local by a race riot. Working in an apposite direction plotwise to Leaving Las Vegas, instead of a lunge for freedom ending in squalor and incapacitation, Tony's has a group of men who are trapped but ends with an escape. Where Ben found love in mutually acknowledged loneliness, the regulars at Tony's find their inebriated camaraderie dissolved by greed and jealousy as the drink runs out and they find themselves sharing the only woman of their party. The fact that Rudd escapes at the end and Ben achieves his goal is sadly prophetic, as John's father's refers to Leaving Las Vegas as being John's suicide note.
The other works by John were Stripper Lessons, about a man who falls in love with an exotic dancer, which explored strip-club culture with the familiarity with which Leaving describes the bar routines of the surrendered alcoholic. A novel, Better, was only taking shape as notes when John died.
Back to the bar.