16 Years of Alcohol

17/11/2025

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16 Years of Alcohol is dense with accusatory voiceover, a voice given to the broadest of generalisations — as if to deflect the self-loathing tone by proposing this isn’t just a personal tragedy, but that the central character is reflecting an aspect of human nature, or at least Scottish, masculine nature. “Sometimes, for some people, things don’t work out as they might have hoped. Hope is a strange thing. A currency for those who know they are losing. The more familiar you are with hope, the less beautiful it becomes.”Frankie is both an alcoholic and a violent man, someone who, early in the film, insists on shaking someone’s hand all the better to get in close enough to administer a Glasgow kiss — more commonly known as a head-butt. Much later, he is in a relationship with an arty record shop assistant, Helen (Laura Fraser), attends a gallery opening with her. He overhears a couple speaking about the art with great confidence. Interrupting, he asks what makes them so sure of the work, and they say it doesn’t need explaining. These are clearly pretentious people, yet Frankie is no less obnoxious in his own way — and much more troublesome. The couple is simply irritating; Frankie is irritated, and while pompous irritants  may be part of the art scene, irritated overreactions are not, as Frankie threatens to violate the polite hum of art appreciation.  He manages in this instance to hold his temper, or rather gets held back by Helen as he tells the pompous gallery-goer how he would carve him up. But Helen now knows she is with a liability and that he doesn’t just come across trouble; he goes looking for it.
The film proposes Frankie does so partly because of a father he can’t trust, showing how the dad betrayed his mother when Frankie was a boy.  The family is in the pub, and Frankie looks on wide-eyed and full of wonder at his dad, while his dad asks his beautiful wife to stand up and take a bow. He then sings a song that seduces another woman in the bar before going outside and having sex with her in an alleyway. Frankie comes across them, and his belief in his father (a la Death of a Salesman) is shattered. He becomes a youthful drinker and a teenage tearaway, entering his twenties ripe for seeing the only authority figure of any note as himself, and this authority will be asserted by the use of violence.
Richard Jobson’s film is both obvious and oblique: the psychology is often crude, but the formal aspects of the film are fresh, and Jobson is concerned to use Edinburgh as a city, as though he feels that to understand his character is to understand the city’s streets. He makes great use of the Scottish capital’s numerous closes in the Old Town, an underpass off Buccleuch Street, Calton Hill etc. Jobson said, “I wanted Edinburgh to be like a character in the film” (BBC), a common enough claim perhaps, but given credence in a work that at the same time wants to avoid typical social realism, where location is usually important. “I made a very clear decision at the beginning that I didn't want the film to be in the tradition — which is a fine tradition — of British social realism. I like those films very much, but it's not what I was interested in making.” (BBC) 16 Years of Alcohol wants Edinburgh to be like a character in the film because the film’s main character is one created by the city. Yet this isn’t chiefly through deprivation, as Jobson well knows, and whatever poverty Edinburgh has, this is neither what the city is famous for, nor would the locations he has chosen reflect this deprivation.
When he says he wishes to view the city like a character, it is one that shapes Frankie’s ego rather than undermines his sense of self. Socially realistic films often focus on the deprivation and risk the weakly syllogistic: if a boy comes from a housing estate, and all housing estates are poverty-stricken, the boy will turn into a poor man. The environment determines the outcome, and while statistically true, it doesn’t mean it must be true.
Jobson focuses little on the destitution and is instead more interested in the inebriation of the title, with the film chiefly about a man’s inability to cope with his emotions and understand his thoughts. Alcohol helps, or at least might seem to for Frankie. Near the end of the film, he is in another relationship and speaks of the three simple words “I love you” — and his difficulty in saying them. Such words risk rejection, while “I hate you” needn’t expect, wish, or hope for reciprocity. Both are performatives; they are words that aren’t just stated, they command an action. But while the words I love you may leave the person feeling vulnerable in the claim, I hate you turns the person invulnerable in the making of it. Frankie is a man seeking invulnerability, as though that initial wide-eyed look we see on his face as he admires his father becomes, in the wake of his father’s cruel infidelity, one of disdain. If his father can speak so fondly, admiringly, and sensitively about his mother’s beauty a few minutes before going outside and having sex with another woman, why in this horrible variation of the primal scene would he later expect the truth about love from others?
Edinburgh becomes the environment in which to explore Frankie’s demons rather than a social milieu that generates his failure. It is a psychological rather than sociological city Jobson seeks, and thus, if he forgoes equational poverty, he accepts the existence of a frequent Scottish type: the hard man. Whether it is Begbie in Trainspotting, Scoular in The Big Man, Jimmy Boyle in A Sense of Freedom, Charlie Sloan in Small Faces, or Frankie here, these are men who process their emotions by extending into violence. They might not all be villainous, and on occasion be noble (Scoular), but there is an assumption that aggressive release will be the means by which to express themselves. If 16 Years of Alcohol is interesting, it rests partly on that claim not being causal but expressionistic. In other words, if films often suggest that the behavioural problems come out of one’s environment, 16 Years of Alcohol proposes that a milieu can be used to connote a character’s sensibility. When Frankie stands up on the National Monument of Scotland and offers a mock power speech, we nevertheless note that this captures an aspect of his character, as it wouldn’t if he weren’t someone who prides himself on being formidable. In another moment, Frankie and his gang are hanging out in the Potterrow Port underpass, and they look like they have modelled themselves on A Clockwork Orange’s droogs. These are environments Frankie exploits; he isn’t their sociological victim.
If Jobson speaks of his resistance to realism, it may rest on Jobson accessing a central but less commonly contemporary aspect of Scotland’s past: the Gothic. Theorists of Scottish representations often discuss Clydeside, Tartanry, and Kailyard, with hardman stories often falling into the former, as deprivation leads to desperation, and desperation leads to violence. Jobson emphasises the desperation but wants a Gothic aspect over a realist one — if we accept that an important element of the Gothic imaginary is a split personality given expressionist form. This allows, instead of the cause-and-effect of the social milieu giving rise to character, the character to demand an environment that reflects their chaotic mind. In Scotland, the doppelganger theme has been explored through the Caledonian Antisyzygy and its best-known manifestations are The Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The point would then be to find images that capture the split mind, and Gothic architecture can lend itself well to such a purpose, even if Jobson is more eclectic than that. He draws no less on the neo-classical (National Monument of Scotland, St Stephen’s Church), the Brutalist (the Potter Row Underpass), and the numerous medieval closes of the city. What he seeks are labyrinths of the mind and imposing monuments to reflect Frankie’s despair. While many might be put off by the voiceover (including numerous reviewers), those who know a little about Edinburgh will see a director trying to marry Scottish discourses of personal collapse, alongside a fidelity to capturing numerous places within the city that can exist both as carefully chosen locales and reflections of one man’s psyche.
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

16 Years of Alcohol

16 Years of Alcohol is dense with accusatory voiceover, a voice given to the broadest of generalisations — as if to deflect the self-loathing tone by proposing this isn’t just a personal tragedy, but that the central character is reflecting an aspect of human nature, or at least Scottish, masculine nature. “Sometimes, for some people, things don’t work out as they might have hoped. Hope is a strange thing. A currency for those who know they are losing. The more familiar you are with hope, the less beautiful it becomes.”Frankie is both an alcoholic and a violent man, someone who, early in the film, insists on shaking someone’s hand all the better to get in close enough to administer a Glasgow kiss — more commonly known as a head-butt. Much later, he is in a relationship with an arty record shop assistant, Helen (Laura Fraser), attends a gallery opening with her. He overhears a couple speaking about the art with great confidence. Interrupting, he asks what makes them so sure of the work, and they say it doesn’t need explaining. These are clearly pretentious people, yet Frankie is no less obnoxious in his own way — and much more troublesome. The couple is simply irritating; Frankie is irritated, and while pompous irritants  may be part of the art scene, irritated overreactions are not, as Frankie threatens to violate the polite hum of art appreciation.  He manages in this instance to hold his temper, or rather gets held back by Helen as he tells the pompous gallery-goer how he would carve him up. But Helen now knows she is with a liability and that he doesn’t just come across trouble; he goes looking for it.
The film proposes Frankie does so partly because of a father he can’t trust, showing how the dad betrayed his mother when Frankie was a boy.  The family is in the pub, and Frankie looks on wide-eyed and full of wonder at his dad, while his dad asks his beautiful wife to stand up and take a bow. He then sings a song that seduces another woman in the bar before going outside and having sex with her in an alleyway. Frankie comes across them, and his belief in his father (a la Death of a Salesman) is shattered. He becomes a youthful drinker and a teenage tearaway, entering his twenties ripe for seeing the only authority figure of any note as himself, and this authority will be asserted by the use of violence.
Richard Jobson’s film is both obvious and oblique: the psychology is often crude, but the formal aspects of the film are fresh, and Jobson is concerned to use Edinburgh as a city, as though he feels that to understand his character is to understand the city’s streets. He makes great use of the Scottish capital’s numerous closes in the Old Town, an underpass off Buccleuch Street, Calton Hill etc. Jobson said, “I wanted Edinburgh to be like a character in the film” (BBC), a common enough claim perhaps, but given credence in a work that at the same time wants to avoid typical social realism, where location is usually important. “I made a very clear decision at the beginning that I didn't want the film to be in the tradition — which is a fine tradition — of British social realism. I like those films very much, but it's not what I was interested in making.” (BBC) 16 Years of Alcohol wants Edinburgh to be like a character in the film because the film’s main character is one created by the city. Yet this isn’t chiefly through deprivation, as Jobson well knows, and whatever poverty Edinburgh has, this is neither what the city is famous for, nor would the locations he has chosen reflect this deprivation.
When he says he wishes to view the city like a character, it is one that shapes Frankie’s ego rather than undermines his sense of self. Socially realistic films often focus on the deprivation and risk the weakly syllogistic: if a boy comes from a housing estate, and all housing estates are poverty-stricken, the boy will turn into a poor man. The environment determines the outcome, and while statistically true, it doesn’t mean it must be true.
Jobson focuses little on the destitution and is instead more interested in the inebriation of the title, with the film chiefly about a man’s inability to cope with his emotions and understand his thoughts. Alcohol helps, or at least might seem to for Frankie. Near the end of the film, he is in another relationship and speaks of the three simple words “I love you” — and his difficulty in saying them. Such words risk rejection, while “I hate you” needn’t expect, wish, or hope for reciprocity. Both are performatives; they are words that aren’t just stated, they command an action. But while the words I love you may leave the person feeling vulnerable in the claim, I hate you turns the person invulnerable in the making of it. Frankie is a man seeking invulnerability, as though that initial wide-eyed look we see on his face as he admires his father becomes, in the wake of his father’s cruel infidelity, one of disdain. If his father can speak so fondly, admiringly, and sensitively about his mother’s beauty a few minutes before going outside and having sex with another woman, why in this horrible variation of the primal scene would he later expect the truth about love from others?
Edinburgh becomes the environment in which to explore Frankie’s demons rather than a social milieu that generates his failure. It is a psychological rather than sociological city Jobson seeks, and thus, if he forgoes equational poverty, he accepts the existence of a frequent Scottish type: the hard man. Whether it is Begbie in Trainspotting, Scoular in The Big Man, Jimmy Boyle in A Sense of Freedom, Charlie Sloan in Small Faces, or Frankie here, these are men who process their emotions by extending into violence. They might not all be villainous, and on occasion be noble (Scoular), but there is an assumption that aggressive release will be the means by which to express themselves. If 16 Years of Alcohol is interesting, it rests partly on that claim not being causal but expressionistic. In other words, if films often suggest that the behavioural problems come out of one’s environment, 16 Years of Alcohol proposes that a milieu can be used to connote a character’s sensibility. When Frankie stands up on the National Monument of Scotland and offers a mock power speech, we nevertheless note that this captures an aspect of his character, as it wouldn’t if he weren’t someone who prides himself on being formidable. In another moment, Frankie and his gang are hanging out in the Potterrow Port underpass, and they look like they have modelled themselves on A Clockwork Orange’s droogs. These are environments Frankie exploits; he isn’t their sociological victim.
If Jobson speaks of his resistance to realism, it may rest on Jobson accessing a central but less commonly contemporary aspect of Scotland’s past: the Gothic. Theorists of Scottish representations often discuss Clydeside, Tartanry, and Kailyard, with hardman stories often falling into the former, as deprivation leads to desperation, and desperation leads to violence. Jobson emphasises the desperation but wants a Gothic aspect over a realist one — if we accept that an important element of the Gothic imaginary is a split personality given expressionist form. This allows, instead of the cause-and-effect of the social milieu giving rise to character, the character to demand an environment that reflects their chaotic mind. In Scotland, the doppelganger theme has been explored through the Caledonian Antisyzygy and its best-known manifestations are The Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The point would then be to find images that capture the split mind, and Gothic architecture can lend itself well to such a purpose, even if Jobson is more eclectic than that. He draws no less on the neo-classical (National Monument of Scotland, St Stephen’s Church), the Brutalist (the Potter Row Underpass), and the numerous medieval closes of the city. What he seeks are labyrinths of the mind and imposing monuments to reflect Frankie’s despair. While many might be put off by the voiceover (including numerous reviewers), those who know a little about Edinburgh will see a director trying to marry Scottish discourses of personal collapse, alongside a fidelity to capturing numerous places within the city that can exist both as carefully chosen locales and reflections of one man’s psyche.
 

© Tony McKibbin