Editor’s Note: This article is by contributing editor Michelle McClellan.
Smashed (2012) is the story of a young woman named Kate in present-day Los Angeles who confronts her excessive drinking through the Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship. She gains sobriety, although her marriage disintegrates and she is fired from her job in the process. The overall narrative trajectory is familiar: it traces Kate’s life as she moves from her out-of-control drinking to the supportive intervention of a colleague, to the challenges of early sobriety, to a relapse when she loses her job, and then her one-year sober anniversary. While previous addiction films have featured alcoholic women as protagonists at least as far back as The Smash-Up (1947), the central character in this genre is still more likely to be a man. What makes Smashed unique is that Kate’s identity as a young married woman allows pregnancy to be deployed as a plot device, revealing deeply-held ideas about drinking and maternity in the United States.
