The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences does not give out an Emmy for most profligate depiction of substance abuse, but if it did, there would be at least three strong contenders this year. Season three of HBO’s Euphoria depicted Rue and Faye choking down Vaseline-coated balloons of fentanyl. Season two of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors followed the “eight-ball episode” from last year with shady billionaire Owen Ashe’s (a wonderfully bipolar James Marsden) consumption of ketamine, MDMA and blow, as well as a whole lot of single-malt Scotch and other high-end liquors tossed back by the cast. (Hamm’s character drinks higher-shelf stuff than his Mad Men alter ego).
And then there is Amazon Prime’s Spider-Noir.
I’m convinced the amount of whiskey consumed in each episode — which takes place in Depression and Prohibition-era New York, during the early 1930s — would be debilitating, if not toxic, to mere mortals.
I realized this while bingeing the highly entertaining series over the last few weeks. By the time I finished episode six, I had an increasingly unpleasant, visceral reaction to the copious whiskey swilling of Ben Reilly, the alter-ego of superhero (stuporhero?) The Spider — played in both cases by Nicolas Cage —and other characters in multiple scenes. Whiskey is quaffed in speakeasies, villain’s lairs, homes, offices and even in a morning mug of coffee.
To be fair, the excessive drinking is integral to the storytelling. Reilly suffers from major PTSD, having witnessed horrific things in World War I — including an encounter that results in his transformation to The Spider — and the murder of his great love, Ruby. (Like the death of Gwen Stacy, the beloved of Marvel Comics’ original Spider-Man, Peter Parker, Ruby’s murder was tied to her relationship, and his attempt to save her failed.)
I’m a former tabloid reporter who worked at a pre-digital Page Six, and drinking holes like the late, great Manhattan saloon Elaine’s played a key role in coaxing information and gossip from well-lubricated sources. A few pops at social events I covered also helped steel my nerves when I had to ask celebrities potentially infuriating questions and to tolerate the publicity hounds and gadflies dying to get into the column.
That experience is why I marveled at the unbridled tippling taking place in Spider-Noir, and the journalist in me wanted to determine the real-life effects of drinking like Ben Reilly and his cohort.
I proposed to my editors that I find out. “Let’s do it!” came the response. “Don’t charge us for the hangover.”
I purchased a bottle of Jameson whiskey and a drugstore breathalyzer. I cued up episode seven of Spider-Noir, “Nobody’s Hero,” and set out to drink every time a character did the same. I would take notes on my reactions as the show progressed. Because I do not have a death wish, I limited myself to a measured 1 oz. shot instead of the glasses depicted in the series that are filled with one or two fingers, neat, of what I hope was caramel-colored water on the set.
Initially, I intended to take a breathalyzer test after every round, but the instructions on the packaging said 20 minutes must elapse after imbibing to get an accurate reading, and that no eating or smoking could take place either. That would have to wait.
Here is what happened:
Opening scene
At The Alcove, the ritzy speakeasy owned by Irish crime boss and bootlegger Silvermane — played to perfection by Brendan Gleason — the piano playing of the venue’s alluring singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li) devolves into increasingly angry banging. She is guilt-ridden over revealing The Spider’s identity because, in the previous episode, she and Reilly vowed to run away to Santorini, Greece. Although she doesn’t yet know this, he was kidnapped as a result and subjected to crude experiments to determine the source of his powers. (I’m being purposely vague to avoid major spoilers.)
Cat downs two big swigs of vodka. Although my preferred cocktail is a vodka martini — vermouth in and out, three olives — I am not mixing spirits for this adventure. I take two shots of Jameson. And away we go.
Reaction: Smoooth. A curtain of whiskey warmth begins to blanket my body.
2:07 into the Episode: Silvermane storms into his club. “I need a drink,” he barks. “Lo, the irony. A man controls the flow of alcohol for a city of 7 million souls, and yet my troat [his brogue leaves out the ‘h’] is as dry as a camel’s hole in a sandstorm.” Silvermane drinks. I take another shot.
Reaction: Hoo boy, three shots in under three minutes. Pretty sure that’s a personal speed record. I feel this one in my stomach — in a worrisome way.
3:17: “Another round?” Cat asks Silvermane,” Does the king ride his sister?” he replies.
3:33 Cat pours. I take my fourth shot. This must be a personal speed record. “What are you fighting for?” she says. Silvermane: “Fighting is the point. It’s what gives the whiskey its taste.” He doesn’t drink. I’ve jumped the gun.
Reaction: “Hot pinball straight to the stomach,” I write in my notes. A glass of water would help here, but nobody in Spider-Noir drinks their whiskey with water back. I am determined to do the same.
9:06: An anxious Cat visits Reilly’s private investigations office. It’s daytime. Reilly’s gal Friday, Janet (Karen Rodriguez), a dogged sleuth herself, is packing up the place because Reilly has told her about him and Cat leaving town. Cat explains that Reilly never showed for their rendezvous. “It’s been days,” says a now equally worried Janet. Janet’s solution: “You want a drink? There’s probably a bottle still floating around here somewhere.” Cat turns her down, but Janet still fishes out a fifth of whiskey and splashes it into two water glasses. I gulp shots five and six. Cat takes a sip of hers, but the scene ends before Janet imbibes. I’ll call that one premature pop a buyback.
Reaction: My eyebrows are hot. Motor functions slowing. I misspell a few words while recording notes.
10:57: Ben Reilly is at a windowless speakeasy at what looks like the South Street Seaport. Giant slow-turning fans embedded in the walls offer flickering glimpses of daylight. He is drinking, what else, whiskey, and wallowing in the realization that Cat betrayed him. I take shot number seven. “Do you know anything about spider muscles, Eamon,” he asks the bartender (Michael Patrick McGill). Eamon, who looks like a young, beefier Rodney Dangerfield, says no. “That’s because they don’t have any,” Reilly says. “They’re on a hydraulic system. Shooting fluid to move their legs.” Eamon rolls his eyes. “Keep ‘em coming,” Reilly says. I throw back my eighth shot.
Reaction: I am beginning to feel like I, too, lack muscles. “Head is hot,” my notes says. “Buzzing.”
13:41: Six hooligans pile into the bar. They have fistfuls of cash. In a previous scene, two Silvermane-controlled supervillains — Flint Marko (Jack Huston) and Dirk Leyden (Andrew Lewis Caldwell), whom Spider-Man fans will recognize as Sandman and Megawatt — have robbed the mayor’s back-office campaign coffers and handed out the money on the street as incentives to vote for his opponent (and Silvermane’s new toady) in the upcoming election. One delinquent jostles Reilly. The group starts ripping on The Spider.
Hooligan 1: “Have you seen him lately?”
Hooligan 2: “He looks like my Mom after 10 loads of laundry.”
Off-camera Hooligan: “I don’t know what he’s been up to for the past half a decade, but the years haven’t been good to him.”
Even after eight shots, I have the wherewithal to think: couldn’t that guy have just said, “for the past five years”? Thugs aren’t usually unnecessarily wordy.
An off-camera hooligan (I’m no longer capable of discerning between voices) uses the phrase “photo op.” Wha? “Nodding,” read my notes. I pause the video and do an online search. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “photo op” was first used in 1981. After belching, I congratulate myself for noticing the anachronism in my altered state.
I restart the video. Reilly signals for a refill. I take a shot. That’s my ninth. Sweet Jesus, take the wheel.
Reaction: “Foggy,” the notes say. Indeed. When I rerun the episode to check the time codes, I see that I missed two of the skells slugging their own whiskeys.
My preoccupation with my increasing inebriation is broken by a tour-de-force Nic Cage moment. “Maybe, maybe, maybe, The Spider is a guy like anyone else,” he says to the toughs. “You ever think about that? You ever wonder what his problems were? He’s swinging around burning buildings saving people…”
Cut to the hooligans. They are rapt.
Cage goes full German Expressionist. His face twists. His eyes are wild. “Do you ever think he feels the heat? Or gets sad?” He pounds the bar. Restraint dissolves. “Or tired?!” He pounds the bar again. “Or lonely?!”
Cut again to the hooligans. They burst out laughing.
Disgusted, Reilly staggers out of the bar and into the daylight. I get up from my chair to gauge my balance. I’m not quite there but on my way.
Rosemary Clooney begins singing “Sway” on the soundtrack. Nice touch.
Outside the bar, Reilly finds his Spider headgear in his overcoat pocket. A more primitive version of Peter Parker’s, it looks like a knitted black face mask with opaque white eyepieces that light up when useful. He also wears a fedora but doesn’t have it. He dons the mask and staggers back into the gloom of the bar.
“Hey, you’re The Spider!” says one of the hooligans.
Much web-slinging and ass-kicking ensues. “Web! Web! Web! Web! Web!” a maniacal Reilly says machine-gun style, leaving the delinquents cocooned and in various states of consciousness. Eamon puts a glass on the bar (in my notes, I wrote, “puts a bar on the glass”) and reaches for a bottle.
17:27: Cage puts his own chewy spin on vaudevillian of that era Jimmy “The Great Schnozzola” Durante’s catchphrase, “Ha-cha-cha-cha!” and lifts his mask enough to reveal his mouth. When Peter Parker did this, it was usually to kiss Gwen Stacy or, later, Mary Jane Watson. Reilly’s love comes in a bottle. “That one’s on the house, pal,” Eamon says as he pours another round. “To the victor go the spoils,” says Reilly. I skull my tenth shot.
Reaction: This is no longer fun. Cotton-headed and numb, I shuffle over to a mirror. My eyes have narrowed; my face looks like I have full-blown rosacea.
17:44: Daily Bugle reporter and Spider ally Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris), whose vibrant super fly outfits make a strong argument for watching the series in “true-hue” color instead of black and white — the viewer can switch back and forth — enters the bar and surveys the chaos. “Ah shit,” he says. “What the hell are you doing? Janet’s got me looking all over the city for you.”
“I’m drinking. What’s it look like?” replies Reilly.
An existential discussion about the price of being a superhero takes place on a park bench overlooking the East River, then Robertson drags Reilly back to his office.
“Wait, are you yellow?” Janet says upon seeing her boss.
“What do you mean, yellow? Like a coward?” Reilly replies.
“No, like a banana,” she says.
I snort. In the previous episode, the scientist looking for the source of The Spider’s superpowers discovers it in a biopsy she takes of his liver. His liver! Go, writer’s room! What would a biopsy of my liver reveal right now?
While Reilly recounts the events that led to his current state, he inadvertently reveals that he is The Spider. He slaps his forehead. “Oopsie-poopsie,” he says to Janet. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“You already did tell me that,” Janet replies.
22:34: Cue three flashbacks. In the first and best, Janet walks in on Reilly in his skivvies. Garters hold up his socks. He is wearing his Spider goggles and the fedora that’s also part of his costume, but not his face mask. Bing Crosby is singing, “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”
“Ay, hijo de tu madre!” Janet exclaims.
“I’m The Spider, Janet,” a plastered Reilly slurs as he waves a bottle of whiskey. “I Spider.” I pause the video and laugh hard. I toast Cage with shot number eleven.
Reaction: This one really burns. I’m feeling queasy. “Sloshing,” my notes say. That would be the 11 ounces of whiskey in my stomach.
The second flashback does not involve drinking. In the third, der Bingle is still on the soundtrack, and Janet walks in on Reilly hanging from ceiling using his Velcro-like spider grip. In his free hand, he’s holding a bottle of hooch and drunkenly singing into it, “I’m your Spider. Be my Spider. To be real.” I recognize that last lyric but brain… not… working. I look it up later, based on the note, “’70s song” and determine that it’s Cheryl Lynn’s 1978 hit, “Got to Be Real.” Reilly doesn’t actually drink from the bottle, but I still take my 12th shot. I don’t note why.
Reaction: Covfefe. Is my hearing is dimming? Was that a grunt?
23:29 Janet pours Ben a cup of… tea? Making tea in my condition could be disastrous, so I gratefully down a glass of water.
25:46: Cat and Flint Marko are at her apartment. Though she agreed to run away with Reilly, Marko is her true love, but he is irrevocably transforming into the Sandman. He knows he can’t stay with her. He’s also pissed that she planned to run off with Reilly. “There’s no coming back from this,” he tells Cat. “This life, it’s got no taste now. It’s got no feel.” There’s no drinking in this scene, but it nicely sums up how I’m feeling.
28:38 Silvermane’s super goons are passing out bottles of stolen Canadian whiskey to local law enforcement officers, and once again telling them to vote for the mayor’s opponent. No one’s drinking though. In fact, no one drinks for 13 or so minutes left in the episode. A big battle ensues — I won’t give away the conclusion — and once the end credits roll, I wait another 10 and give the breathalyzer a blow. I get a 0.09 percent reading, but I forget to take a video for proof. I wait another 10 minutes and repeat the steps, this time while recording the procedure with a video. This time I get a 0.08 percent.
Reaction: Based on how unsteady I feel and the volume of whiskey I’ve consumed in less than a half hour, I’m surprised the number is not higher. While blood alcohol content of 0.08 percent is the floor for a DUI charge in New York and California, it’s much lower than the past breathalyzer results for celebrity DUI recipients Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan and Haley Joel Osment, which were 0.12 percent or higher. Then again, I didn’t match the volume the characters sluiced down their pieholes.
I want to assume the fetal position but flash back to another alcohol-drenched bit of entertainment, 1987’s Barfly, written by Charles Bukowski — essentially, based on his life — and starring Mickey Rourke. I realize that I need fuel. Using my McDonald’s app, I order a Big Mac meal and six chicken nuggets. When the bag arrives, there’s also a McCrispy chicken sandwich inside. I eat that too. Tank full.
Reaction: What did I learn from this escapade? I not Spider, Janet.
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