Twelve-Step Theology and Cinema as Metaphysical Discourse
Our discussion has repeatedly argued that modern addiction cannot be adequately understood as a medical disorder, moral failing, or behavioral compulsion alone. Rather, addiction emerges historically as a response to a civilizational rupture: the collapse of transcendence in Western modernity coupled with the persistence of metaphysical longing. Alcoholism, in particular, exemplifies this condition with unusual clarity. What modernity calls addiction is not simply excessive substance use, but a displaced soteriology—a false solution to the problem of meaning after God.
Antonio Escohotado’s historical account of psychoactive substances demonstrates that addiction, as a stable structure of compulsion and identity, is not a universal human phenomenon. Across antiquity and into the pre-modern Christian world, drugs functioned as pharmaka: mediating agents capable of healing, poisoning, revealing, or consoling depending on ritual, dosage, and symbolic containment. Wine, opium, cannabis, and visionary plants were integrated into religious rites, medical practices, and communal life without producing the ontological category of “the addict.” Excess occurred, but it remained episodic and socially bounded. The absence of addiction was not the result of restraint or ignorance, but of meaning.
Modernity dismantles this containment. The Reformation weakens sacramental mediation, the Enlightenment evacuates cosmic order, and capitalist rationalization privatizes suffering. What remains is the autonomous subject, burdened with responsibility but deprived of transcendence. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism—life continuing after the death of God—finds its most concrete and embodied expression in addiction. When transcendence disappears, intoxication replaces it. Alcohol becomes a substitute sacrament, offering temporary relief from metaphysical weight without offering redemption.
This transformation fundamentally alters the nature of drinking. Alcohol no longer intensifies life symbolically; it compensates for its emptiness. As Wolfgang Giegerich argues, modernity forces meaning inward. Contradictions once held ritually, mythically, or theologically must now be borne psychologically. Addiction arises when the soul refuses this inward burden and seeks chemical relief. Modern alcoholism is therefore not Dionysian ecstasy but post-Dionysian exhaustion. It is not excess, but compulsion; not celebration, but survival.
Within this context, twelve-step theology must be understood not as a therapeutic technique but as an implicit religious response to modern metaphysical collapse. Its foundational insight is theological rather than psychological: the addict cannot save himself. The admission of powerlessness marks the breakdown of the modern myth of autonomy. Step Two’s appeal to a “Higher Power” reintroduces transcendence without dogma, allowing secular subjects to re-enter a symbolic order without explicitly naming God. This ambiguity is not a weakness but a structural necessity within a culture that distrusts metaphysics yet cannot live without it.
Confession, long displaced from modern life, returns centrally in twelve-step practice. Here Greg Mogenson’s insight is decisive: addiction persists where truth cannot be spoken. Modern psychology places the subject before an endless courtroom of explanation, diagnosis, and self-surveillance without absolution. Twelve-step confession restores allocution—speech addressed to another—without guaranteeing forgiveness. This risk is essential. What heals is not certainty but exposure.
Yet twelve-step theology remains structurally incomplete. It restores humility, confession, and transcendence, but without sacramental resolution or eschatological closure. Hence the perpetual temporality of recovery: one is always “in process,” always vulnerable, never redeemed. This endlessness mirrors modernity itself—a Good Friday without Easter, a salvation indefinitely deferred.
Cinema becomes the privileged medium for visualizing this condition precisely because it operates where theology and psychology falter. Film does not conceptualize addiction; it renders it visible. Modern addiction cinema consistently depicts not substance abuse per se, but the collapse of symbolic worldhood. Time fragments or loops. Narrative progression gives way to repetition. Space loses meaning and becomes interchangeable: bars, motels, highways, ruined cities. These are not merely settings but metaphysical landscapes emptied of transcendence.
Unlike pre-modern intoxication, which opened the cosmos, modern addiction closes it. Vision narrows rather than expands. The addict does not journey; he stalls. Bodies lose expressivity and become functional or depleted. Speech fragments, silence dominates, and action no longer leads to transformation. Cinema thus visualizes what Nietzsche and Giegerich diagnose philosophically: the literalization of soul-collapse in bodily repetition.
At the same time, cinema repeatedly stages moments that echo twelve-step conversion—not as triumphs of will, but as gestures of surrender. These moments are typically understated, humiliating, and ambiguous. Survival occurs not through mastery but through relinquishment. This is profoundly anti-modern and quietly theological. Film thus becomes a cultural unconscious, revealing what modern discourse resists acknowledging: that addiction is not primarily a failure of discipline, but a symptom of a civilization that has lost the capacity to suffer meaningfully.
From this perspective, modern addiction must be understood neither as sin nor as disease alone, but as heresy. It is a false answer to a real theological question. Alcohol promises relief from meaninglessness but delivers repetition. Twelve-step theology partially corrects this by reintroducing transcendence and confession, yet it cannot fully redeem what modernity has structurally foreclosed. Cinema, finally, stands as the medium in which this unresolved tension becomes visible, staging addiction as the lived experience of metaphysical collapse.
Brenton L. Delp