TODAY'S NUGGET: The Lost Weekend (1945) - Two Steps in Thinking About Emotion

[Quick Summary:  Don, an alcoholic, failed novelist, tries to survive the weekend alone at his brother's apartment.]

The premise of an alcoholic getting drunk over a long weekend? Boring, right?

I read this script and had to begrudgingly admit that the writers Wilder and Brackett got my emotions invested.  How? 

Lagos Egri said it best in his chapter "Emotion: The Source of Identification":

Here is where the writer's intelligence is tested to the full. The first step is to make your reader or viewer identify your character as someone he knows. Step two - if the author can make the audience imagine that what is happening can happen to him, the situation will be permeated with aroused emotion and the viewer will experience a sensation so great that he will feel not as a spectator but as the participant of an exciting drama before him. 

Here, the writers first establish how Don uses alcohol to numb him from fear as a failed writer (we ALL know that person).  

Don must, must have alcohol, but has not sold his precious typewriter or cheated on his faithful girlfriend Helen.  

But when his hits bottom (scene below) we all say, "That could happen to me too":

Don is shaking so that he can't pick up the glass. He bends down, sucks half of it, then lifts the glass and drians the rest. He holds out the empty glass to Nat, his eyes imploring.

NAT: That's all.

DON: Come on, Nat, come on. I'll let you have my typewriter.

NAT: I'm no writer. You're the writer. Now go. Go away.

DON: Nat --

NAT: I mean it. Get out.

Don takes the typewriter and drags himself out of Nat's place. Then we see Third Avenue, outside Nat's as Don emerges, and starts dragging himself up the street toward home. As he passes the antique shop, he suddenly stops. There stands the wooden Indian that Gloria spoke about, pointing up. That's where Gloria lives. Second floor, this same house. Don walks into the house.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED: I shall cogitate more about the second part ("could happen to me too") because it is the trickier bit for me.

The Lost Weekend (1945)
by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder
Adapted from the novel by Charles R. Jackson