One of my all-time favourite films is My Cousin Vinny. If you haven’t seen it, seriously, go rent it. You are in for a treat.
Joe Pesci plays a lawyer who finds himself defending his cousin and his cousin’s friend in a murder trial in a backwoods county in the deep south of the USA. Although completely innocent, the boys accidentally confessed to the crime due to a misunderstanding. The defence has a mountain to climb, not least because Vinny has never been to trial before and has only dealt with divorce cases rather than capital cases. Also, the judge, played superbly by Fred Gwynne, is far from kindly disposed towards Vinny, who is a street-smart but rough-around-the-edges character who inadvertently offends him at every turn with his lack of decorum and deference to the court.
There are so many great scenes in the film, particularly between Pesci and Marisa Tomei, but there’s one that has a great deal of truth to it.
Vinny is persuading a sceptical defendant that he can win the case after a particularly rocky start. He makes this speech. I hope it’s not a disappointment, but I am not going to attempt a New Jersey accent.
“The DA’s gotta build a case. Building a case is like building a house. Each piece of evidence is just another building block. He wants to make a brick bunker of a building. He wants to use serious solid looking bricks like these [he points to the cell block walls]. Right? Let me show you something. [Pesci pulls out a deck of cards]. He’s going to show you the bricks [Pesci pulls out a card and shows it face-on]. He’ll show you they got straight sides. He’ll show you they got the right shape. He’ll show them to you in a very special way so they appear to have everything a brick should have. But there’s one thing he’s not going to show you. When you look at the bricks at the right angle [he tilts the card edge-on] they are as thin as this playing card. This whole case is an illusion, a magic trick. It has to be an illusion, ‘cause you’re innocent!”
It occurred to me recently that our beliefs about alcohol are just as illusory.
We think that alcohol helps us deal with stress. We think that alcohol helps us to make connections with people. We think that alcohol makes us happy.
We accept these beliefs as incontrovertible because this is what we have been told by films, by television, by advertising, by our families and by our friends.
But when you examine every one of these beliefs, they are all illusions. If they were not, then the more we drank, the less stressed we would be, the happier we would become and the more deep connections we would have with our friends, but that isn’t the case. If we are honest with ourselves, the opposite is true.
We are more stressed because we are dealing with the cognitive dissonance we feel due to the war going on in our heads (I want to drink/I don’t want to drink). We are stressed because regular alcohol use makes us produce an excess of the stress hormone cortisol. We are stressed because once the initial hit of alcohol wears off (in about 20 minutes) the body tries to achieve homeostasis, so secretes chemicals to calm us down, and these make us feel uneasy, depressed and uncomfortable.
It doesn’t make us happy – it makes us miserable because we know we are harming our health, our relationships, our careers and our wellbeing. And we certainly don’t feel happy when we are hungover – we feel physically and mentally about as far from happy as we could be.
And instead of deep connections with people, we have damaged relationships and superficial nights of drunken escape.
When the case goes to trial, Vinny demolishes the DA’s case by brilliantly exposing the illusions one by one and pulling apart the witness's testimony on the stand. This is what we help our clients see; once they have seen it, change becomes easy. Like one of those optical illusions that can have us stumped for a while, there is no way to unsee the new perspective once we have seen through it.
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