The concept
of everyone existing in their own bubble is becoming more and more prominent as
time goes on and the world/culture/politics finds increasing ways to divide us.
Where one person hears verifiable facts, another hears flagrant falsehoods.
Where one person sees hate, another sees freedom. Now more than ever, for
reasons right or wrong, people are seeking communities where they can be
themselves, express their own ideas without judgment, and have those ideas
validated by those who think like them. Whether they’re safe spaces on campuses
or hate threads on 8chan, people are seeking commonality, and if they look hard
enough, they’ll find it.
The Roaring
‘20s, formerly a dive bar in Las Vegas, Nevada, was one of those places where
people could meet, thrive in each other’s company, exchange ideas, trade
regrets, and find a little hope while staring down the empty bottom of a bar
glass. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, a
documentary by filmmakers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross (colloquially known as
the Ross Brothers), takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to a bar’s last hurrah in
operation as its patrons filter in for one final morning/day/night of drinks,
laughs, chaos, tension, and tears. As we meet them, we sense the history they
have with the bar and its other regulars. They’re not random folks who wander
in for a spritz. They each have a name, a personality; for them, this is
routine, a part of their lives, a haven for their worries and whiskey wisdom. And
the things that come out of their mouths are unexpectedly poignant, hilarious,
offensive, or downright befuddling.
“It’s a place you can go [when] nobody
else don’t want your ass.”
There’s
Michael, whom we meet trudging to the bar first thing in the morning, where he
offers a hello to Marc the bartender before heading into the bathroom to shave
and put himself together. A bit-part actor (whose only credit you’ve likely
heard of is the Will Ferrell Comedy Get
Hard), Michael is brutally honest in his hungover self-assessment: he’s an
alcoholic and failure (which his fellow patrons don’t refute in an act of empty
support), but that, to his credit, he didn’t become an alcoholic until he’d
already termed himself a failure.
There’s
Bruce, a Vietnam War veteran, who has the saddest eyes in the room. He talks of
losing his fellow soldiers in his platoon, the pain of that moment, and the
pain that haunts him to that day. He breaks down in tears over how his country
treated him after he came home. The bar is all he has, meaning its patrons, and
with it closing down, he has no one left – no friends, no family. Bruce later
leaves the bar toward the end of the night, unspotted, with no proper on-screen
goodbye, spilling fresh tears. The only witness to his slow descent into the
darkness of night down a lonely alley is the camera.
I could keep
you here all day with all the different “characters” of the Roaring ‘20s.
There’s Ira, an aggressive, antagonistic, gravelly-voiced drunk who tells one
of his fellow patrons to “get a pistol and shoot yourself in the forehead” –
and this before his anonymous place of employment actually knows to call the
bar when he fails to show up for his shift. There’s John, a young Australian, a
bringer of donuts, and wielder of a mysterious brown bag that’s referenced a
few times during the doc, to which John says “don’t worry about it,” but when
its contents are finally revealed, it’s hilariously perfect. (John later dabs a
full tab onto the tip of his tongue once the party really gets going, and then soon
acknowledges, “That was too much acid. The number of acids needs to be less.”) There’s
Pam, a 60-year-old bar maiden who is quick to flash her breasts multiple times
in hopes that someone else will remark on their youthful appearance. Slinging
them drinks are first- and second-shift bartenders, Marc, a bearded
guitar-player, and Shay, a quick-witted mother of unscrupulous son Tra
(pronounced Trey), who sits outside the bar with his two friends sharing
joints, sneaking beers, and eavesdropping on all the chaos that leaks out from
the back exit.
“Hey Paul, could
you bring me the toilet paper?
I got a bad
situation in here.”
From their
outward appearance, these are the people you pass in the street whom you would
so easily judge. We see Michaels and Bruces every day – people with missing
teeth, scraggly hair, prematurely aged features, military service baseball caps
– and we can tell they’ve lived long, tough lives…but we judge them for it. If
it’s a Michael, we write in our heads all the poor choices he’s made; if it’s a
Bruce, we see the military emblems and assume that he’s sad and broken from a
war that stole his youth and his joy. We don’t know their story; we just know
they’re taking too long in front of us in line at the store, or they’re trying
to engage perfect strangers in conversation because of their loneliness and
their desire to feel worth. What Bloody
Nose, Empty Pockets reinforces is that, in this small bubble of the Roaring
‘20s, these are real people with real relationships. They’ve lost family,
traveled the world, served their country, forged relationships. They fight,
they flirt, they trade advice and regrets. For whatever reason, the outside
world has rejected them. Their friends and families have left or died or never
existed at all. For many of them, this is the only world that matters to them,
and with the documentary filming the bar’s final day, we see this world coming
to an end and how everyone reacts to it.
Once a
viewer catches a glimpse of all the different drunken characters slurring
profanities, flashing aged extremities, and nearly getting into physical
altercations, that viewer might blithely describe the Roaring ‘20s as the anti-Cheers, but that viewer would be wrong.
It’s not the anti-Cheers. It’s just Cheers. Full-on Cheers. At the Roaring ‘20s, everyone knows your name, what you
drink, what troubles you; they know your history, your sadness, your triumphs, your
pain. They drink together, naturally, but they dance together, too; they hug
and catch up. They watch Jeopardy, shout
their answers to the TV, get nothing right, and good-naturedly curse “smarmy
fuck” Alex Trebek for always knowing the answer. They watch talk shows about planning
the ideal cruise ship vacation, perhaps knowing that they aren’t just the last
people on earth to be caught dead on a cruise, but they probably couldn’t
afford to go anyway. And it’s no coincidence that, later on in the night when
the rambunctious crowd hits a fevered pitch, the camera happens to capture that
same TV now showing a ‘50s dramatization of the sinking of the Titanic, the
most famous shipwreck in history. Because whether they be majestic “unsinkable”
ships, or periods of youthful happiness, or local dive bars, things come to an
end. The most magnificent creations die slow deaths. Nothing is forever.
“You just tried to fight a man with
tattoos on his eyelids.”
It’s both
ironic and appropriate that the very bar whose last day we’re witnessing
happens to be called the Roaring ‘20s – perhaps the most infamous decade of
American history, which began with promise following the advent of the automotive
industry’s assembly line, kickstarting production of Henry Ford’s Model T and
changing the world, along with the beginning of the suffrage movement that led
to a woman’s right to the vote, but ending with the Great Depression of 1929,
which saw the loss of millions of jobs and homes, and which saw, sadly, a
massive increase in suicides. It was the end of an era, and the beginning of a
long period of suffering and hopelessness where people felt aimless, useless,
and without a place to go.
Unlike that
infamous abrupt ending of American history, 1929, the patrons of the Roaring
‘20s were at least allowed to pre-mourn an ending they knew was coming. Because
of this, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets feels
like the last episode of a TV show that was on for years, which saw cast
members come and go during its many seasons, and for which every one of those
characters came back for one last appearance, acknowledging the part they’ve
played in its history and reminding audiences they will always be part of it –
even if their memories of it aren’t always so rosy. At one point, Michael, the
self-confessed alcoholic failure, drunkenly embraces a younger patron named
Pete and begs him to choose a different path – one that doesn’t end in finding
another bar once the Roaring ‘20s closes its doors. “You need to get out of
this bar and don’t go into another one, and don’t go into another one after
that,” he tells him. “You can still do something other than what I’ve done.
There is nothing more boring than…a guy who used to do stuff who doesn’t do
stuff no more because he’s in a bar.”
When Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets comes to an
end, the viewer will no doubt have a
variety of different interpretations on how to feel. What did we just witness? Was
it a collection of losers for us to gawk at, feel emboldened by the
explicitness of their failures, all to feel better about our own lives? Was it
a glimpse into the lives of a bunch of down-and-outers who have nothing left
but a place in which to drown their woes? Was it the dissolving of the only
family many of these patrons have ever known? Was it a tale of hope that there
exists out in the world a community for every kind of person, scrubbing reality
of any indication that we’re all actually alone? That, ultimately, will be up
to every viewer to decide. What I do know, however, is that what I witnessed
was beautiful, that you can find beauty in places you’d least expect to find it,
that it does offer hope, that these
men and women from every different possible walk of life – age, race, gender, sexual
orientation, profession, political ideology – found each other, and in doing
so, found comfort with each other.
They found a community that lifted them up, or tore them down when they needed
it, or offered a place to escape, to exorcise their demons, confess their sins,
do penance, and amend their lives. They found a place to dance and sing and
laugh and cry and to be utterly themselves without judgment. Can you honestly say you have that? Because
I’m not sure I can.
“This was a real nice place you had here.”
