Wine bars. Dive bars. Sports bars. Hipster bars. Cocktail bars. Night clubs. Dance clubs. Music venues. Nostalgia bars. Piano bars. Speakeasies. Irish pubs. Brewpubs. Gastropubs. Gay bars. Biker bars. Etc. These days, there are a fairly bewildering assortment of choices when it comes to finding a place to imbibe alcohol. I haven’t even exhausted the possibilities. Comedy clubs, there’s another one. Not to mention the whole galaxy of places that serve alcohol but aren’t “bars” proper. And each one of the types I’ve already listed can come in a variety of flavors.
Bars are a pretty integral part of the social fabric of our generation (by which I vaguely mean anyone born before between, say, 1985 and 1995). While not everybody binge drinks or otherwise consumes spirits prodigiously, it’s considered by many among our generation for it to be unusual or noteworthy when they meet someone who doesn’t drink at all. Going to bars (or some other establishment that sells alcohol) is one of the bedrock social activities. I mean, just look how happy these attractive people are:
I know this doesn’t sound like a very profound thing to say. But think about the broader cultural perception of bars as portrayed in movies and TV. Broadly speaking, movies and TV only portray two different archetypes of night-life: swanky night-clubs (where everyone is attractive and drugs abound) or dingy and depressing dive bars (where regulars are stooped sullenly and silently over their drinks). Sure, there are some slight variants of these tropes. Sometimes the dive bar is a rustic country tavern, sometimes it’s a pool hall. “A Clockwork Orange” has that creepy milk bar. Gangster and noir movies sometimes portray smokey lounges, instead, while Westerns rely on saloons. And so on.
But, fundamentally, the way movies tell us to think about bars is very … old-fashioned, almost puritanical. Bars and clubs are usually depicted as being a place of moral turpitude. The list of functions that they serve is short and sordid: they are where people on their last legs go to drown away their sorrows, they are places where criminals go to conduct their business under the cover of darkness, they are places to be either pitied or feared. When a character goes into a bar, you know it’s because things are not going well.
Maybe bars did used to be like this. Maybe in the good ol’ days, real men drank scotch in suits in fine offices full of mahogany, and only degenerates and malcontents deigned to drink alcohol in a bar. Or maybe this is just a construct of Hollywood, as an easy way to signal despair. Regardless, it seems incongruous with the way our generation has come to actual interact with bars in daily life.
If anything, bars have gone too far in the other direction. It isn’t uncommon now to see young parents hanging out at bars while their children play under the table. Some bars even have dedicated niches for children. There’s a whole industry growing of bars that are also other things, like barcades, so people can play arcade games and drink, and axe-throwing bars, so people can throw axes and drink. The importance and popularity of bars, and alcohol more generally, has grown to the point where it is starting to subsume other aspects of social culture (non-Mormon division). Now, your friend going to a bar isn’t considered a reason to worry; if anything, it’s when your friend doesn’t meet you at the bar that you get concerned they might be depressed. Movies haven’t yet caught up with this paradigm shift.
So the next time you see Ron Burgundy crying in a bar, tell him to cheer up. Invite him to the quirky speakeasy in the alleyway behind the Whole Foods; the password is on their Twitter. Or, if that’s not your speed, head on down to the gastropub with the sleek Scandinavian design for a $15 pint and a $39.50 Asian-fusion turkey burger with papaya chutney on brioche. Or just go on down to the local pub, with a name like the Randy Leprechaun, tp get a pint of Guinness and put a banger in your mouth. Whatever your inclination, just go out and grab a drink. And remember the wise words of Homer Simpson: