Sliding into one of the restaurant's corner booths, Ellen orders a gin and tonic and downs half of it as soon as the waitress brings it to her table. She has another with Hooper when he arrives and contrives to drink a third by deliberately delaying her choice of meal. In a Molly Bloom-like internal soliloquy, she wonders whether the booze will affect either her judgement or her tongue, and then - echoing the porter in Macbeth - worries "about alcohol increasing the desire but taking away the performance." The one thing she doesn't seem concerned about is whether the alcohol level in her blood is likely to impair her driving ability. As she shares a bottle of wine with Hooper, their conversation becomes increasingly explicit, and so too do Ellen's thoughts as she imagines them both as Ballardian victims of a road accident, caused not by DUI but by a fantasy of mutual masturbation.
In 1938 Professor Rolla N Harger invented the breathalyser and his home state of Indiana became the first to establish a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.15% as a means of defining impairment - a figure that remained the legal limit until the early Seventies when it was reduced to 0.10%. Officers believing a driver to be intoxicated could use a Field Sobriety Test (FST) to confirm their suspicions. In the 1950s when Roger Thornhill was charged with drunk driving in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, FSTs were far from sophisticated and the test was not always consistently applied. The Grand Rapids Study of 1964 demonstrated that a BAC as low as 0.4% was enough to increase a diver's likelihood of being involved in an accident, and it was this study that led to the eventual tightening of the law in the Seventies.
Peter Benchley - like many of his contemporaries and like the characters of his book- would have thought nothing of getting behind the wheel of a car after a few drinks.
