alcohol's self-forgetting ranked below the Grail
presented the self-forgetting of alcohol as inferior to that of religion/art (since the consumption of bourbon made the salesman’s head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film’s end its dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time squeezing it through the front door of the Vittorio).
Context
The desire-mechanics panel stated obliquely through a film: self-forgetting is the Grail everyone in the book is chasing, and drink is explicitly graded as a lesser route to it than art or religion — because the drinking, far from dissolving the self, swells the drinker's involuted head until it won't fit through a door. The intoxicant that promises escape from the head only enlarges it; the substance sold as self-forgetting is the thing that traps you most inside yourself.