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Thanks, I Hate It: Requiem for a Dream
🕑 Added 2019-01-08 00:48:07 +0000 UTCIf I were given total authority to wipe any art I chose out of existence, Requiem for a Dream wouldn’t exist. That’s it. Forrest Gump? Dumb, but it can stay. Mein Kampf? Whatever, he’s dead. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties? I think we can survive it. No, it’s Aronofsky’s insipid anti-drug PSA, dripping with cautionary moralizing and D.A.R.E-league scare tactics, that really deserves the ax. There’s something to the much-celebrated bodycam shots, I suppose, but they’d impress more if the characters’ perspectives and emotions in which we’re meant to feel trapped amounted to anything beyond “heroin is bad.”
On the subject of heroin, if there’s a movie with less empathy and understanding for addicts, I don’t want to see it. Aronofsky’s junkies are pale, wriggling grubs without humanity or motivation, their lives strings of misdeeds bent to the arc of their addictions. They have no self-awareness, no real personalities. Nor is there much to suggest the causes of their illness, beyond a general sort of “sign of the times” cultural malaise. Aronofsky’s interest in their suffering feels prurient rather than investigate, hungry to depict the worst and most degrading experiences a person could go through without pausing to consider what it feels like to go through them.
Misery in art can drag us kicking and screaming into vulnerable places where we might never venture on our own, but only if it shows us what we don’t already believe, if it confronts us with things we’d sooner not think. Requiem for a Dream tells us what we’re always told about addicts. They’re weak. They’re vapid. They prize their own pleasure above the wellbeing of their loved ones. In spectacles of abasement like the infamous “ass to ass” scene and in Sara’s (Ellyn Burstyn) ecstatic envelopment by a hollow game show, we get not an opportunity to understand the loneliness and isolation in which addiction breeds, but a smug assurance that we’re superior to those who suffer from it.
Comments
Gretchen Felker-Martin
100% correct
One of the few films whose DVD I have taken out of my DVD player & thrown against the wall as hard as I was physically able.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
Me, watching Jurassic Park: Man I could really go for being eaten alive by a tyrannosaurus rex.
Side note- you know you're an addict when you watch requiem for a dream and it makes you want more heroin. Yup. I still want heroin every time I rewatch it.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
I wouldn't presume to value my take on this over the take of someone who has experience with addiction, honestly. But yeah I noticed the pupil thing too! Really dumb detail to miss. I like The Fountain, which I think is very pretty, very sad, and contains a great monologue about letting the body die.
Do you like any of Aronofsky's other films? You know what's interesting- I watched this in the early days of my drug addiction and I sympathized SO much with the characters. I mean I must have projected so much of myself into them. So I really loved it. I thought of it as a sympathetic portrayal until, well, just now. But you bring up some interesting points. I still think Ellen Burstyn's performance in this film is fucking heartbreaking. I guess up until now my only (and let me admit now, very petty) complaint that makes me sound like a drug snob is the giant pupil dilation shots. HEROIN PINS YOUR PUPILS PEOPLE. Just show that footage backwards please. Ok petty snob complaint over. I still love the movie because it just gives me all the feelings I got the first time I watched it. And those were some fucking intense feelings. I don't know if you think that's an okay way to approach art, but that's how I do sometimes.
