#78 - Requiem for a Dream

“I'm somebody now, Harry. Everybody likes me. Soon, millions of people will see me and they'll all like me. I'll tell them about you, and your father, how good he was to us. Remember? It's a reason to get up in the morning. It's a reason to lose weight, to fit in the red dress. It's a reason to smile. It makes tomorrow all right. What have I got Harry, hm? Why should I even make the bed, or wash the dishes? I do them, but why should I? I'm alone. Your father's gone, you're gone. I got no one to care for. What have I got, Harry? I'm lonely. I'm old.”

Seeing has been fundamental to the identity of cinema for as long as it has been existed. It has been the means by which we have seen things we never could have imagined previous, both in spectacle and in intensity. It has also been the dream of millions to be in movies and to be seen, to have their shot, their (to borrow Andy Warhol’s, now clichéd, mantra of popularity) 15 minutes of fame. That’s what Sara Goldfarb wants. She sits in her armchair every day, a retired and lonely woman, and watches as the smiling faces, bright lights and constant validity are projected from her small, decrepit, rabbit-eared television. She watched across a gulf of knowing that she will never be on that side of the screen until one day she receives a suspiciously benevolent phone call offering, and not selling, her the opportunity to be on television. This miracle chance becomes her reason for being. She gains a new raison d’etre and decides that she needs to loose the weight of her years of lethargy and sugar addiction and fit back into the red dress that she wore to her son’s graduation, the last time she remembers feeling desired. Sara starts dieting, eating only egg and grapefruit until she is told that there is a regime of pills that can help her loose weight with a fraction of both effort and time. After a gained prescription from an indifferent doctor she beings to loose weight and gain energy, but as time drags on, and the reply from Madison Avenue is not forthcoming, she beings to slip, and her perfect routing begins to become unsustainable. Like the other characters in Requiem for a Dream, her control over her addiction begins to crack and her world becomes more and more enclosed and disturbed.

Sara’s speech to her son, as well as being a highly emotional and fantastic piece of writing, contains both the wish to be seen and to be understood; for someone to see from her point of view. Point of view is key to this film as it require a great amount of compassion, and endurance, to see through to the end the decent each character endures through consequence and addiction. Subjectivity is necessary as people like Sara, Harry, Tyrone and Marion are routinely dismissed in civil society as no-good junkies and scum. It is their point of view that we experience throughout the film through Aronofsky’s use of framing and image. Empathetic subjectivity through image is key to the film’s identity (as signposted by the frequent shots of the eye, whose retina is altered by a fresh dose and which take prominent place on the film’s poster). Without it the film would still be a powerful film, no doubt, but it wouldn’t effectively work the way it does and probably wouldn’t be on this list and it also wouldn’t effectively show the effects the various addictions are having on the film’s central characters.

One example of the use of image is Aronofsky’s use of split screen. Usually a device for either reducing the visual gap between characters during a phone call (most likely to avoid frequently cutting between the two side of a conversation) or for a clever piece of juxtaposition, like in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where two separate psychiatrist meetings are paired, with even the dialogue alternating scenes between lines (and actually shot at once with a fake wall between scenes). But in a conversation between Harry (Jared Leto) and Marion (Jennifer Connelly) the split screen shows two halves of the same image, the same conversation, only, that there is a delay of a few seconds between what seems like fluid conversation and delayed physical actions. This technique shows them as both together but also distinctly apart and isolated. Each having their own perspective and own individual world that is disconnected from the real world. Along with this, there are a vast amount of similar techniques used to portray a similar unreality and fragmentation (the film itself has around 2000 cuts, as opposed to most films having on average 600-700) and in no way shies away from showing exactly how each addiction takes it’s toll on all the characters.

The film gives a voice to those looking for solace and meaning, but are controlled by their addictions and acts, not as some have feebly called “anti-drug propaganda”, but rather as a viewpoint rarely seen before. Cinema does indeed show worlds rarely seen before, and here is no exception. The core difference being that this is a world that some would rather not see and does exist, and not a world we may wish to see, but doesn’t and deserves to be seen all the more for it (provided you are old enough as it is a VERY tough film).