Thanks, I Hate It: Requiem for a Dream

If 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.