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Requiem // 102 Post #6

No matter how poor the movie this sort of protracted examination is a fate almost too cruel for any director to suffer. Almost. An exception of course is being made for Darren Aronofsky‘s Requiem for a Dream (2000) and so I’ll cut straight to it, spoiler alert, this film is utter tosh.

Until I was approached by Nicholas Rombes to contribute to this project I remember actually liking Requiem. The first and last time I saw the movie before now was in Warsaw’s Kino Muranów in late summer of 2000. Ten years ago the movie’s use of montage, split screen, and heart-rending score by Clint Mansell struck me as a fresh new approach to telling the tale of addiction’s many faces. New and thrilling was how I remembered it anyway, which ought to have been an indication of what was in store for me upon a second viewing — memory after all is rarely a reliable witness. It certainly wasn’t how I remembered the eighth minute of Requiem for a Dream, which is quite possibly still one of my favorite scenes in an otherwise disappointing and overly deterministic movie.

The scene begins with Harry (Jared Leto) and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) eating snow cones at a food counter on a listless summer evening in Coney Island. Talk turns to scoring heroin directly from their chief source, which they surmise they could in turn sell and use the profits to buy a pound of pure heroin, and thus be able to live out a comfortable summer free the daily hustle of having to score scag — a decidedly improbable scenario for a couple of small time junkies whose primary source of income is the repeated pawning Harry’s mother’s relic of a television set. A police officer approaches the counter and takes a seat. Harry and Tyrone perk up a bit and exchange a knowing glance. Unbeknownst to the cop Harry unbuttons the officer’s holster, withdraws his side arm, and proceeds to play monkey in the middle with Tyrone. Or at least that’s how Harry imagines it until he’s jolted out of his pipe dream into the banal present after being prompted by the cook several times for his order. The cop looks at Harry. Harry declines another order. Harry and Tyrone leave the counter. Scene ends.

Aronofsky uses the same fantasy technique later in the movie when Marion (Jennifer Connelly) drives a fork into the hand of Arnold the shrink (Sean Gullette) as he makes a sexual advance. Like the monkey in the middle scenario, the scene is wrenched back to a desperate present wherein Marion offers sex in exchange for money to her erstwhile psychiatrist. Both fantasy sequences — monkey in the middle and the forked hand — picture the Requiem protagonists acting out in ways contrary to their condemned lives. On both occasions, however the fantasies collapse and the characters resume their one-way journeys to oblivion.

For all the jazzed up editing and lurid subject matter Requiem for a Dream is little more than Old Testament redux. Characters are doomed without any possibility of redemption. The monkey in the middle and forked hand fantasies provide a glimmer of another world not entirely ruled by an angry God or the economy of heroin addiction. Just as Harry and Tyrone taunt the cop with his pistol so too Aronfsky taunts the audience with the promise of dramatic conflict only to snatch it away in an instant. To those who would suggest that is how addiction works in a relentless, all-consuming fashion, I counter by saying that is precisely where Aronofsky’s film founders. Requiem‘s portrayal of addiction however realistic or not makes for lousy dramatic effect and even worse cinema.

As a closing thought were my clever remarks, bad poetry, and first semester graduate papers from ten years ago be subjected to the same scrutiny I can say definitely that I would fare much worse than today’s subject.

“Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway.”

Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove, 1984. 53-63.

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