The 2000 film, Requiem for a Dream, by Director Darren Aronofsky is a chilling look into the realities of drug addiction, disappear, and hopelessness. If ever their was an anti-drug film or Public Services Announcement cautioning people about the dangers and ills of drug use, this could most certainly serve as one of the canonical texts. One viewing of this film would cause Nancy Regan’s 1980’s warnings of “Just saying No” to duck and hide their insufficient faces in shame for simply not hitting home hard enough. According to Farber, in The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s, he contends that by the late 1960s, many young antiwar activities and others who were involved in a variety of social and political movements were in open revolt against what they considered “the American way of life,” believing that the “traditional” values of American life were what had produced the war in Vietnam, racism, and a lot of other ugliness. The shock troops in this “cultural war,” at least as most Americans saw it, were the longhaired “freaks” and “hippies” of what was then called the “counterculture.” It was the counterculture, more than the antiwar movement or Black Power groups, that seemed to many older Americans to be the most threatening to their family and loved ones. Far more young people would experiment with illegal drugs and counterculture lifestyles than would ever participate in the civil rights, antiwar, or student movement (Faber, 168). The spread, lure, promotion, and open use of illegal and experimental drugs was the main reason a majority of adult Americans feared and hated the counterculture (Faber, 173). The hippies did not introduce drugs to America, however it was their use of mind-altering substances without the permission of the medical establishment that seemed to cause the most friction. Young underground drug manufacturers and dealers operating out of protected counterculture enclaves would at first supply the new drugs (Farber, 174). Every generation perhaps praises itself as more influential than the one preceding it. This may be the reason as to why even today, the 1960’s are documented and looked back upon with a certain historical nostalgia and even reverence. It was sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, civil rights, women’s rights, black power, antiwar, a time for change and a shift in the American value system. Though drugs were feared by the establishment then, it seemed to have an air of youthful rebellion with perhaps less negative stigmas attached, after all the hippies grew up, cut their hair, and eventually migrated into corporate America as well. This dreamy outlook seems tame when pitted in comparison to the gruesome six-year period between 1984 and 1990 in the United States referred to as the crack epidemic, during which America boar witness to a huge surge in the use of crack cocaine in major cities, and crack-houses all over the USA. Fallout from the epidemic included a huge surge in addiction, homelessness, murder, theft, robbery, and long-term imprisonment. This fallout also spurred the “war on drugs”, a term coined in 1971 by Richard Nixon to describe a new set of initiatives designed to enhance drug prohibition. Despite the social stigma of drug use and trade throughout the 20th century the drug trade has remained profitable in more than one way. From a media and pop cultural standpoint, drugs, drug use, and drug distributors have been glamorized in showcases of musicians (Jim Morrison of the Doors, Kirk Cobain of Nirvana, and most recently British pop sensation Amy Winehouse), immortalized fictional and non-fictional characters in films (King of New York (Frank White), American Gangster (Frank Lucas), and New Jack City (Nino Brown)) and as stated earlier, in the pleasantly nostalgic relationship with Woodstock and the hippies movement of the past. It perhaps even seems common place to hear echoes of, “Just say no,” or “don’t do drugs”, but simultaneously see sexy and alluring images within popular culture that would make even the slightly curious adolescent, say, “okay maybe just once.” Curtis Jackson-Jacob’s case study entitled “Crack Use on a College Campus” is an interesting read in relation to viewing Requiem for a Dream. In his case study, Jackson-Jacob’s expands the fairly narrow and dismissive view often held about “crack heads” as street predators or street victims, to also include, stable users, sneaky dabblers, and campus smokers. In other words, normal, functioning, and successful people also smoke crack, often stigmatized as a purely ghetto (i.e. urban minority) drug. Jackson-Jacob’s point in the article is twofold: 1.) To present an alternative to the dominant images of crack use in the most impoverished conditions in American society and 2.) Comparing crack use across a variety of settings, argue that features of the environments of use critically shape the organization of crack-related troubles, including criminality, victimization, legal sanction, and stigmatization (Jackson-Jacob, 342). He goes on to explain the five designated categories, providing examples of each. Jackson-Jacob’s case study/social experiment, really humanizes the use of crack in a way that is rarely seen. The people are “normal” and relatively harmless, accept possibly to their own physical well being, referring to whatever long or short term effects the drugs may have on the body. Perhaps most interesting, in the case study, is how absolutely adamant some of the students were about not wanting their parents to find out about their habit. It is as if the social stigma or shame they would feel from their parents discovering their “bad” habit is the only real or meaningful consequence to their drug use. This of course points back to the topic of discussion, deviant behavior and how it is perceived in our society. Though in Requiem for a Dream the choice of drug is heroin, instead of crack, the fact that the main users are primarily middle to upper-class people illuminates what Jackson-Jacobs found in his case study. Based on Hubert Selby's 1978 novella, Requiem for a Dream follows the druggy descent of young hustler Harry (Jared Leto), his doting mother Sarah (Ellen Burstyn), his rich but slumming it girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his wide-eyed buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). In between fixes, Harry dreams of opening a clothes store with Marion, a talented designer whose lack of confidence Harry helps to hold together with encouraging words. In an unsuccessful attempt to obtain funds for the clothing venture, Harry and Tyrone scale down their drug habits and set up as small time dealers, convinced that they can make some quick money. This is the point at which Jackson Jacob’s “suburban, secure, close associates” become more acquainted with the not so nearly secure world of street life and violence. Sarah, Harry’s mother, meanwhile has hopes of her own. After years of partaking in TV quizzes from the comfort of her living room, she receives a mailed invite to appear on one of the most popular shows. Lonely and loveless since the death of Harry's father, whom she continuously mentions throughout the film, she sees it as a chance to win back her self esteem and lose weight as a goal of fitting into her ‘red’ dress for the show. To achieve this, she embarks on a course of prescription diet tablets (uppers), straight from her doctor’s orders. The junkie traumas, binges, and jonesing of Leto, Connelly and Wayans, while captivatingly painful, have all been seen before. What makes this film unique is watching an elderly woman on prescription drugs, losing her mind, in her own living room. With ever pound she sheds and every nerve racking grind of her teeth, she slips deeper and deeper into the land of no return. The category this character would most closely fit, before her spiral out of control, would be Jackson-Jacob’s stable user; a user who compartmentalizes their use, allowing it to pervade only certain areas of social life. In a ‘Desperate Housewives’ meets ‘The Golden Girls-esque’ fashion her transformation from retired homebody to the pill-popping monster is almost unbearable. Requiem is one of those films that one can watch a hundred times, talk about as an academic exercise, and yet because of the mastery of the film making, remains very difficult, despite repeated viewing, to escape an emotionally and visceral response to the journey. Perhaps it is the horror of watching human suffering by self-destruction. Or maybe, the body mutilation that is so graphically portrayed by the steadily rotting crater of an artery in Harry’s arm, representing the boiling down of suburbia into hell on earth. Director Darren Aronofsky crashes the run away train narrative into dazzling visuals and distils an unflinching yet heartbreaking study of damage. While much was made of Aronofsky's visual style (the film has 2,000 edits where most have 800), Requiem's true brilliance is finding the pace for a human story within the rush of chemical excess. Essentially a fable, the film is divided into three acts: summer, autumn and winter, no spring. It begins slowly with each character powered by the optimism that their lives are on the turn, then paradoxically gathers pace as they settle into rotten routine before plunging you headfirst down the spiral as hope abandons each of them. The film stands as an excellent illustration of the variety and dimensionality of the “drug user” merging Jackson-Jacobs “modes of crack using, their features, and troubles”, into a filmic experience that is as captivating as it is difficult to watch (Jackson-Jacobs, 343).
Works Cited
Farber, David. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. Hill and Wang, 1994.
Rubington, Earl, and Martin Weinberg, eds. Deviance: The Interactionist Perspective, Tenth Edition. Pearson Education, 2008.
