Requiem For A Dream – Darren Aronofsky – 2000

Requiem for a dream takes the viewer from dizzying, euphoric highs to soul-crushing lows in a little over an hour and a half. Aronofsky’s mastery of craft steers the viewer’s emotion from the top of the roller coaster all the way down. 

Take for example a split screen segment from the first act, in which Marion and Harry take drugs and tell each other their dreams. The split screen effect of the scene between Marion and Harry begins with two faces looking at each other in close up, and the division of the characters is barely noticeable at first, as the camera is equidistant from each character.  After a moment each image begins to cut so that there are disparate images on either half of the frame. 

Marion touches Harry’s ear. We see her hand on his ear in the left half of the frame. In the right side of the screen we see Marion’s profile.The effect of the split image creates a fracture in both the spatial relationships of the characters and the temporal elements of the scene. What is happening on one side of the screen does not necessarily correspond temporally with the events of the other side of the screen. We are transported by the incongruity of the time and space of the image creating a space out of time and separated from the shared space of the other character occupying the room.

One of the things that has always resonated with me is the contrast in motivation of drug use between Harry and his friends versus his mother Sara Goldfarb. The trio of beautiful junkies purport to have in mind a day in the future when they don’t use any more, but they joke about wasting time. They are young, attractive and seemingly independent. I don’t really understand why they use, other than decadence. Their scenes in the first act are presented in joyful electric montage, when Harry is with Ty playing records or airy fantasias with Marion, such as the split-screen segment or the long take of the paper airplane descending from the condo.

By contrast, Sara never has a golden period in the film. In the opening scene she is burglarized by the living person she loves the most. She starts in a state of retreat. Unlike the youth in the story, she is old and lonely. This loneliness and the idea of transforming her body to fit into the red dress are directly related. If she can be on tv, she’ll offer the kind of connection that she finds from the tv, satiating her loneliness because she imagines those idolized on the tv are never lonely. So her drug use, to fit in the dress and get on tv, is a more psychologically nuanced desire than the desires of the youth. As Moreno asserts, “Sara’s growing addiction to the television and the virtualization of her past and future dreaming devours her power to feel, think and act in the present.” 

There’s only one thing that someone would say that is never a lie. ‘I’m lonely.’ Sara Goldfarb’s loneliness in Requiem For A Dream is a horror far worse than any addiction.