Entering the year 2000, America was at its peak power. The economy was roaring, the global economy fell in line with U.S. designs, military alliances were swelling, barriers to trade were falling. The American Dream was coming true for many.1 It was from this summit of American prosperity where Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream broke loose and tumbled down to the harried masses. It is an artifact of western capitalism that evokes Ozymandias: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”2
Requiem for a Dream is a novel by Hubert Selby Jr. that was adapted into one of the most lachrymose films ever made, revolving around four characters in Coney Island. There is Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow with an offer to appear as a contestant on some junk gameshow. Her son Harry is a heroin addict who feeds his habit by repetitively pawning his mother’s television set. His girlfriend, Marion Silver, has a talent for artistic textile designs but gradually becomes hooked on heroin herself. Their friend is the orphaned Tyrone C. Love, fumbling at some misguided effort to find acceptance in the low-level world of organized crime.
Predestination
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said in no uncertain terms: “A letter always arrives at its destination.” The present moment manifests itself by way of a material reality and psychological being that have already crystallized.3 The chance encounter with your future partner; the bus you miss for the first time; the promotion you just got at work—these are the letters that arriving from addresses we have occupied in the past. In the film, this is symbolized quite literally with anxiety-inducing violins thrumming as Sara pushes her contestant form into the mailbox and Tyrone leaves the apartment to pick up a “pound of pure.” Their dreams are set in motion, their letters are out for delivery: Sara will get her 15 minutes of fame after years of invisibility, Marion will get her own artisanal clothing shop, Harry and Tyrone will prove they can earn the serious cash that nobody in their family ever had.
A letter always arrives at its destination but that place isn’t always intended by the sender. Dreams can turn into nightmares. Sara needs diet pills—amphetamines—from a quack doctor so that she will lose weight and fit into her favourite red dress. Harry and Tyrone need just “a little taste” to know how much to cut their product with. Marion needs to keep her creative energy up. We see a cotton ball swell with moisture. We see a syringe barrel boiling and a vein of blood pumping. And the dilated eyes—that eye—a vacant gaze into the abyss:
This is the Night, the interior of human being, existing here in phantasmagoric representations: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. From his eye the night of the world hangs out toward us.4
When the film reaches its climax, we see horrific scenes of Sara convulsing under electroshock therapy, Tyrone taunted by racist prison guards, the bloodspray from Harry’s infected arm being amputated and Marion’s grotesque humiliation as a prostitute before a perverted group of johns. Their letters had arrived.
American Dream
This film disturbed a generation of viewers because it is so much more than a cautionary tale about drugs. In fact, the shadow that Requiem casts over audiences does not even belong to drugs; it belongs to the American Dream. Selby writes in the preface to the novel:
I believe to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul.5
Whatever lofty ideals the phrase may have originally held, the American Dream was always destined to become entangled with notions of wealth and class in a capitalist society like the United States. At the outset of the film, vapid materialism had already hollowed out the lives of our characters and this made them vulnerable to toxic escapism in the form of television, drugs and junk food. Karl Marx:
In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.6
Like the audience, the characters of Requiem are children of capitalism and this is why it haunts us. The American Dream is a capitalist construction that preaches richness in consumption. What Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone expose is our collective inability to find richness in “our very heart and soul,” to use Selby’s phrase.
The Gravity of Capitalism
Sara’s pre-standing addiction to television, specifically a self-improvement game show, reveals a person yearning for meaning in her life as a widow and mother to an emotionally absent drug addicted son. The sweets are making her fat. The game show sells a self-help program for $39.95. In a revelatory hallucination, a film crew takes down the walls of her apartment and reveal that her living room has been the TV studio all along. There is no product for Sara; Sara is the product.
Harry appears to have fallen wayward sometime after his father passed away. He does not ask his mother for money to directly feed his drug habit. Instead he has constructed a ritual whereby he barges into her apartment and takes her television set only for her to retrieve it later at the pawnshop. The pawnbroker facilitates the monetary transaction between Harry and Sara, giving Harry the requisite emotional distance to lead such a tormented life. The first thing he does when he scores some cash is purchase his mother a new television set from Macy’s. After extending this material gesture to his mother he can brave to sit down and talk with her. Sara tells him that she does not want commodities; she wants a grandchild. Harry falls to tears upon realizing the void his mother is facing—and the bodies of Marion and himself are too polluted to build the family she asks for. Dazzling cash stacks and getting high have estranged him from his true dreams in life: happiness for his mother and Marion on the pier.
Mirrors hold a significant register in psychoanalysis because it is at the mirror stage when we become cognizant of ourselves as autonomous beings and individuate from our mothers. As Tyrone regards his sliding mirror, his business is doing well and a beautiful woman awaits him in bed. The film flashes back to a young Tyrone running to his mother and jumping up on her lap. “I told you, mom, one day I’d make it,” he whispers. She replies: “You don’t have to make anything, my sweet. You just have to love your mama.” His face belies bewilderment at this recollection: while he has learned to “make it” by a material standard, he has never learned how to love another person. His girlfriend disappears from the plot after this scene.
Marion must have the steepest fall from grace of all four characters: from a comfortable upper middle class family to a drug addicted prostitute. We learn that she resents the emotional coldness of her parents who only care about money and appearances. For this, she defies them by exchanging sex for drugs with her shrink and slumming it with Harry in a decrepit apartment. But we learn that she is not much different from her money-minded folks after all. At the same time she rejects her parents fixation with their textile business, she aspires to have one herself. The warmth and comfort of her relationship with Harry turns cold and transactional as they spiral into addiction. It is this narrow view of human beings as objects of exchange that ultimately makes her addiction vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy predators.
In his Paris Manuscripts, Marx wrote: “Private property has made us so one-sided that an object is only ours when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”7 As our labour and means of life have become saleable commodities, our existence is reduced to that of a spiritually-barren market participant. Community is dissolved, friendships are transactional and familial bonds are strained. So long as this alienated world exists, Requiem will shuffle in its shadows.
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Footnotes:
Noted by Hubert Selby Jr. in his Preface to Requiem for a Dream (De Capo Press, 2000): v. ↩︎
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias. ↩︎
See Jacques Lacan, Écrits (W.W. Norton, 2006): 28-29 and Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992): 1-27 for more on Lacan’s purloined letter and future anteriors. ↩︎
G.W.F. Hegel, Jena Lectures. ↩︎
Selby, Requiem for a Dream, v. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 106-7. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎
