"The best description of hunger is a description of bread. A poet said that once." - Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the WorldThe line above relates to my assigned frame, from minute 25 of Requiem for a Dream, in two ways. First, the shot is exactly what Herzog's quotation describes. Sara Goldfarb, trying pathetically to survive Day One of an egg-and-grapefruit diet, starts seeing food everywhere - hunger is shown as the thing it most desires, as the semantic opposite which completes it. Second, and more broadly, the quotation raises questions about how art can most realistically and truthfully convey concepts that mean through absence, that are defined by the opposite pole toward which they incessantly strive - concepts like hunger, longing, desire, unhappiness. We might frame the question this way: does Requiem for a Dream show us the hunger, or the food?
The answer has to do with the very fuzzy line between showing, graphically, the effects of addiction, and inducing the effects of addiction in the viewer through graphic means. We might understand this as a difference between art as empathy, and art as weapon.
What defines this difference? It comes from where we are situated, through the camera's eye, in relation to the characters it observes. Film, borrowing from literature, can simulate first- and third-person narration: first when the distance between the camera's and protagonist's perspectives is erased, third when it is emphasized. The more invisible the camera, the more we are likely to "see things through the characters' eyes." The more active, histrionic, stylized, virtuosic the camera becomes, the more aware we become of the director's agency, that we are not looking through these characters but at them. Every sudden cut, canted angle, split screen, pan and zoom pushes the people in the frame farther away from us; they become objects and not subjects.
In Requiem's disturbing and gruesome climax, three protagonists are subjected to the most visceral and invasive of violations: that of their bodies. Through parallel cutting, we witness all three forms of rape - the forced feeding tube down Sara Goldfarb's throat, the amputation of Harry's arm, Marion's forced "ass-to-ass" - essentially simultaneously. Yet how Aronofsky films these sequences makes clear where he - and therefore we - stand in relation to his characters. At each moment of invasion, the camera is placed directly in front of the victim's face - the most objective angle possible, static, impassive, observational. More importantly, it is the perspective of those who are enacting the violence from which their victims suffer - the doctors and nurses for Sara and Harry Goldfarb, the circle of voyeuristic men for Marion. We see their pain and we recoil because it's not our own. We feel pity, shame, nausea, horror, but - if we are honest with ourselves - never empathy. If the battle is between the addict and the rest of the world, it's clear where Aronofsky places us, where he wants us to be.
I first became aware of Requiem in college as a film that I had to see and that, after seeing, I had to love. Like other cult films, there is never a question of disagreement or friendly debate; this may be possible for other movies, but some films apparently transcend normal aesthetic categories and become beacons that represent something else entirely. You made friends by bonding over Requiem. It was screened in common rooms and student film clubs and on laptops perched on beds. It was near-ubiquitous on "Favourite Movies" lists.
But - if you'll permit me a moment of studied ignorance - how can this be? The movie is essentially a PSA about the dangers of drug use. Countless reviews on Amazon and Netflix attest to this. While most mention the stylized filmmaking and acting, the final tone of many reviews is a decidedly moral one: addicts recognize that it's "just what it's like," it should be screened for junior high school audiences as a deterrent, and on and on. What strikes me as curious about this is that I can't imagine an anti-alcoholism movie, say, or a movie about the dangers of unprotected sex ever achieving the kind of fervent status Requiem has on campuses across the country.
Especially confusing is that, while people tell me that the movie is a powerful treatment of the effects and consequences of drug use, the kind of excitement and bravado in their voices suggests something else. It's entirely different from the way other great, horrifying films (say, Schindler's List) are talked about and traded in social discourse. So let me ask a question that may strike some as naive, and therefore easily dismissed, but which I would like to take seriously and try to answer: how can a film filled with such suffering and tragedy inspire the kind of mass culture fervor we see - still - today? How to explain the squeals of delight and nods of assent among college freshmen when the title is invoked? Or that, ten years later, there is a project to analyze 102 frames, one from each minute, for this movie and not some other?
Requiem's overnight and permanent absorption by mainstream culture - of which actual addicts form only a small part - suggests a kind of solubility with popular thought, a lack of real resistance or required effort. In fact, by reducing addiction to its effects (mirrored in the film by visual effects), Requiem actually makes the horrors of addiction easily digestible and even safe. If all we need to feel to identify with addicts is the jerks and jolts that accompany the movie from start to finish, we don't need to deal with the side of addiction that Requiem knows nothing about - the unbearable heaviness at the other end of Requiem's fleet-footedness; boredom, isolation, time not as fast cuts but as interminable. Much has been said about how far Requiem goes, how much it pushes the envelope of experience and endurance. Perhaps we should consider how it doesn't go far enough.
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