Essay on "Counseling Addiction"

Essay 14 pages (4327 words) Sources: 10

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Addiction

Requiem for a Dream: A Case Study

Darren Aronofsky's second film, Requiem for a Dream, repeats in many ways the frenzied, tragic trajectory of Pi. Where Pi's Max Cohen followed his mathematical obsession into insanity and self-destruction, Requiem now shows us the decline and fall of four individuals, Sara (Ellen Burstyn), Harry (Jared Leto), Marion (Jennifer Connelly), and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). Sara gets hooked on diet pills, and her son, Harry, his girlfriend, Marion, and his buddy Tyrone are all junkies. Whereas the end of Pi leaves Max Cohen outside, smiling, looking up at the trees, the protagonists of Requiem all collapse in a gory heap: Tyrone ends up in prison; Harry is stuck in a hospital, his arm amputated; Marion maintains her drug habit by prostituting herself; and Sara is in a psych ward after undergoing electroshock therapy. As in Pi, the frenzied excitement of Requiem for a Dream is that of the world going to hell in a hand basket.

The attractive young people almost kill themselves through drugs. The film communicates addiction via both arrangement (quantity of intensification) and method (perceptual quality). As Harry and Tyrone shove the TV set around Brighton guests, 'anybody want some time?' then gives out the speed pills articulated in the jumpy cutting of party footage. The spatial warp of drugs is also forceful. Deep focus photography makes hollow, empty space a purpose correlative to the emptiness of addicts in line for their next fix. Light and reflections are utilized to express tilted states. Tyrone and Harry ignore the soft gold light quality at Brighton Beach in their eagerness to score. Paradoxically, the afternoon haze presents a visual equivalent to the state of tranquilization they seek. The harsh bare bulb in Tyrone's pad differs with the glow of sunshine from a window blocked by his back as he faces his electric predilection. When Harry and Marion thrust open an emergency exit door, it sparks white light like the drug's sudden increase of pleasure. White light also trickles in and blanks out the semi-naked image of Marion in the reflection in the mirror, flooding her in ecstasy beyond eroticism. Paradoxically, she ends up prostituting her mistreated body for heroin. Such self-absorbed fascination is common with Tyrone, who toys with mirror images of himself and pays no attention to his waiting lover.

The association of the viewer with cinematic methods is additionally extended in the physical grouping of projection and presentation to generate auto-productive craving machines. Rapturous with a drug rush, Tyrone dances to a hip-hop track. The rubbery motions of his legs and body winding with fluid nimbleness might appear as the unobstructed play potential to mechanical acts. As a type of force-field 'crossed by a powerful, nonorganic energy', though, this is not a body disjointed by addiction like Tyrone's. His overjoyed dance only imitates the cathartic possibilities of a BWO. In its early stage' the addictive drug happens to increase joie de vivre and incentive. Eventually, it weakens the users' creativity, whilst their plans, such as building a clothes design business, result to nothing. Tyrone's fake sense of safety is emphasized by the canting of the camera. High angle shots are employed often to create the constricted viewpoint of a trap. They give a kind of 'point-of-view' angle of the drug as imperceptible predator biding its time as the prey grows to be more trapped. Up-close imagery of Harry with Marion offer Deleuzian tactisigns. The soft warmth of their young skin is displayed in soft-focus sepia quality. The utilization of split-screen here puts side by side faces in conversation with fingers stroking skin and evokes the previous disjunction of Harry and Sara. Nevertheless close the friendly rapport of these close-ups, the screen stays worryingly split. Each lover is ensnared by his/her addiction and mutual betrayal is predicted by composition here. Their excited conversation is splotched out as the screen overflows with blinding light. Despite their affirmation of love, a gradually spinning image places them no longer in front of each other but confronting each other. As they lie poised in the cool grey glow of a heroin high, each partner is away on a personal high.

The 'Winter' progression persistently completes the characters' downfall. Rendered helpless in a down-canted roof-top camera angle, Sara roams the snow-covered sidewalks. People haze by her in the too-fast movement of chronological dissociation. Harry and Tyrone drive south, encouraged by their dream of a Florida drug paradise, keeping Marion to take part in live sex shows that pay for her drugs. In the middle of the lush greenery and blue skies of the South, Harry takes his last shot into the decaying sore in the middle of his arm and side-steps reality. After a frightening dream about losing Marion over the perimeter of the pier Harry wakes up with his arm cut off. Marion grins in her sleep as she holds onto her heroin earnings.

Harry and Marion are a defiant, thrill-seeking couple that start the movie as impulsive and zealous lovers. In the initial dialogue between the two, Marion conveys her feelings of being ensnared by her parents', and her dependence on their caretaking. Harry tries to provide for Marion in the one way that he understands how, by distributing and seeling heroin. Tyrone, is the companion and enabler of Harry's heroin distribution and addiction team, Harry's accomplice on the street. Harry becomes surrounded by the deceptive power of his new authority-he stops over to visit his mother only to ensure her that his pleasant job downtown at the bank was going to provide for her and Marion. The films exact use of flashbacks lines Tyrone's disproportionate self-indulgence with childhood memories and experiences-more than simply junkies and fixes,

The character are lifelike and completely complex for one to reprimand in a strict sense. In one prominent scene, Harry and Marion are in bed next to each other. Aronofsky splits the screen in two, with one half focusing on Harry and the other half focusing on Marion. In spite of the reality that we recognize they are lying next to each other, their presence is hardly felt beyond the edges of the other's frame. In this fashion, Aronofsky efficiently conveys how the couple is with each other, and still vastly apart -- a facade of their relationship which becomes more and more pronounced later on in the film, when a scarcity of drugs forces them to desperate alternatives. In such situations, the lovers are hollow figures, eventually disappointed by their own realism and representation. Hopelessly artificial blue lights that highlight (emotional/physical) distance restore the tender and warm caresses confined across split-screen close-ups of their bodies. A once-precious summer-lit snap of the couple ultimately offers Marion's entry to the sex business and prostitution at drug fuelled parties. The telephone digits for the sleazy pimp/dealer Little John (Keith David) is scribbled on the rear of the snap, thus discovering the snap's original hopes as all the more emotional and unreachably hopeless. Marion visits the pimp, who, Harry told her prior to their departure, has heroin but is not selling it, in its place selling it for sexual favors and prostitution. After the meeting with Big Tim, he gives Marion a humble supply of heroin, and tells her she can get additional supplies at a party he's throwing next week. He does not specify what precisely she will have to do to be paid, but she recognizes it will be sexual. In the beginning, Marion refuses the offer, and starts to leave Big Tim's place feeling terribly sick, most probably from a combination of withdrawal symptoms and revulsion at her deprivation. Big Tim, who has seen many addicts, tells her, "See you next week." When her first stock of drugs dries up, she in fact returns for the gathering thus beginning her depraved descent into regular prostitution and creating a rift with her boyfriend.

Harry's mother Sarah, who tries for to reclaim the misplaced glory of her dead husband and gifted memories of her son, will do everything to get in shape and into the red dress she put on at Harry's high school graduation day. She ultimately undergoes electroconvulsive treatment, and for Sarah strange consequences are uncovered as the perverse means to her goal move forward -her increasing madness due to amphetamines is a disgracefully human depiction of what keeps our lives important.

Aronofsky also wanted us to see that the 'world of the film [is] much more like a dreamland. Thus he set Requiem in Coney Island, tinted the screen, shot through filters, used split screens to show multiple subjectivities, and added pulsing, atmospheric electronic music. As in Pi, there are numerous hallucinations, almost all of which are nightmares. Even the pleasant dreams, such as when Harry imagines Marion by the ocean, burst apart to prove once again the agony of illusion. The substantial artifice of the film, in sum, is given over to distortion and insanity. There seems to be no way for Aronofsky… READ MORE

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