How ‘Requiem for a Dream’ subverts the tradition of addiction
Drug addiction has always been a fascinating narrative line for movies and literature to explore. From the darkness of William Burrough’s Junky to the sheer terror of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, addiction has often been central to some of the most intoxicating artistic creations.
And few are as impressive or harrowing as Requiem for a Dream, the 1978 novel written by Hubert Selby Jr, which tells of four New Yorkers whose lives are greatly impacted by their respective addictions. The novel was later adapted into a feature film by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Ellen Burstyn and Marlon Wayans.
Leto plays Harry Goldfarb, a young heroin addict, while Wayans and Connelly, respectively, play his friend Tyrone and girlfriend Marion, who are both also junkies. Meanwhile, Harry’s mother, Sara (played by Burstyn), has a very different addiction of her own, first to television, then to a dream, and then finally to amphetamine diet pills.
So, there is undoubtedly an element of drug dependency in the novel and the film, and the characters go to great lengths to fuel their inherent physical desires, leading to truly terrible consequences. Harry practically loses his arm, Marion becomes a prostitute, Tyrone suffers racist abuse in prison, and Sara undergoes electroconvulsive therapy.
But there’s a more profound subversion to the very nature of addiction in the story, too, and it shows that reliance isn’t necessarily always on a drug but can simply be for an idea or a concept. For Harry, Marion and Tyrone, their addiction is to the desire for freedom and living a good life. While their dependency on heroin grows and ultimately ruins their life, they also dream of owning their own business and escaping their monotonous lives.
That’s primarily why they decided to buy a large quantity of heroin to sell, make some cash, and start living the life they’d always wanted. But, of course, the temptation to not get high on one’s supply is too much to bear, and they sign their fate by reverting to their physical needs. But their addictions only arrived because of that initial addiction to a dream.
Sara’s case is even more interesting. As a lonely widower, she is comforted by television, and when she receives a hoax call informing her that she will take part in her favourite game show, Sara starts a crash diet to fit into the dress she wore years earlier. But it’s that very idea that becomes her addiction. As with her son, Sara starts using amphetamines to speed up the process of her weight loss, but it’s all inspired by her dream to be thin and star on television.
Of course, the actual invitation to the game show never comes, but Sara’s addiction has already taken root and grows and grows until she finds herself in a state of amphetamine-induced psychosis. So Requiem for a Dream subverts addiction’s very nature and tradition in removing the affliction from solely narcotic means into something far deeper and more conceptual.
During an interview with Salon, Aronofsky suggested that the story is not actually “about heroin or about drugs” and said that Sara’s narrative makes us question, “What is a drug?”
He noted: “What Selby is saying is that anything can be a drug – it doesn’t have to be smack. It could be TV, it can be coffee, it can be chocolate, it can be food, it can be hope, it could be love, it could be sex.”
In fact, Aronofsky began to see his film as a “monster movie” with an “invisible creature”.
Detailing further, he explained: “It lives in [our] heads,” the director said. “Addiction. That’s the human struggle. All of us have our addictions, whether it’s procrastination or workaholism or TV — we’re constantly dealing with that struggle.”
Ultimately, both Selby and Aronofsky show that addiction is simply what we do to escape the most painful parts of our reality. Requiem for a Dream is a phenomenal narrative work, both as a novel and a film, and by peeling back the initial layers of what we think addiction is, we learn that we are all addicted to one thing or another, not necessarily just to substances, but to ideas, dreams, other people and to life itself.