Essay: 'Requiem for a Dream' (2000)

Might as well face it you’re addicted to meh

Photo: Artisan Entertainment

I never got around to seeing Darren Aronofsky’s visually inventive but shallow trauma porno Requiem For A Dream about losers doing drugs in New York City way back in 2000 because I was a loser who was too busy doing drugs in New York City.

That’s not some kind of flex. It’s just a fact. I’ve been sober for fourteen years now, but before I quit the booze and the drugs—and I dearly loved the booze and the drugs—I was just another drunk whose rock bottom wasn’t dramatic or tragic or cinematic, it was just pathetic. Thank God. That’s how that story usually goes, too. Rock bottoms are moist and cold. Lightless. Think Gollum, but he smells faintly of vomit, sleeps on a mattress on the floor, and listens to the same Linkin Park CD repeatedly. That was my vibe.

One day, I was just alone. I had lost friends and family. I said things to some I love that I couldn’t take back. I was broke and spiraling and gutless. And—one day—I couldn’t take it anymore. Simple. I cried. I cried for weeks. We’re talking swollen eyelids and snot and dry heaving. I dragged myself to a meeting and ran away from that meeting and sobbed in my filthy Queens apartment for another couple of weeks and then dragged myself back to a meeting and met other weasels and weirdos and wannabe gangsters. Slowly, I got my shit together. Very slowly. And for a few years there I would slowly walk by my local like it was my ex’s house.

Of course, I wasn’t addicted to heroin, which is a blessing, I suppose. I snorted it a couple of times to be polite, but I never tapped a vein. I’ve seen what it does. It’s a ride. Heroin is fun, and that’s the point. You feel great until the screaming starts. I was more a fan of cheap vodka, the kind you can guzzle like Gatorade and cocaine, back when you could buy baggies of it mixed with laxatives in Washington Square Park.

I know people who kicked heroin, and a few who… well…. I don’t know what happened to them. Well, one was found in his bathroom, but that was a long time ago.

The first friend of mine to ever get sober used to score at the corner of 9th and Avenue C in Manhattan, and I’d get drunk on her couch as she’d nod off. I was there, mostly, to make sure she didn’t drop a lit cigarette onto something flammable.

She sent herself to the hospital with an arm full of fucked up veins eventually, and years later, she was one of the first people I called when I was newly off the sauce. She had been waiting for me on the other side for a long time, and I cried on the phone when I told her my life was out of control and I was getting help. I cried because when you’re newly sober, you feel things deeply, like a teenager listening to love songs for the first time.

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Honestly, I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to see Requiem For A Dream. It is, without question, the one movie friends are surprised I haven’t seen. I’ve been writing about my struggles with addiction for a long time, and I always get similar comments from readers: “Have you seen Requiem For A Dream?” “What do you think of Requiem For A Dream?”

These questions are always followed by breathless warnings. The movie has a reputation for being emotionally exhausting. “Fucked up,” is how one friend described it. I’ve been told for years that it is bleak and intense, and when I posted to social media that I was watching it for the first time, followers told me to buckle up.

Well, I don’t want to harsh anyone’s buzz, but Requiem For A Dream does not hold up. It is a pretentious exploitation film with the frenetic energy of a short-attention-span music video and the confident swagger of an art school graduate. It is the work of mostly young people playing a grim game of make-believe. And the result is an R-rated after-school special.

(Are after-school specials too generational a reference? Too Gen X? Do folks know that kids would come home once upon a time, and the only things to watch were soap operas and half-hour morality plays about what happens when kids behave badly?)

I’m sure Hubert Selby. Jr's 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream, about four New Yorkers whose lives spin out of control, is gripping on the page, but the movie adaptation is slick showbiz sleaze and nothing more.

The working-class characters in Aronofsky’s dirge are, at worst, cartoons, but sweaty cartoons, and the drug use is both plentiful and lurid. Speaking of: for a movie about heroin, there was very little blood or shit and almost no needles, save for one moment, and that moment, while gory, was not realistic in the least.

The movie never made me miss the fun and games of hustling for a high, but there were a few scenes with blunts, and that made me nostalgic for the Golden Age of Roll-Your-Own Joints.

Requiem For A Dream is an example of the whole “heroin chic” phase of the 90s, an aesthetic fascination with skinny, vampiric dope fiends in ads and music. There were all sorts of movies about heroin addicts, too, from 1991’s Rush, starring Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh as undercover cops on smack, to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting in 1996, which introduced the world to Ewan McGregor. Indie movie icon Harvey Keitel smoked heroin in Abel Ferrera’s 1992 nightmare Bad Lieutenant. I must have watched that movie a dozen times on a battered VHS tape while drunk.

Even Ben Stiller had a turn as a heroin addict in 1998’s Permanent Midnight which was about a successful television writer with a habit. And then there are edgy drug-fueled flicks like Kids and Pulp Fiction and Basketball Diaries.

The genre’s high-water mark is probably Gus Van Sant’s 1989 cult classic Drugstore Cowboy, a crime drama about addicts who rob pharmacies, but that’s just me.

I should mention drug flicks have been around for decades. They just flourished during the 90s. Al Pacino made a pre-The Godfather splash as a hopeless, fast-talking junky in 1971’s Panic At Needle Park. That’s a really good one. Then there's 1936's Reefer Madness, a pioneering anti-drug classic that is both hysterical and paranoid.

These movies all had two things in common: they were sexy and vehemently anti-drug. In these kinds of movies, drug addiction is a moral failing, and in that way, drug movies are similar to noirs. They are morality plays where beautiful addicts are punished for shooting or snorting or smoking whatever. The lesson is: don’t do drugs, kids.

I won’t argue with that. Don’t do drugs, kids. But if you do and or you start drinking and things get out of control, it doesn’t mean you’re weak or evil. It just means you’re human. There are people who can — who want — to help you.

Thankfully, over the past couple of decades, alcoholism and drug addiction have become less stigmatized, and I think more people understand that some folks have no control when it comes to alcohol and drugs and I also think there’s a greater understanding that opioids, especially, are insidious and medical attention is required to help those hooked on pain pills. The conversation about addiction isn’t perfect, but it’s more realistic and compassionate than it’s ever been, that’s for sure.

The 90s drug movie genre feels unsophisticated by today’s standards. The War On Drugs was still raging during the Clinton years, a failed policy that only succeeded in destroying the lives of so-called drug offenders.

Movies like Requiem For A Dream depend on audiences who have little sympathy for users. Rubberneckers. It’s easy to judge a cokehead or a meth freak if you think they’re crooks or scumbags. If you believe they deserve their misery. And there are still people who think this way. But drug addiction is not a criminal problem. Its solution is not mass incarceration. Addiction is a healthcare crisis, full stop.

Besides all that, the story of addiction, and recovery just isn’t very compelling. It’s not even rare. Right now, someone is losing everything because of their addictions, and someone is fighting to get what they lost back. This is common, everyday stuff. Only someone totally clean would ever think doing drugs makes anyone interesting. Trust me: cocaine is not a personality.

My addiction doesn’t make me special. I am not defined by it. Millions of people have done what I’ve done. What makes me special is what I’ve done with my sobriety. What have I done? I take responsibility for my actions. One day at a time.

Requiem For A Dream substitutes fancy camera work — fisheye lenses and time-lapse sequences and extreme closeups — for drama. From the moment the movie starts, you know that something bad is going to happen to widowed Coney Island native Sara Goldfarb, her feckless son Harry, his rich kid girlfriend Marion, and Harry’s literal partner-in-crime Tyrone. The movie is nothing but descent, a stylish, hyperactive one-hour and forty-two-minute plunge into the lower depths of director Aronofsky’s imagination.

Requiem For A Dream takes place in a heightened reality, and it's a tedious one like living inside a can of Red Bull. It tries so hard to be shocking but instead of feeling shocked, I wanted a nap halfway through. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of having a late-night conversation with one of the children of the night but they’re boring. Just constant yakety-yak. I could never shut up. Will they steal from you? Yes? Probably? That’s because they’re also predictable.

The veteran of the cast, Ellen Burstyn, deserved her Oscar nomination for playing a lonely mom hooked on TV who loses her mind on diet pills and flies over the cuckoo’s nest. She is one of the greats, and even though her Brooklyn accent is regrettable, she manages to inflate a flat character.

Future rock star Jared Leto plays her son, and I was amused by his perfect, alabaster skin. Leto is as beautiful as his co-star, Jennifer Connelly, who plays uptown girl Marion. Both he and Jennifer Connelly — a former child star looking to shed her wholesome image — are committed to their roles but, ultimately, they’re unconvincing. They both come off as overeager narcs. Marlon Wayans was a well-known comedian when Requiem For A Dream came out and he’s good. His role isn’t particularly original, he’s a well-meaning low-level thug. Tyrone and Harry have something else in common besides the white stuff: they’re rotten sons.

Coney Island's performance as Coney Island was outstanding, however. Bravo. This was before its current facelift, so it was still wonderfully desolate, a dilapidated funland far from Manhattan's glistening skyscrapers.

The climax of Requiem For A Dream is a pileup of comeupances. Our anti-heroes are electroshocked and amputated, and forced to sell their bodies. There are shots of buzzsaws and dildos and poor Ellen Burstyn getting her brain zapped. Tyrone probably gets off the easiest; he rots in prison. Does it get worse than what these four are subjected to? Oh, hell yeah. It gets worse and less dramatic. I mean, Requiem For A Dream is a different movie if they all quietly die in their sleep one night.

No one suspected, in 2000, how bad things would get in 2001 and every year thereafter, so we all had an appetite for dark, edgy pop culture. That is my one defense of Requiem For A Dream. We collectively craved violence and depravity because, for many, real life was cushy. America was a big, dumb colossus at the turn of the century, rich and powerful and cross-eyed with stupidity. Terminally self-centered. I’m sure Requiem For A Dream was a cheap thrill back in the day. It feels good to feel dirty, that kind of thing.

But now? Twenty years later? It still looks good. Aronofsky is certainly brilliant, and he has made better movies. Clint Mansell’s soundtrack is hypnotic. The cast is willing to do whatever it can to tell the story. It’s just too bad that the story lacks any humanity, depth, or maturity. Requiem For A Dream is a good boy’s fantasy of the price bad boys pay.

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Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands—Theatre Kids is available for purchase. My debut memoir is a funny/sad look at addiction, masculinity, and starving artists hustling in post-9/11, pre-iPhone New York City.

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