BHA: Requiem for a Dream: A Critical Realist Response

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I sent an earlier draft of this review to the Film Philosophy list where it
died a quiet  (very) death.   But I am reading Collier's Being and Worth
and thought that it might be of value to recast the review in more Critical
Realist terms with an emphasis  on the moral and philosophical problems the
film touches upon.

Requiem for a Dream:

This film by Darren Aronofsky is adapted from the 1978 novel  by Hugh Selby
Jnr.  Selby is famous for "Last Exit to Brooklyn" (1964) a novel about the
horrors of a gay sub-culture in New York. The film deals with the lives of
four people:  Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), her son Harry (Jared Leto),
his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelley) and Harry's Afro-American friend
Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans).

The mother gets hooked on amphetamines because she thinks she is about to
go on television and needs to lose weight.  Harry and Tyrone try to make it
as drug dealers.  The idea is also to create a clothes designer business
for Marion. Their fate should not surprise anyone.


The film lasts for 102 minutes and details in the most harrowing way how
everyone and everything goes wrong.  We are spared nothing, absolutely
nothing.  At the end I walked out of the for- the-press showing absolutely
traumatised, and I was not feeling great to begin with.

I should of course have expected this from a film that had its origins in a
Selby novel. In a way I did but knowing intellectually and undertaking the
actual journey are two very different things.

What is good about this film?  Well to begin with it is a sure and certain
antidote to any complacency about life in America.  For those of us who
live outside the Evil Empire it is a constant wonder how it presents itself
in Disneyland terms. Charlatans like Clinton and banally evil people like
Dubya Bush are for every saying 'God bless you" and "God bless America"
just before death rains from the skies. Doug Porpora has talked very
movingly about this in terms of the contradiction between America's avowed
belief in God and the reality of their alienation from the sacred.

When going to see Requiem for a Dream, think of Marcellus' line in Hamlet
and substitute America for Denmark and you get the movie's message 'There
is something rotten in the state of America.' there is I would argue an
integrity to this point of view.  It counterposes despair to the official
optimism and the prescribed philosophy of "Can do. Will do".

In terms of the quality of the acting in the film, Ellen Burstyn is amazing
in the main role.  This is American acting at its most gut wrenching.  For
these things alone the film is a must see.  The added bonus is that the
film's  anti-drug message is horrifically  (necessarily so) clear.

Moreover the director, Aronofsky, is bright and as he has just taken over
the Batman franchise I would say he is about to be The Man.   His
innovative use of a range of film techniques such as the split screen is
very effective and at times stunningly beautiful. This is especially so in
his portrayal of the young lovers as they lie seemingly side by side. There
is an androgynous quality to them that I suspect has its origins somewhere
in Last Exit to Brooklyn. I watched this sequence and wondered about what
Critical Realism has to say about desire. Very little I thought.

However I have had occasion to reflect on this and there is much more about
desire than one would suspect.  In Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom (DPF)
there is the desire for freedom.  there is also talk of the need for the
education of desire and that is very relevant as a meta comment on the
desire portrayed in the film. Of course in From East to West (FEW) the
novella revolves around the desire for oneness, for an end to the splits
and alienations that bedevil modernity.  And it is this longing that is
most relevant to an understanding of the film.


There are though things about the film's thematic structure that I would
like to explore.  It is for a start an absolute downer. 'Christ', I asked
my friend,  'Is life like that in America?'  She thought 'yes'.   I said it
could not be, because if life was like that then the film would be
impossible.  If everyone was totally fucked up, how could you get a book or
a film written?

I was thinking here of Engels' category of naturalism versus realism.
Naturalism undialectically posits the working class as victims and ignores
the potential they possess to become the agents of history and to make the
world anew. In effect naturalism destratifies the social world.  In
eliminates the stratification of the personality and writes out the
possibility of emergence.  Naturalism's territory is that of the Eternal
Return - the same old, same old.  Nothing will ever change.

The distinction between naturalism and realism was of some comfort to
me.  But then over coffee my friend and I had a trip through the number of
families we know who have been afflicted with heroin addiction.  The list
was depressing and this is Brisbane, not New York. So is the film
naturalist or realist?  Well the answer is that it is naturalist but
betimes despair grabs me and then, I am inclined to think,  so is reality!

The second thing I want to comment on is the fatal flaw that all the
characters had.  They desired.  The mother wanted to go on
television.  Harry and Tyrone wanted to be dealers.  Marion wanted to be a
fashion designer.  In a very Buddhist or Shopenauerian way their problems
and their suffering could be seen to follow directly from this desire.  If
the mother had been prepared to shed the past and her dreams of a husband
who found her desirable again then she would not have ended up on
amphetamines.  Similarly for all the other characters, it is desire that
traps them. This would appear to be the territory of the later
Bhaskar.  Asceticism beckons and the denial of desire is the cure for the
sufferings of humanity.

However I am only half in the FEW camp! Part of me still clings to the
earlier Bhaskar and I am also drawn to a non- Buddhist reading of the
film.  I want to say that the problem the characters in film confront is
not desire but the tawdry nature of their dreams.  To want to go on a Quiz
show is hardly the pinnacle of ambition. Nor is it especially worthy to
desire to be a dealer.  When the boys talk of their craft, the Holy Grail
for them is a "pound of Pure".  that for them is the formula that will open
up Aladdin's cave.

What all these characters need is an education in desire and not asceticism.


As the great Socialist William Morris said so memorably, we need 'to teach
desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire
in a different way' (cited in E.P. Thompson, "William Morris", 1976:
791).  Looking at the film in this way the problem with the characters is
not that they desired but that they desired so little.

What though of the film itself as an aesthetic whole?  It shows a world
which is the opposite of 'living well'.  Yet there are flickering moments
of redemption.  The Jewish pawnbroker's disgust at the boys stealing from
their mother is one such moment.  Similarly the sight of the old ladies
weeping and holding each other after visiting their now mad friend is
deeply touching.  However it is in the physical beauty of the pairs of
young lovers that contains the utopian moment in this film.  The perfection
of their bodies and their lust and tenderness towards each other remind one
so forcibly of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.

More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
for ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
that leaves a heart high-=sorrrowful, and cloy'd
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.


At the conference in Lanacster, Roy apparently quoted from Wordsworth's Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality.  I unfortunately did not get to hear him
because I was giving a paper at the same time (thank you
organisers!!).  But the lines from Wordsworth may have been from these:

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction; nor indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest -
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledg'd hope still fluttering in his breast:-
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questonings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor man nor boy,
But all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither
can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.


Wordsworth's poem is a remarkable statement of the Platonic ideal.  It
holds out the possibility of the return to the Absolute and of subject
object identity.  This is a deeply spiritual joy located at the First
Moment of the Bhaskarian dialectic.  However Keats' poem too holds out a
similar vision, though here the way to unity is the Tantric one. Subject
object identity is achieved through sexual ecstasy.  But Keats is all too
aware that such unity is impossible to hold.  As soon as it grasped it
fades.  That for him is the attraction of the art of the urn.  It seems to
promise eternity.  The lovers on the urn cannot kiss but forever will she
love and he be fair.

Again in Aronofsky's film the lovers Harry Marion gaze deeply into each
others eyes. They seem in perfect harmony. It is however not until they
start to move that we realise the screen has been split.  What appeared to
be one was only fleetingly so.


So then there are glimpses of unity and beauty in the early part of the
film.  There are notions of decency that remorselessly get destroyed.  The
film ends as an elegy to lost oneness. It is this dream of the Absolute
that provides the film with its tragedy. The characters want but do not
know really what to want for.


It is finally only through their collective suffering and the horror of
their martyrdom that a negative unity is reestablished. It is a
reinstatement of the Nietzschean vision of the wisdom of Silenus.  We look
at the film and we think with Silenus that it would have been better for
humanity not to have been born.


regards

Gary



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