Last weekend I watched Requiem for a Dream, having gotten on a kick with Darren Aronofsky's work (which includes Pi, and The Fountain), and whoa, boy, was it a punchy film. In the past, this is a film I would have sneered at for being what I might have termed, "conveniently bleak," for being... tragedy. I still have little use for that form of art, as most of the time you get a thin cypher for author's own particular pain, but written large and definitive. The dark adolescent drama still makes me sigh.
But this movie was different. It struck me as a pretty true depiction or representation of the hell state, in this case in the form of addiction to heroine. Aronovsky and Selby
(the writer of the novel and co-screen writer) gives us the image, but without saying that that's all there is in the world, that all endeavors turn to shit and all dreams lead to the flames. These are four particular stories that are given, four inflections of the same hell, but there are others in the film who are not either in or heading for that place. Nor does it seal the characters up in their suffering, denying them of some eventual redemption or salvation. It simply takes us from the anteroom of hell to its deep interiors, and leaves us there. Ok, I can accept that. And having had some experiences of feeling utterly trapped, I can feel the truthfulness of the depictions.The next morning, though, I realized that it wasn't a film to watch right before going to bed. I woke with a screeching anxiety and sense of despair that didn't match up to anything going on in my life. After meditating for several hours, I think I understood what about the film crawled under my skin and opened up an abscess.
I grew up in a pretty conventional household, lower and then middle middle class, tutored by my family and environs (the term "community" is much too strong for my suburban neighborhoods) in a certain imago of the world, that with its sixties overtones and colorings, was basically the classic bourgeois lens. Money and wealth were not ostensibly the uber-goals, but under the surface they were what defined safety and security. The neighborhoods we lived in were generally solid middle class, older track houses generally owned by your standard workers or small business owners. Money as status was not obvious; everyone was more or less at the same level economically, and outward appearances were not really stressed.
But there seemed to be a chronic underlying anxiety about money, in my family and in my neighborhoods. Our family was scraping-by-poor at the beginning, as my parents were beginning to establish themselves in their work, and later became more financially stable. But there were little in the way of safety nets, either from other family or socially. We would never have starved, but with the whole extended family living at the same level, there was not a sense of being able to fall back in any substantive way on other family members. The stress, from what I remember, was intense at times, both because there was real financial struggle, and because of how my parents were trained up to think about money.
I can remember my father going from job to job, either getting fired or quitting, till landing a position with a pest control company (where he still works). He and mom would fight about it, in the back room behind a closed but thin door, so we knew as kids that the ground under us was not stable. We also, in family stories, and in the popular media we were exposed to, taught about what was below us, what pit it was possible to fall into if we did not work hard enough or strayed too far out of the mainstream. The bums down on K St., the hookers on T St., the druggies and gangsters somewhere down in then unvisited depths of South Sacramento, all were object lessons in what happens to you if you fall. From relatively civilized to living with the animals, fighting for bones and carrion.
Waking up the morning after Requiem was waking up into a terror of regression, what seems to me to be the night sweats of the bourgeois. Requiem follows the descent of four mostly middle class people as their social relationships and financial status crumble. Under the stress of addiction and impoverishment (the three addicts), and loneliness and despair (the mother), their families atomize and their access to resources dries up. They become gaping mouths without the ability to feed themselves. They become powerless and helpless, falling on the tender mercies of the state, which in the bourgeois mind, is good for the underclass, and appropriate punishment for the failings that their poverty demonstrates. But for the middle class, having climbed out of that fetid state, regression back to it is utter hell, truly terrifying, the funneling of anxieties around loss of a tenuous power, and recognition that the animal skills that are transmuted in being civilized, are no longer available when you lose your wings and fall back to the jungle floor.
That was a rough morning.
