Requiem For A Dream (2000)

Introduction:

This movie, Requiem For A Dream is a 2000 film which written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Darren Aronofsky is a director is the director who made the hallucinatory “Pi” (1998) with a tiny budget, about a paranoid genius who seems on the brink of discovering the key to – well, God or the stock market, or whatever else his tormentors imagine. And now, he with the greatest budget to brings a new urgency to the drug movie (“Requiem For A Dream) by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel. This Movie was actually adapted from 1987 novel "Last Exit to Brooklyn" by celebrated author Hubert Selby Jr. This movie is about how the characters or human being can easily love and feel loved, and how happiness can be easily found and tragically lost in just a blink of an eye. So, let’s start a small discussion about this movie! 

Synopsis:

This movie was concerned about the four people who trapped by their own addictions. Harry and his friend, Tyrone are poor heroin addicts living in Coney Land, New York. While Harry’s girlfriend, Marion is a fellow addict who trying to escape herself from her wealthy father and she like to design clothes. In fact, Harry’s dream is to score a pound of smack so that he could make enough money to open a clothing boutique shop with Marion but so far he and Tyrone can barely scrape by supporting their own habits. Meanwhile, Harry’s mother named Sara spends her days to watch Television. She gets a junk phone call where she has been told that she got the chance to appear on her favorite game show. After the call, she tried lot way to lose weight to fit her red dress and end up Sara has her own drug habit of her own that is spiraling out of control.

Discussion:

The theory of intertextuality was used in this movie. As what the above said from my introduction, this movie was actually adapted from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” which is a 1987 novel by celebrated author Hubert Selby Jr. From the beginning of this movie, Harry locked his mother in the closet and stole away his mother’s TV set. Those sequences of shots were actually Hubert Selby’s favorite line in his own novel that became the world’s bleakest movie. Basically Darren Aronofsky refers to the story line of Hubert Selby’s novel to make or produce his own movie which is this Requiem For A Dream movie. 

For the past, the movie genres has shapes the generic form of the film like the comedy show must involve those content, character, lighting and so on. It has already became a kind of movie form in which the comedy movie need to include all those content only it counted as comedy movie. For now, Darren Aronofsky tends to mix the criteria from different genres (hybrid genres). In fact, this movie is a psychological movie but Darren Aronofsky used to mix the horror criteria in this psychological movie for the purpose of attracting the audiences. Those sequences of shots were showing what the addiction of the characters is and some horror sequences were added in to. For example, Sara with psychological problem imagines the refrigerator was moving forward her, the sound effect, the blinking light bulb (lighting) and so on. Furthermore, there were some other genres in this movie like action, romantic love and sexuality.      

Beside this, this movie also used the Kuleshov effect and Soviet Montage Theory. The Kuleshov effect is a film editing effect and it’s a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than a single shot in isolation. In this movie, the film editor, Jay Robinowitz combined those random frames which have been chosen to bring out some meaning to the audiences. All the single shot or frame were combined into sequences of shots such as the pupil size become bigger, the lighter, the human cells, the pills or drugs. When these frame/ shot combined into sequential of shots, it brings out the meaning of drug assumption to the audiences. Even the process where Harry and Tyrone sell drug and earn money also used this filming editing and theory too.    

Own Thinking:

From the beginning of this movie, it gave me an expected that the Harry’s mother, Sara is a kind mother and end up will have a happy ending but in fact this movie is totally different from my initial expectation. It is not boring but is interesting and would shock or surprised us even though it is different from my initial expectation. For instance, I thought Sara is a kind mother and guess she will have a happy ending but end up she was suffered in the psychological problem. It’s a very big change between the segment of shots for the beginning and the ending part.