Requiem for a dream

Requiem for a dream is an American psychological drama movie directed by Darren Aronofsky which was released in 2001.

It is a film that speaks for a generation, touching on subjects and the subjects like drugs, sex the media and a variety of other excesses. That said, the film is particularly about dependency and its circumstances.

Different aspects of addictions are spoken about in the movie and how the four principal characters are managing them. The effects are slow at the beginning and unrestrained at the end. With them, Aronofsky is showing how we can fall into addiction through a variety of excesses and obsession of consumption. The music is loud, the script moves very fast and the scenes are strong and sometimes even hard to watch. The images saturate, exactly like the brains of the characters.

Every character struggles with addictions. They are all different but are similar in how intense the grip of each addiction is.

The hero Harry, a university graduate, has all his future in front of him. He is talented and very clever but he is taking drugs with his friend Tyrone or his girlfriend Marion.

At the beginning the drugs are portrayed as playful and occasional. Presented as a fun and playful way to escape reality with his friends. Then, he and Tyrone have the idea of selling heroin. They discover the world of a drug dealer without any pity or sympathy. At this point, Harry is also becoming slowly addicted to the drug.

He is as destroyed by his addiction so much that his arm is decomposing. This leads to the tragic end of him having to have his arm amputated.

His mum, Sara Goldfarb is also an addict but in another way. She is poor, widowed and addicted to the television. It is manipulating her in the way that it will persuade her to stay young and beautiful with regular imperative. All her days are spent watching diet television programmes. She is obsessed by the fact of wearing her wedding dress again which is symbol of youth and happiness. She is going to see a doctor to achieve this goal who is giving her what she believes to be ‘appetite suppressants’ but in reality they are amphetamines.

She is missing every rational part of herself and reality. The doctor’s scheme appears to work but she is slowly dying and losing her mind. The end will be very dramatic but without any surprise: a frontal lobotomy and being locked off in a mental health centre.

Marion, is an artistic young woman. She is slowly falling into drugs with her boyfriend Harry and her addiction gets so bad she even begins to turn to prostitution to get her dose.

Tyrone remembers himself from when he was a kid, very close from his mum. In the movie, we see a lot of his old memories as a child and as a son. Drugs eventually bring him to prison where he lives amongst racism and loneliness.

When people who use drugs can't stop taking a drug even if they want to, it's called addiction. The urge is too strong to control, even if you know the drug is causing harm.

40 million Americans aged 12 and older or more than 1 in 7 people are abusing or are addicted to nicotine, alcohol or other drugs. This is more than the number of Americans with heart conditions (27 million), diabetes (26 million) or cancer (19 million). 

An estimated 13.5 million people in the world take opioids (opium-like substances), including 9.2 million who use heroin. Opiates, mainly heroin, were involved in four of every five drug-related deaths in Europe, according to a 2008 report from the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction.

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