20 Years Ago: Requiem for a Dream
Today in 2000, Darren Aronofsky released his second feature film
“Does it make you want to do drugs?”
It was 20 years ago today, and I had just returned to work, after a long lunch to take in a matinee of Requiem for a Dream. My coworkers knew the trailer and they wanted answers.
“No,” I replied, nervously. “I very much.. DO NOT WANT... to do heroin right now.”
It wasn’t a ridiculous question. Around this time, movies involving hard drugs were a driving force in youth culture: Kids (1995), Basketball Diaries (1995), Trainspotting (1996), and Fear and Loathing (1998), among others. Moralizing about whether a given movie “romanticized drugs” was a common way to get on cable news.
Come to think of it, those debates seemed to wane with the release of Requiem. It seemed to shut down the debate by being so utterly bleak.
Requiem is a short movie, under 100 minutes, but with over 2,000 cuts. The editing resembles a Nine Inch Nails video, with split-screens, close-ups, and expressionist montages. The lead actors, Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly, are gorgeous, but their characters are grotesque. The style evokes a narcotic high, but the content is a real downer, man.
In Vulture’s recent oral history of the film, the director, Darren Aronofksy, said:
I was never interested in heroin... I tried to not mention what drug they were taking... This really was about addiction, and that addiction could be any shape and form. There’s only that one shot of the needle going in the arm when it’s all sore and gross.
The film initially received an NC-17 rating, due to a graphic sex scene at the end. After losing an appeal, the studio released it unrated. But honestly, it could have been an effective public school PSA on the effects of narcotics. No drug movie has ever looked so cool while making addiction look so uncool.
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25 Years Ago Today: Leaving Las Vegas, starring Nic Cage as a strung-out alcoholic, was released. Maybe today should be national rehab day?