Daren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream depicts the solemnity of compromising oneself for the sake of a dream. The antithesis of Langston Hughes's poem, "A Dream Deferred," this film portrays four interrelated people as they chase their dreams with reckless abandonment. While Hughes's poem explores the potential fates of dreams left to die, Aronofsky's film exhibits the corrosive nature of the unregulated pursuit of happiness where drugs serve as the intermediate.
The desire for the quick fix breaks the characters as they turn to the immediate reward of drugs as a way to expedite their success. The film carries the viewer through the parabolic nature of doing things the quick and easy way. First there is nothing. Then there is a drug. The drug use is followed by accelerated growth. After the summit, the user plummets. Addicted to the drug, the user's view is reduced to a scope with only the drug in the crosshairs.
This tragic and common story brings attention the the dilemma of finding the balance between individual freedom and the need to socially compromise for the sake of one’s desires and safety. The general public pays the cost of their free time and independent urges in order to gain the social capital necessary to sustain their lives and protect themselves. One extreme is to do everything society expects of you, break none of the laws, and follow all of the rules, thus taking minimal risk. This appears to be the safest way to maneuver through society’s challenges. On the other end of the spectrum, are people who chase their desires without concern for what others think and fail to be deterred by the fear of punishment. Neither is free. The super citizen is shackled by the norms established by others, many of which are highly limiting and fundamentally unnecessary. The radical rebellion is shackled by the products of his/her self destructive actions and negate themselves from receiving many of the services offered by the society they shunned.
Freedom has a price on it. Freedom is the ability to choose your limitations. The protagonists traded the monotony of the working class life for the freedom to do seize the day with their own desires. However, once they were addicted, their drugs of choice evolved from facilitation to means of desperation. Their dreams were redirected, or referred, to drugs.
What happens to a dream referred?
Does it dry up
like an old lady in the sun?
Or **** like a whore–
And then run?
Does it turn your arm to rotten meat?
Or lock and hold you under–
like iron bars and concrete?
Maybe it just shocks
Like a battery, corrode.
Or does it implode?
As I read, I can see exactly how much the two sides juxtapose, how they depict those who follow the law and those who go out of their way to fulfill Carpe Diem by violating every aspect of the law. But what of those who are equally blessed (or cursed) with these two extremities within them? Those who allow these two to coexist, where do they stand?
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