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Requiem for a Dream: Showing at the Dendy Brisbane This film by Darren Aronofsky is adapted from the 1978 novel by Hugh Selby Jnr. Selby is famous for "Last Exit to Brooklyn" (1964) a novel about the horrors of a gay sub-culture in New York. The film deals with the lives of four people: Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), her son Harry (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelley) and Harry's Afro-American friend Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans). The mother gets hooked on amphetamines because she thinks she is about to go on television and needs to lose weight. Harry and Tyrone try to make it as drug dealers. The idea is also to create a clothes designer business for Marion. Their fate should not surprise anyone. The film lasts for 102 minutes and details in the most harrowing way how everyone and everything goes wrong. We are spared nothing, absolutely nothing. At the end I walked out of the for- the-press showing absolutely traumatised, and I was not feeling great to begin with. I should of course have expected this from a film that had its origins in a Selby novel. In a way I did but knowing intellectually and undertaking the actual journey are two very different things. What is good about this film? Well the film is a sure and certain antidote to any complacency about life in America. The fatuous nonsense that CNN is about to shower the world with over Bush's inauguration is brutally exposed. There is something very rotten in America. Moreover the director, Aronofsky, is bright and is, I suspect, about to be The Man. His innovative use of a range of film techniques such as the split screen is very effective and at times stunningly beautiful. Moreover Ellen Burstyn is amazing in the main role. This is American acting at its most gut wrenching. For these things alone the film is a must see, and the fact that the Dendy is showing it confirms its status as Brisbane's premier centre for serious Cinema. The added bonus is that the film's anti-drug message is horrifically (necessarily so) clear. There are though things about the film's thematic structure that I would like to explore. It is for a start an absolute downer. 'Christ', I asked my friend, 'Is life like that in America?' She thought 'yes'. I said it could not be, because if life was like that then the film would be impossible. If everyone was totally fucked up, how could you get a book or a film written? I was thinking here of Engels' category of naturalism versus realism. Naturalism undialectically posits the working class as victims and ignores the potential they possess to become the agents of history and to make the world anew. That distinction was of some comfort to me. But then over coffee my friend and I had a trip through the number of families we know who have been afflicted with heroin addiction. The list was depressing and this is Brisbane, not New York. So is the film naturalist or realist. Well the answer is that it is naturalist but then, I am inclined to think, so is reality! The second thing I want to comment on is the fatal flaw that all the characters had. They desired. The mother wanted to go on television. Harry and Tyrone wanted to be dealers. Marion wanted to be a fashion designer. In a very Buddhist or Shopenauerian way their problems and their suffering could be seen to follow directly from this desire. If the mother had been prepared to shed the past and her dreams of a husband who found her desirable again then she would not have ended up on amphetamines. Similarly for all the other characters, it is desire that traps them. However I want to essay a non- Buddhist reading of the film. I want to say that the problem is not desire but the tawdry nature of their dreams. To want to go on a Quiz show is hardly the pinnacle of ambition. What is needed for these characters is for them to receive an education in desire and not asceticism. As the great Socialist William Morris said so memorably, we need 'to teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way' (cited in E.P. Thompson, "William Morris", 1976: 791). Looked at the film in this way the problem with the characters is not that they desired but that they desired so little. regards Gary