Abnormal Personality: Darren Aronovky’s Film Requiem for a Dream

Darren Aronovky’s film Requiem for a Dream is an adaptation of Hubert Shelby Jr’s fiction novel of the same name. The movie depicts different parallel stories of four people living in Brooklyn, NY, and struggling with addiction. All four stories develop during three seasons, where every season represents how gradually each character’s lives go down on a spiral as the seasons change. Everything starts with summer, where are characters are doing fine, followed by the fall, where their lives start to go downhill, and ends in the winter when the characters find their fate.

The film parallels the live of Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), a heroin addict who dreams of getting a pound of heroin to sell it along with his drug dealer Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). Harry’s wishes are to sell a pound of heroin and save enough money to open a clothing boutique with his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly). Harry and Tyrone are two impoverished heroin addicts that can barely support their own addiction habits, while his girlfriend Marion is a cocaine addict that comes from a wealthy family.

On the other hand there’s Harrys mother, Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), a widow who spends most of her day alone watching television. Sara becomes obsessed with a TV show hosted by Tappy Tibbons, one day she receives a call from a company telling her that she has the opportunity to appear on her favorite show. In order to fit into her favorite dress, which she was planning to wear in her show appearance, she visits a doctor who prescribes her amphetamines for weight loss. She develops a tolerance for the medication and increases the dosage without consulting the doctor. She soon starts to have hallucinations thinking she is the guest of honor of Tappy Tibbon’s...

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