From: "Andrew Hagen" <xah-AT-myrealbox.com>
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 22:44:39 -0500
Subject: BHA: Re: Requiem for a Dream: A  Critical Realist Response


On Wed, 07 Feb 2001 07:52:26 +1000, Gary MacLennan wrote:
>[....]Requiem for a Dream:
>When going to see Requiem for a Dream, think of Marcellus' line in Hamlet 
>and substitute America for Denmark and you get the movie's message 'There 
>is something rotten in the state of America.' 

The line should rather be: "There is something rotten in the state of
American filmmaking." This trite, MTV inspired melodramtic throwaway,
Requiem for a Dream, does try *so* hard to get its message across:
drugs are bad. After seeing Ellen Burstyn's character hallucinate from
diet pills so strongly that she needs electroshock, her son's life
ruined by gangsterism and a dirty needle, the noble black character
thrown in prison, and the incredibly beautiful Jennifer Connelly
reduced to a commodity from association with all these lowlifes, one
does get the message: drugs ARE bad. They really are. I'm sure. As we
used to say back in forensics, however, "Look, the horse is dead,
buried, and the funeral happened a week ago, people. Get over it." The
horse, and this movie, are indeed dead on arrival. 

Requiem's self-flagellation does not end its hokey storeyline. We are
subjected to innumerable sound effects. What are sound effects, you
ask? Good question. It's the old principle of "see cow, hear cow." If
you show a cow on the screen, it simply must moo. If a cow appears, but
does not moo, the film has violated one of the great tenets of
filmmaking and the end product is attainted alike to a heretic of 16th
Century Spain. In Requiem, there are no cows, thank God. But there are
plenty of opportunities for sound effects. Filling up a glass with
whiskey? Fill the speakers with the sounds of a glass being filled with
liquid. You know the sound. It's the same sound used for many beverage
advertisements as seen on TV. Except this sound is much louder than it
would be in real life. Lighting a match? Dub in a match sound. Another
example. Say someone is filling up their syringe with illegal drugs.
Dub in the sound that this process apparently makes. But make that
sound really loud. Repeat this often. Everytime you hear the thing that
makes a sound, make that same, pre-recorded sound, really loud, just
when it appears on screen. Am I the only one who finds this annoying?
It is like being force-fed. At least have different pre-recorded sounds
for the different match strikes. Match strikes don't sound the exact
same every time.

The MTV aspect comes in with the music video style of editing. The
director is not satisfied with simply telling his story. He must
display his ability as a filmmaker to have lots of action on the screen
through the use of multiple frames. This process is repeated endlessly.
These "frames" work well for neither web sites nor movies. Is the
director innovative in his use of frames? No. Has anyone seen the
Woodstock movie? Or the old 1950s film noirs where Bogie is on one half
of the screen and Lauren Bacall is on the other half, and a telephone
is in the middle bottom of the screen, signifying the medium of their
conversation? It's an old, boring technique.

I had the good fortune to watch the film with a great friend of many
years, making the experience more than worthwhile. It is too bad the
stock characters couldn't have lived natural lives, and occasionally
had a fulfilling experience themselves, as even the most addicted
people do indeed have. Did the characters indeed dream of a better
life? Well, real life people would have. Even in America do people
dream. But these characters only wanted a bigger score, (for the more
proper among the readership of this list, a "score" is when you buy
lots of illegal drugs), not some kind of Leninist Potemkin village
fantasy. Where's the complexity? Where's the evidence that anyone cared
about the real characters that lived behind the stock images of the
filmmakers?

The stentorian moralizing of Requiem is beyond the pale. I cannot
recommend the film.

As for the critical realism response, I know Bhaskar wants to drive us
into the flimsy ground of aesthetics. I just wonder if anyone else has
heard of the original "critical realism"--the aesthetic school of the
first half of the 20th Century.

Andrew Hagen
xah-AT-myrealbox.com




     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---