It's been a decade since the release of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, thirty-two years since Hubert Selby, Jr.'s original novel version came out. Powerfully bleak, bleakly powerful. One way to look at them both is through the lens of Kurt Lewin's (1890-1947) force field concept. In motion, a person projects life space toward a goal (in pursuit of happiness, stability, power, peace or whatever) and arcs across helping or hindering forces at the boundary zone. The four unfortunate main characters in Requiem drive toward a fantastic (or mundane) goal, only to spiral downward due to "hindering forces."
But what exactly are hindering forces? A person can be "his own worst enemy" in a lot of ways. There are also enemies and rivals, real or imagined; there is bad luck and accident or illness or addiction; laziness; situational constraint; indifference; lack of imagination; "vegetable torpor" (a Woody Allen quip); timidity, temerity; reality disconnect -- "living in a dream world." Hence the need for a requiem. And let's not forget epic catastrophe and in the "we all get there in the end" department -- mortality. After losing the dream, a requiem for the corpus. Our corpus, our dream.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
4 comments:
You may know my opinion on Selby from posts I did before. I liked the movie and this, to me, was definitely one of the times when the movie was far better than the book. I have no use for Selby's novel at all. Lana really likes this movie too, and I watched it with her and found it good. We watched it on her laptop with it plugged into a car charger, and we had the AC running. It was during one of the poweroutages we had after Gustave a few years back.
男人有了外遇，但是他不想離婚
在外遇情人面前，他可以享受著年輕戀愛般的美好
在回歸家庭時刻，他可以享受著老婆對他無微不至的照顧
在同事朋友面前，他可以享受著眾人對他的忌妒與羨慕
男人有了外遇，但是他不想離婚，他只想自私的擁有一切
That movie f*cked me up like nothing else. Eventually I had to buy it, although I find it very hard to watch. It was on TV for a couple of nights a while back. I couldn't make it all the way through the first night, but forced myself to finish it on the 2nd. I've even bought it, but can't bear to watch it again. Compelling & horrible. SO horrible.
ellen burstyn's performance is one of the greatest screen performances ever
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