Mengzhiying photography

In Requiem for a Dream, the feeling of experiment is even stronger. Judging from the temperament of the whole movie, it also makes people feel that the director is exploring the expression of this content, which is more dynamic than that in Black Swan, but at the same time, the expression of this theme in Black Swan has not reached steady control, so the action behind it is slightly rough. Let's put Black Swan aside and look at Requiem for a Dream itself. The film tells the story that Harry, the male host, and Marianne, the female host, are infected with drugs and are destroyed step by step by drugs. The other line is Harry's mother, Sarah. In order to be on TV, she used drugs to lose weight crazily, and eventually she was admitted to the psychiatric department with physical and mental injuries. Most people are so impressed with drugs and drugs after watching the film that this film can be dubbed as "the best anti-drug education film". If we look further, the director actually shows an addictive individual's extreme loneliness through drugs, or drugs, and leads to a doomed ending, revealing nothingness and despair. Although the film spans three seasons, the seasonal changes are rarely expressed through the description of the environment, but mixed in the fast cutting scene and shot with words. The narrow space, the shaking lens looking up and the fast and endless soundtrack all show this way of world experience with subjective world color. It can be said that the director tried to take the audience to experience the subjective world of an addict through the lens, just like the title of the film. This is a dream in a narrow space. It seems that there will be a stable promise in the dream, but this promise is like an irresistible temptation, and there is nothingness behind the temptation.

Become/indulge in

In the plot, the three main characters (the man and the woman, the man's mother) all show an addiction tendency. Of course, addiction is a very broad term. What we usually call substance addiction. It is this continuous use of drugs or drugs that has caused obvious problems and pathological behaviors. But if we try to understand this addiction and put it into the personality structure, instead of using "problem" and "pathological" to make a judgment of "when to intervene" and "to what extent", then we can go further and talk more. Addiction here means that a person's existence must depend on other things, or that self-integration must depend on other things, otherwise it may face the danger of disintegration and extinction. Of course, substance addiction will bring pleasure, and the essence of addiction is that individuals must rely on maintaining this pleasure. Drugs and drugs in the film maintain the existence of individuals as a unified unit through the satisfaction of the most basic physiological desires. Direct physical desire is the basic substance that constitutes human beings, and these substances are integrated and combined by ourselves in some form with our own strength to produce meaning. Material addiction, on the other hand, drags the whole personality that has been difficult to maintain its own shape and boundaries with a fragmented and localized body feeling (with some fragments of emotion, memory and personality). But this is not only caused by substance addiction, but through the most direct substance-physical feelings, it evokes sporadic fragments of personality, thus temporarily maintaining the unified existence of personality. But a little expansion will show that this is a helpless way. If we can maintain the existence of this integration by involving more personality components, more emotions, memories and real objects, then it is not surprising that we will go through fire and water for it. In the film, this more "advanced" addiction is the addictive relationship existing in the three protagonists. Harry and Marianne seem to want to get rid of the influence of their family background. In the opening part, they once fantasized that they could open a clothing store and lead a completely different life. This kind of imagination is really just imagination, which sounds so dreamy and unreal, just like the magical changes that can happen in life after having the "magic button" of "money". In the addictive relationship between Harry and Marianne, we can realize it by selling drugs, so as to get a glimpse of the essence of this relationship for this "dream requiem"-a better life and their clothing store. It's like two people face to face, but in essence they face themselves and make a commitment with self-temptation. This promise is like the despair revealed everywhere from the beginning of the film, that is, both of them know that it is impossible to go on like this, but they are unable to break free, which is also the influence of drug addiction on their personality. This sense of despair is hinted at from the beginning in the film. In Harry's fantasy, he uncontrollably grabbed the gun of the policeman sitting next to him. At this time, it can be seen that Harry's friend seemed to want to stop it at first (this is also a part of Harry's own heart), but things inevitably happened, and the ending came to an abrupt end at the moment when the police fell. A good relationship can see the temptation that the other person is about to fall into, so as to really think for the other person (and for yourself, part of yourself can feel the other person) and save the other person. On the other hand, Harry and Marianne are trapped in their own whirlpool. At this time, the other person and this relationship, in their own experience, are like a beam of light in the dark, grasping tightly, blending in and forgetting the darkness. Before the conflict, the relationship between the two people was as close as a dream, and there was even a feeling of integration (but not, a shot will be analyzed later). When the "dream" was teetering, the two men still took risks for the "other side" and finally pushed themselves to the edge of the cliff. It can be seen that this destructive relationship with addiction is "necessary" to rely on this relationship, not one. This dependence on "necessity" has its own unique contradiction, that is, knowing that it is impossible, but unable to get rid of it, that is, individuals have a sense of conflict between "love" and "hate" for addictive substances (physical objects and relationships) and can only "play" until they sink. Behind substance addiction, the deeper is the addiction relationship between two people, which is the temptation of weak personality. There is a deeper connotation behind Harry's mother Sarah's addiction to diet pills. Sarah's lines in the film are more direct, on the one hand, through the image of TV, on the other hand, through Sarah's own self-report. Sarah takes medicine because she wants to be on TV, which can arouse the "glory" in Sarah's heart: her red dress, golden high heels, loving husband and promising children are all around her. In the face of such a "dream" coming true, even though Sarah knows in her heart that it is false (meaning that what she lost is impossible to get back, she is still lonely and getting old slowly), but she still pays everything for it, which is also addiction.

lonely

The so-called addiction means that the existence of individual life cannot be separated from something, which makes individual life unable to grow according to its inherent nature. All the strength of individual life can only be used to maintain this inseparable relationship and indulge in falsehood. Therefore, this is different from the relationship between "fish and water", because "fish" will not use all the strength of individual life to maintain the inseparable relationship with "water" But usually, we may use "we can't live without xxx" to describe this relationship. In Requiem for a Dream, this kind of "can't live" can be said to be a deep loneliness. The essence of addiction is that the integrity of the individual must depend on the other. Without this other, the individual is like being in a dark space without any reaction (inappropriate, but let me use it for the time being). A classic but ethically questionable sensory deprivation experiment provides some evidence that when we don't get feedback from the outside world, our personality integrity as a unified whole may be problematic. For example, some things are divorced from the whole personality, such as hallucinations and phantom touches. We can't make these "noise" experiences a part of ourselves, so we will "crack". Of course, we are not in such an inhuman laboratory environment. In human society, deep mountains and forests, and even dark and humid prisons, our bodies and our senses can always receive some stimulation. We can perceive an "environment", and we can objectify it while subjectivizing ourselves. However, even in the real environment, the deep personality structure of addicts is still threatened by the loss of this environment. In the worst case, they can't directly feel this threat, because this threat brings about the destruction of personality. If the subject doesn't exist, they won't feel anything, but usually this threat of elimination will lead to narcissistic rage, and this non-existent threat can be quelled by strengthening narcissistic perfusion. In a better situation, the subject exists, but the object is a "disappearing" object, that is to say, it is not that there is no object, it is not that the object does not exist, but that the object has been facing the threat of "disappearing" and the individual has been under the threat of eventually losing the object. Generally speaking, in view of the latter situation, we may be able to use a daily saying that we feel insecure. There is no "sense of security", which leads to even a real person entering his life. On the surface, it seems that this person is establishing a relationship with that person, but in fact, because the object will eventually "disappear", the more real situation is that the seemingly intimate relationship is filled with anxiety that may be lost at any time, and this anxiety may be mistaken for a kind of passion and affection. This can be seen from the similar "fusion" relationship between Harry and Marianne mentioned earlier. The director used a symbolic lens to express this meaning. In the picture, Harry and Marianne lie together, touching each other and telling each other how much they like each other and how good they are. In this close-up, even if the two are close at hand, the director uses a split screen (this technique appears many times in the film) to divide the screen into left and right sides. Because of the black background, when two people's side faces appear in the picture, it is not easy to detect the segmentation of the picture. When two people start touching each other, the audience will find that half of the picture is a person's face, and the other half is a touching hand and body. This creates a strange impression, which makes people confused in a trance. Who is touching who, or are there really two people at this time? Or are you talking to yourself? Touch yourself? When two people are together, this shot is extremely lonely.

In the relationship between Harry and Marianne, this anxiety of losing each other lurks. Sometimes, this happens because of some daily expressions, such as Marianne going to see the old man, which leads to Harry's anxiety of losing Marianne, so when Marianne is about to "leave", the two need to make out to calm this anxiety of "losing". This insecurity makes the relationship seem intimate, but it can never be true intimacy. Harry told his mother that he had found a job and a girlfriend and would take her home next, but all this was based on an unreliable "dream". Harry and Marianne seem to know each other only by sharing this Requiem for a Dream. Intimate relationship will retreat if it doesn't advance, and the two sides will constantly anesthetize each other, which makes the intimate relationship that always stays on the surface unable to resist the external changes. Therefore, when external factors make the theme of "loss" and "disappearance" unavoidable, the relationship will come to an end. It's like the illusory beauty of two people, only solidified in that photo, and finally the director broke the photo.

Be broken

The subjective state of the characters in the film seems to be more than just a sense of security. Through the collage of pictures and sounds, the downward circulation of music and the dim flashing lights, a feeling of depression is created. In the second half of the film, when Harry's drug trafficking plan was frustrated, it seemed that everything began to fall apart slowly. At this time, the film began to use the lens perspective of fixed characters and shaking environment, which is quite different from our daily experience of observing the world, indicating that the spiritual world of the film characters began to break slowly. In fact, there is not much explanation for the history of the characters in the whole film, but only a general understanding of the life experiences of the characters in the play. Even in the real timeline where the characters are located, events and relationships are very jumping. It's like when Sarah is eating a diet meal, one minute there is food on the table, and the next it becomes residue. This metaphor laid the overall tone of the film's attitude towards history. The depiction of the environment in the film is similar. The audience can only see some parts of the scene repeatedly, and even the director uses a lot of repeated lens clips, which makes us see a repeated and fixed lens angle.

The experience brought by this lens language implies the fragmentation of personality. As we all know, PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), severe trauma leads to partial dissociation of personality, such as flashbacks, repeated nightmares, or certain specific situations can lead to horrible memories and out-of-control emotions. It's like being in an inescapable cycle, unable to integrate with other departments of personality. Simple insecurity means repressed experience. This kind of experience and all kinds of experiences that come with it are suppressed in the subconscious, but they are usually relatively complete and can gradually emerge and blend into personality in various ways. Dr Edward described the process. But in Requiem for a Dream, what is presented is not a complete and repressed thing. With the development of the plot, the barely maintained "truth" is gradually broken, showing an illusory or real experience, a broken and chaotic experience, especially in the last ten minutes of the film, accompanied by a large number of shocking pictures, this broken, intense but nothingness feeling reached its peak. In the scene of Harry and Marianne lying side by side mentioned above, apart from loneliness, there is also a sense of emptiness. If there is no sense of security, it will make it difficult for two people to get close, and the wind and grass are unbearable. Then, in this shot, it is revealed that two people have seen themselves, paid attention to themselves, and lost some beauty, but the same is broken and nothingness. Similarly, this fragmentation and nothingness is more straightforward on Sarah's side. This kind of self-division is regarded as a mental disorder in Sarah, and we can clearly measure it with realistic judgment. If the split in Harry and Marianne is a kind of dissociation hidden under the integrity, then Sarah tells us here with all kinds of fantasies and delusions that the only remaining integrity has also been broken. This fragmentation of the self is closely related to the threat to the self itself. In order to exist as an existence, the ego will try to return to its original state. So in the end, after the explosion of blood, vomit and various body fluids, the director let everyone return to the state of "baby" and return to the original state of subject and object. But isn't this a "dream requiem"?

This kind of addiction, loneliness and fragmentation is not a phenomenon that only belongs to a certain region or culture. With the great changes in modern life, it may happen in everyone's mind. Interestingly, I watched the movie in a small cinema. During the discussion, I found that many young people (college students or just graduated) would capture the movie's description of "desire". For the "desire" presented in the film, their attitude is generally that the desire for sensory stimulation brought by material is an obsession, which may lead people into the abyss. And this pursuit of desire seems to be very profound in American culture, which can be felt in Sarah's description of the significance of being on TV. Just for the understanding of desire, different cultures have different histories and play different roles in different psychological structures. On second thought, this deep-seated change accompanied by the drastic changes in modern life is universal, but perhaps here, we can glimpse the subtle differences in the attitudes of some different cultures towards this drastic change in relations.