The arresting beauty of Darren Aronofsky's latest film is achieved through a barrage of technically exquisite images which tell a dark and all-too-human story.

Commentary by Mark Greene.

The arresting beauty of Darren Aronofsky's latest film is achieved through a barrage of technically exquisite images which tell a dark and all-too-human story. This beauty, however, comes at a price. Implicit to this movie-going experience is Aronofsky's demand that we witness the full-spectrum of images and emotions that comprise the Apollo-Dionysos axis; the terrifyingly bright, distancing and omnipotent consciousness brought on by a heroin-high is juxtaposed with the dark and unctuous depths to which a body will plunge in search for its next fix.

The heroin-based plot (as opposed to the amphetamine one) is driven by Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans, who all deliver stunning performances. Juxtaposing surviving for and surviving with heroin, these main characters initially raise capital by selling and not indulging too frequently in the drug. Soon, however, their supply dries up; Summer becomes Fall becomes Winter, and their piece of the American Dream slips through their fingers with alarming speed. This stress brings them squarely back to their addiction as they search for the white panacea and, eventually, sets them plunging towards three harrowing, separate nightmares.

In one of the best performances of the past several years, Ellen Burstyn brings us Sara Goldfarb, an aging widow living a comfortable yet lonely and spiritually shabby existence in a Coney Island apartment building habited mostly by other Jewish retirees and widows. Sara does not have much to do all day but watch television. This, she can do only when her television has not been hijacked to the pawn shop by her junkie son, Harry (played by Leto).

His stealing of the set for a fix and her buying it back from the pawnbroker at the film's beginning clearly set the pace for what is to come. It is as if the denial, fear and tolerance that these characters exhibit in this cyclical and tragic farce set a tempo, like a metronome, that will soon accelerate beyond anything playable by the human hand. It is at the film's climax when the haunting music, performed by Kronos Quartet, comes to rest and we see that these characters have transcended their sense of `self' and entered realms archetypal from which their egos will never recover.

The terror and madness experienced at the extremities of the Apollo-Dionysos axis manifest in the body, the mind only a trailing husk of what it once was, burnt and shattered by its experience of the divine as manifest in the white light and feelings of ecstasy provided by heroin, or other extreme experiences, such as electroshock therapy.

If the younger three characters have but brief success with their vision of the American Dream, it is left to Sara Goldfarb to fully plumb the American Nightmare in the form of a non-stop television infomercial brought to her living room each day. Join Us In Creating Excellence or JUICE is the name of the show and author Tappy Tibbons, played by Christopher McDonald, the host. After receiving a phone call from the show, Sara believes she will soon be an on-air participant. She visualizes herself on TV wearing the red dress she wore at her son's graduation but, after attempting to fit into it, she realizes she must begin a diet.

And so begins Sara's projection of a personality upon her refrigerator and the latter's embodiment of a dark aspect of the American collective psyche. This otherwise inanimate object will later provide some of the most horrific moments I have ever seen on the screen long after Sara realizes she does not have the willpower to deal with the hunger pangs that come with a traditional diet. Instead, she opts for a regimen of prescription diet pills three during the day and one tranquilizer at night that she hopes will transform her body into her vision of `excellence'. In poignant parallel to her son's illegal drug activities, Sara embarks upon a 'legal' yet equally gruesome cycle of addiction.

Aronofsky demonstrates that legal or illegal drug use depends as much upon an initial guiding `idea' or `vision' as any other venture. It is this initial glimpse or desire for excellence or symmetrical beauty that invokes the god Apollo and his sphere of influence. At their most naïve, these four characters all have an inspired mission to attain Apollonian perfection; Sara with images of a perfect body and the impressive distance of television fame, the kids with their desire for a slice of the American Dream, the 'right' of any American with a `vision' of success.

Perhaps their conscious reaching for Apollonian extremes serves to compensate for an unconscious pull towards feelings of bliss, warmth and communal ecstasy that belong to the Dionysian sphere. In this psychological dynamic, it does not matter which force appears first, as one calls the other; both will eventually be present. As such, Aronofsky has brilliantly captured the archetypal underpinnings of the American Nightmare.

His coup de grace comes with images of the refrigerator demanding to be fed. By succumbing to the images of Apollonian perfection delivered by the advertising arm of the American consumerist machine, it is perfectly plausible to imagine that that which feeds us (consumerism) needs to be fed, and so Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone perform the ultimate Dionysian sacrifice for all of the coffee-drinking, pot-smoking, no-dozing, ez-sleeping, happy-hour-drinking, heroin-shooting Americans yearning for communal experience and meaning in their lives. In this can be found Aronofsky's Requiem (request for rest) for the soul and still-twitching corpse of the American Dream.

Watch this film; it takes the step beyond Rilke when he says:

*For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. . . .

By Mark Greene, Ph.D.
MetaMercury Productions
http://www.metamercury.net

© Mark Greene 2001. All rights reserved.