EDITING AND SOUND DESIGN ANALYSIS OF REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

Thomas Hoffman Lucas Ostrowski

THFM 2560 December 4, 2012

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The editor of Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000) is Jay Rabinowitz. Rabinowitz’ credits include I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007), The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011), and many films by Jim Jarmusch, with whom he is a frequent collaborator (Night on Earth (1991), The Limits of Control (2009)). The film focuses on four people whose own unique addictions lead them to create their collective demise. Harry (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) come to witness the horrors of heroin addiction while Sara (Ellen Burstyn), Harry’s mother, finds her sanity unraveling due to an addiction to diet pills that stems from her obsessive desire to look good for a future television appearance. The film’s unfolding of the action on a rather large scale was, according to Aronofsky, one challenging aspect of making the film. Such made him “wonder how I would deal with different subjectivities within the same space and time” (Requiem for a Dream production notes). This is a film about collective addiction, collective struggle, and collective downfall. In its editing choices, it establishes a feeling of collectiveness in many ways and so that the independent stories of these characters can create something unified and something whole. The result is a synthesis that would not have been possible if not for its editing choices. One notable choice is what Aronofsky has dubbed the “hip-hop montage.” According to Aronofsky, “the repetitive nature of the hip-hop montages hopefully captures the obsessive nature of addiction,” thus enabling the film to make clear observations regarding its subject matter and theme through its visual language (Requiem for a Dream production notes). As described by Roger Ebert, in the hip-hop montage in Requiem for a Dream, “Aronofsky uses extreme close-ups to show drugs acting […] we see the pills, or the fix, filling the screen […] Then the injection, swallowing or sniffing […] Then the pupils of their eyes dilate. All done with acute exaggeration of sounds” (Ebert). On a literal level, the montages, like any montage, allow for the passage of time to be shown in a much more brief manner. Even beyond this, though, the film establishes a symbolic cohesiveness between the characters that, again, establishes a setting defined by collective addiction. The montages depict the sense of routine that defines their existences and lays the groundwork for the eventual plight. The film makes using cocaine or heroin as routine of an activity as turning the television on or off. For these characters, their drug use becomes part of a grand routine that fills a certain void within, and this is exactly what makes the world of drugs such a seductively inescapable world with such a heightened tendency of self-destruction. The “acute exaggeration of sounds” that Ebert writes of is a nod to the film’s precise attention to detail through careful and attentive sound design. Its sound designer is Brian Emrich, and has worked previously with Aronofsky on Pi (1996) and later on The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), and Black Swan (2010). The sound design of the montages further strengthens their effectiveness by not only adding to the film’s realism but by at all times giving the viewer either a more heightened or more disillusioned sense of what is going on in the film, comparable to the experiences of the characters themselves when taking the drugs during the montages. Another example of effective sound design in Requiem for a Dream is the repetitive use of Clint Mansell’s cryptic “Lux Aeterna.” The song is used frequently and in a variety of sequences, serving as an audio motif, showing that their terrifying

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downfall looms ever so closely, and even during their downfall, that what still exists is their destructive addiction. Whereas Hubert Selby, Jr.’s 1978 novel uses the characters’ pitfalls to make more aphoristic comments about the state of the American Dream, Aronofsky uses these to comment on the characters’ general failure to realize their own dreams as a result of what they first thought would enable them to do so. The feeling of having a void that needs to be filled and the hopelessness and emptiness that is attached is conveyed in creative fashion through the use of neatly edited flashbacks and dream sequences. Unlike plenty of other films, flashbacks or other techniques that show time outside of the regular narrative frame are not used in Requiem for a Dream as a gimmick to satisfy demands set by the plot. Flashbacks are used to achieve visual symbolism that creates the characters outside of the context of their daily occurrences seen on screen. Each character seems to be searching for something, whether displayed in a dream sequence (Harry’s desire to have a picturesque relationship with Marion) in flashbacks (Tyrone’s hope to make his mother proud) in literal fashion (Marion’s ambition to open a clothing store) or in carefully pieced together, almost hallucinogenic sequences (Sara’s desire to be on television, to be noticed and appreciated).

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Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. "Requiem for a Dream." Chicago Sun-Times. 3 Nov. 2000. <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20001103/REVIEWS /11030303/1023>.

Requiem for a Dream. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Artisan Home Entertainment, Inc., 2001. DVD.