IS FEELING FREE A SENSE OF FREEDOM? And a lot of other unanswered questions about “Requiem For A Dream”.

I have been postponing this movie since my teenage years. I think that I kind of already knew that I would be traumatized from watching it.

So I did watched it, as I finally had a purpose to, and I hated doing so. Which actually means it is a great movie, because it made me feel a mess of feelings that I was surely not expecting: anxiety, sadness, mental distress, loneliness, imprisonment and an odd desire to throw up.

Aside from that, it made me wonder (a lot), in the context of the course, about addiction, alienation and self-ownership. By the story, the images, the music, the succession of shots, we discover a reflection on desire and excess.

So I asked myself from that: is feeling free a sense of freedom? Are we still the holder of our free will when on drugs? So in a way, can we trust our senses, our perception of reality when it comes to freedom and happiness?

During the whole movie, every character seems to be on their own pursuit of happiness, which consume and destroy them little by little. We discover thus a society of disillusions, where happiness is merely temporary.

Does experiencing reality through an object mean you live in a world of disillusions? To what extend can we trust our senses, our perception of reality?

I noticed the importance of time in this movie, when we can ear the clock ticking, feeling the pressure of time passing by. By accelerating or slowing the motion in some scenes, we can feel the total lack of time references of the drug addicts.

All the characters experience reality through an object or a substance, that is television for Sarah Goldfarb, and heroin/cocaine for her son and his friends. Their vision of the world is misshapen as it is based on illusions and hallucinations.

We can take the example of Sarah Goldfarb, who deeply wants to fit in her red dress, symbol of her past happiness. She starts (with the use of amphetamines to keep her thin) picturing herself in the TV show, which becomes a reflection of her interiority and wishes and on the other hand the TV show’s hosts enter in her intimacy, projected in her living room. In doing so, we understand how Sarah is progressively loosing her points of references, and she looses touch with reality, eventually ending up in a mental hospital.

At the end of the movie, we see characters such as Marianne or Tyron take a fetal position, as if they couldn’t go any deeper, and they were reaching out for something familiar, somewhere that felt safe, like a mother’s womb.

In loosing their points of reference, they lost contact with reality.

It seems that the characters are by the middle of the movie utterly dependent on drugs. Thus what is the room for free will? Are they free because they feel free? Or do drugs, which have taken control over them, destroyed their free will?

If we define free will as the ability to become self-conscious and as the ability to make a choice then, are we still free when on drugs? I think that it makes them “indifferent”, in the way Descartes defines it; as a state in which your will is when it is not pushed from one side or another by what is good and right. It means that if they experience “indifference”; as a lack of reasons to choose between two ideas; their will turns away  “from what is true and good”. So there is no free will and no rule of morality. The system of values, of what is good and right is completely torn upside down. Thanks to television and the consumer society that she lives in; the mom thinks that in order to be happy, she needs to be thin, to fit in her red dress, to have a husband and a married son.

How come their desire for drugs inevitably causes them suffering?

Apart from the obvious mental and physical suffering created by their addiction (Harry’s arm with gangrene for example), their desire for drugs is a state of suffering.

If we follow the thesis of Schopenhauer, their want of drugs coming from a lack of substance, puts them in a situation of frustration that can only be exceeded by using again. Yet the use procures the individual only a brief moment of happiness until the desire is back again. Thus, his thesis shows us that all desire, here the desire to use drugs, will create a state of suffering, from which you can only be temporarily freed. But If we accept that, then we accept the fact that their consumption of drugs is only a vicious circle from what they cannot really escape, destroying everything.

According to Hegel’s philosophy if I understood at least of bit of it, consciousness discovers that it’s itself the author of its own errors and mistakes and so it becomes conscious of itself. Does this mean that the characters on drugs are not conscious of themselves, as they are not the authors of their mistakes? Or do we consider that even on drugs, consciousness is responsible for its own actions? I choose to say that they are not responsible for them as they are not their “true” self. I think they fear the possibility of self-creation. On drugs, they avoid actualizing the possibilities they have, avoid engaging in their freedom to create themselves, avoid making choices, so they send away their surd and live absurdly.

Yet I wondered, why do they sometimes seem very happy? Marianne and Harry’s love appears to be true.  So in the end what is true and what is not? Can we even know what the “true world” is? I’m choosing to decide that I don’t have an answer to that question and I warmly welcome any answer anyone can bring me, as I am even more lost now than I was before beginning this blog post.