{"id":6927,"date":"2013-03-23T13:20:53","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T17:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=6927"},"modified":"2013-03-23T13:46:38","modified_gmt":"2013-03-23T17:46:38","slug":"sweet-smell-of-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2013\/03\/sweet-smell-of-success.html","title":{"rendered":"Sweet Smell of Success"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I just watched a commercial for\u2026 something involving \u201c4G,\u201d not sure what\u2026 which showed a man talking to a small group of little children. \u201cWhich is better<\/a>: playing basketball in a huge stadium, or playing basketball in a little driveway?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStadium!\u201d a little girl answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause there\u2019s more room for the fans!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you have a lot of fans?\u201d<\/p>\n

She thinks about it and then says, \u201cYes!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you believe in yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n

Now she looks like this grown man is maybe slightly slow, because of course<\/em> she does: \u201cUh-huh.\u201d<\/p>\n

He high-fives her and a little later we get the tagline: BIGGER IS BETTER.<\/p>\n

Maybe the best reason to watch Requiem for a Dream<\/em>, which is how I spent Thursday night, is that it will make you instinctively shiver at this commercial.<\/p>\n

Requiem for a Dream<\/em> is a crude, sentimental movie. I genuinely don\u2019t think it\u2019s very good, and I don\u2019t recommend it. It\u2019s a screamingly directed junkie-downfall flick, which ordinarily I would be all over, but Darren Aronofsky takes things which almost always work for me and somehow turns them chintzy. I love comic-book framing (I was maybe the only American to pay twice\u2013maybe thrice!\u2013to see Ang Lee\u2019s Hulk<\/em>), I love Jennifer Connelly (and she\u2019s legitimately excellent here\u2013all the actors are great), and the movie even uses the one shot which until Thursday I would have said was guaranteed to make me fall in love with a movie. It\u2019s the shot of Connelly standing at the end of a pier, gazing out into the ocean: the shot I talked about here<\/a> and here<\/a>, \u201cjust a beach and a pretty girl.<\/a>\u201d I have a totally irrational reaction to this kind of image but here it was just surrounded by too much melodrama.<\/p>\n

The music is really amazing. And parts of the movie are undeniably effective. You show me a sweet lonely old Jewish lady getting addicted to uppers because her junkie son won\u2019t visit her and yes, fine<\/em>, I\u2019m going to get weepy, are you happy now?<\/p>\n

The \u201cdon\u2019t do drugs, kids\u201d angle was badly marred for me by the fact that literally every non-addict in this movie, except for some very sweet little old ladies, is a terrible person who is willfully cruel to the addicted characters. It seems somehow immoral to suggest that other people\u2019s cruelty is an inevitable consequence of your own drug abuse\u2013it seems like Aronofsky is saying, \u201cthis is how the world is, this is what addiction is,\u201d as if cruelty is like drug hunger or DTs, rather than a specific choice the non-addicts in this movie make about how they treat the addicts. I\u2019m not sure I can explain this reaction well, since of course I know that addiction makes you vulnerable and one of the things it makes you very vulnerable to is other people\u2019s cruelty. So in that sense being hurt by other people is often a consequence of addiction. But the script here makes it seem inevitable, as if there\u2019s no point in trying to address abuses by cops or doctors or jailers, and there\u2019s a nasty undercurrent of \u201cthis is what you get,\u201d as if the story being told is solely about the tragedy of drug abuse and not about the horror of abuse of power. I guess what it is, is that Requiem<\/em> acts as if only the addicts in this movie really have agency and the rest of the world exists as a machine to give them the fruits of their addictions. But in fact the non-addicts make choices too, and they are without exception evil ones.<\/p>\n

But Requiem<\/em> does have at least one creepy, genuine insight. It\u2019s really serious about this \u201cdream\u201d idea. All of the characters have some goal, some dream they\u2019re striving to realize, and those dreams are wholeheartedly millennial-American: get on TV, own my own shop where I sell fashions I\u2019ve designed, make enough money in the drug game to retire and finance the girlfriend\u2019s dreams. Heavy drug use can make these dreams seem immediate, close enough to touch, almost within grasp, even as of course they\u2019re actually receding every moment.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a terrific bit in Augusten Burroughs\u2019s Dry<\/em>, which I relate to a lot<\/em>: \u201cThe fact is, I have accepted Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards, met wonderful people, and had healthy, loving relationships, all in my mind, all while drinking.\u201d Requiem<\/em> gives an even more heartbreaking version of this retreat into the inner world, the inner audience, when that poor sweet Jewish lady admits, \u201cI like thinking about it.\u201d She likes thinking about being on TV\u2013imagining it, hallucinating it in a diet-pill haze\u2013even if on some level she knows it isn\u2019t real. It feels good to think about, whereas the reality of an empty apartment feels like abandonment, failure, as if even the good parts of the self have gone away and left you totally alone.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just watched a commercial for\u2026 something involving \u201c4G,\u201d not sure what\u2026 which showed a man talking to a small group of little children. \u201cWhich is better: playing basketball in a huge stadium, or playing basketball in a little driveway?\u201d \u201cStadium!\u201d a little girl answers. \u201cWhy is that?\u201d \u201cBecause there\u2019s more room for the fans!\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,177],"tags":[239,171,101,238,121,54,52,57],"class_list":["post-6927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-too-much-is-never-enough","tag-a-beach-and-a-pretty-girl","tag-abuse-of-power-comes-as-no-surprise","tag-america","tag-darren-aronofsky","tag-doctors-and-policemen","tag-how-to-stop-time","tag-if-whiskey-were-a-woman-id-be-married-for-sure","tag-sweet-smell-of-success"],"yoast_head":"\nSweet Smell of Success<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I just watched a commercial for... something involving "4G," not sure what... which showed a man talking to a small group of little children. 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