Requiem for a Dream free essay sample

It’s not happening, and if it were to be happening it would be alright † Sara Goldfarb in the opening scene of Requiem For a Dream (Aronofsky). â€Å"Sara Goldfarb is a lonely widow who is revitalized by the prospect of appearing on television as a game show contestant, while her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his friend Tyrone have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and ease. Lulled by early successes, Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone convince themselves that unforeseen setbacks are only temporary. They ignore their deteriorating circumstances and focus all their energies on realizing their beautiful visions of the future. Even as the promise of fulfillment disappears to nothingness, they cling to the delusions that are slowly destroying their lives, denying reality until at last they are eye to eye with their worst nightmares(Requiem For A Dream (2000)). † This was an excerpt from IMDB. com’s description of Darren Aronofsky’s film Requiem For A Dream. We will write a custom essay sample on Requiem for a Dream or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page There were four people in the story that had serious emotional issues from earlier years in their life and serious illegal and prescription drug abuse, but I found the mother’s story, Sara, to be exceptionally interesting. She is a middle-aged mother who has been seriously affected by the passing of her late husband. Sara frequently spoke to him as if he was in the same room. I had â€Å"diagnosed† Sara with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the passing of her husband Seymore, and from having to raise a delinquent son. In our book, the authors classify Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as an anxiety disorder in the DSM-IV. It is an anxiety disorder because it has elements including generalized feelings of fear, and apprehension (Butcher, Mineka, and Hooley ). It also states that one of the major criteria for being diagnosed with PTSD is that the person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which: 1. ) the person experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury to the self or to others, or 2. The persons’ response involved intense fear, helplessness or horror (Butcher, Mineka, and Hooley ). The movie never went into detail on how the father died, but it was enough for Sara to somewhat ignore the fact that he was gone. In the movie, Sara gets a phone call from someone at her favorite television show’s company saying she had won a trip to be on the show to win a prize, and that they were sending her paperwork to fill out before hand. She goes through her closet and finds the dress she wore to her son’s graduation about five dress sizes ago when Seymore was still alive. Sara goes into complete obsession to try and lose enough weight to fit into the dress. While watching, I thought this was her way of escapism from being lonely; to drive to hard to lose weight to fit into the red dress and smile †It makes tomorrow alright,† she said. She eventually goes to a back alley â€Å"doctor† who prescribes her weight loss pills which turn out to be uppers and downers (speed and sleeping pills). To see immediate results Sara starts to mix and match numerous of the weight loss pills and starts going into hysterics. For example while being high on her pills, she starts to see herself on that tv show, the fridge holding the food she cannot eat starts to jump towards her, and sees projections of herself and the show host in her living room hackling her about how pathetic she is for trying to lose weight and how poor she is. When the scene pans out, you can see that the tv had been off the whole time and she was playing this all in her head. Eventually, she does lose weight enough to wear the dress and makes her way to the tv station. Since she was so out of her mind from the medicine the police came and took her to the hospital where they performed an EKG on her three times and moved her to the psych ward. She kept telling the nurses that she was ready to be on the show and that Seymore and her son Harry would be so proud of her and that she loved them very much. Even to the very end when she is left in the hospital because her son is stranded in Florida, the only thing that brought her happiness was thinking of being on her favorite television show and the â€Å"prize† she had been waiting for the whole time is seeing her successful son Harry. She tells him she loves him and he told her that he loved her back. The delusions she put herself into as a defense mechanism from the loss of her husband were those of grandeur. I was a bit confused on how the medicine she was prescribed could have affected her in such a permanent manner but what I’ve gathered from what I’ve learned in class was that the complete imbalance of the drugs she had been taking reacted negatively to each other in such a way as to poison the brain and her body. The medicine could have affected the brain enough to misfire on her conscious preventing reality to really sink into her. Since she was taking the medicine at such an emotionally unstable time in her life, that was where she was permanently stuck. I do believe that Sara Goldfarb did have PTSD from the loss of her husband but I also believe that the drugs she was taking to lose weight affected her brain balance in such a way to completely destroy her mental condition.