Body politics and spaces of drug addiction in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream

Abstract

Through a critical analysis of Darren Aronofsky's filmic adaptation of Hubert Selby's Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream (2000), this article explores different relational understandings of drug using bodies and spaces of addiction. In an attempt to move away from modernist readings of addiction I look to different relational and ethical understandings of bodies and assemblages offered in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. By approaching the subject of drug addiction through the film and Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy, this article presents different insights and alternative political and ethical imaginaries of what drug bodies and spaces are and do.

Faceless sex: glory holes and sexual assemblages

“…The body has no meaning in itself; it exists because it is connected to other bodies and to other objects, it is a contextual body, a body that is situated along a vector of meaning that is in flux. Bodies are ‘internally capable of producing desire and affective relations, regardless of the identity or form of the objects’– animate or not – in and/or through which they come into contact (Moreno, 2009, p. 220). Defined through the assemblages they make with others, bodies become subjects able to interact with the social world.…”

Drugs, addiction, and the social bond

“…Psychoanalysis acknowledges that addiction is always composed of unique constellations of subjects, objects, relations, and affects, but it also provides a framework for analysing why some subjects experience such apparently unfree, compulsive relationships to situations and substances. Post‐structuralist approaches have done valuable work in critiquing moralizing accounts of drug use by refocusing attention on what drug‐using bodies can do , rather than what they mean (Aitken, : 137), but this amoral gesture often results in a reluctance to make any substantive statement about why people use—confining itself to mapping assemblages and noting the degree to which affects and connections are strengthened or weakened by drug use (Malins, ; Moreno, ; cf. Duff, ).…”

“…The addicted subject "decide[s] to take a shortcut via the toxic route of the body and, as such, avoid the less immediate, and thus less satisfactory, detour via the social bond" (7). Moreno (2009) provides an account of this aspect of addiction in his geographical analysis of Aronofsky's (2001) film Requiem for a Dream. In reviewing the descent of four characters into addiction-a widow who becomes addicted to television and diet pills, alongside her son, his best friend, and his girlfriend, who all slide into heroin addiction-Moreno describes how they become "socially and spatially disconnected, confined, and captivated by the madness of their drug addicted bodies and un-realized dreams" (222).…”

“…Geographies of drugs and alcohol have examined their regulation by the state (Evans, ; Kneale & French, ; Moreno & Curti, ), their role in urban regeneration strategies and the production of a night‐time economy (Jayne, Holloway, & Valentine, ; Shaw, ), how drug policies circulate (McCann, ; McCann & Temenos, ), and the concept of therapeutic landscapes (Gesler, ; Wilton, DeVerteuil, & Klassen, ). While it is possible to highlight work that addresses drug use and addiction more directly (Duff, , ; Malins, Fitzgerald, & Threadgold, ; Moreno, ; Saldanha, ; see Jayne, Valentine, & Holloway, and Wilton & Moreno, for reviews), it is nevertheless true that geographers have had relatively little to say about the experience of drug use, the lives of drug users, and broader theoretical frameworks for understanding drug use and addiction.…”

Living fast and dangerously? Spatio‐temporalities of happy and healthful smoking futures

“…I do not refute that up to a certain threshold, severely ‘addicted bodies’ can be ‘blocked and disengaged from affective relations’ (Moreno, : 226) such that smokers can become unresponsive to people and places. Alongside this, some tobacco control commentators have contended that the affective sensations of enjoyment engendered by cigarette smoking do not empower young people but are instead a testament to one's seeming enslavement to a paralyzing nicotine addiction (Macnaughton et al ., ).…”