The movie Requiem for a Dream is a difficult movie to watch, but gives the audience a glimpse into a world they might not ever see. The movie portrays a group of people who eventually succumb to the horrors of drug addiction and despair. Drug addiction can change people who are full of hope and dreams into people who don’t care about anything else but getting high. People who are addicted will sometimes do anything to get their fix, and that is what Requiem for a Dream is about.
Drugs can dislocate us from ourselves and others. Drugs can cause a person to lose sight of hopes and dreams in order to satisfy cravings, and/or avoid withdrawals. In people’s brains there is an interaction between reactive reward pathways and reflective reward pathways. The reactive reward pathways motivate people towards immediate gratification through the use of things like cues and associations, while the reflective reward pathways motivate people for more abstract or long term things, for planning, reaching goals, cognitive, or social rewards. As a person transitions into drug addiction, the reflective and reactive reward systems both adapt, and work together to create exceptionally salient pathways encouraging drug use. The pathways encouraging drug use can be so strong that it overrides other reflective reward pathways that discourage drug use, making the person more concerned about using drugs than they are about life goals, social reinforcement, relationships with others, and anything else that could prevent them from using the drug. People become willing to do anything to get drug, and this movie dramatically portrayed it. In Requiem for a Dream they were willing to do anything they had to do to get more heroin, including prostitution, losing an arm, leaving a girlfriend behind, driving across the country, risking death, and prison time. As drugs become the focal point of someone’s life everything else they once enjoyed can fade away and lose meaning, leaving them stranded...