Requiem for a Director

The last time I rewatched Requiem for a Dream, I had to stop it three times. Not because it was bad — because it was too good. Aronofsky understood something most directors are afraid to touch: that we are creatures who will destroy ourselves in pursuit of feeling something, anything, and that the destruction has a terrible beauty to it.

That was 2000. Quarter century ago. The man made Ellen Burstyn look at herself in a mirror and see a monster, and somehow made you feel sympathy for the monster. He put the camera in a pill bottle. He understood suffering.

So when I learned that this same director — the one who gave us The Wrestler, Black Swan, Mickey Rourke dragging his broken body into that ring one more time — has now started a company called “Primordial Soup” pumping out AI-generated historical content for Time magazine’s YouTube channel, I didn’t know whether to laugh or order another drink.

I ordered another drink.

The series is called On This Day… 1776. Revolutionary War stuff. According to the Guardian, King George’s hair looks like “someone melted down and hardened a plastic badger.” Benjamin Franklin resembles “someone genetically spliced Hugh Laurie with Anthony Hopkins, then covered the resulting monstrosity in a thin layer of roving liver spots.” The whole thing plays like “a mangled cross between an animatronic sex toy convention and those old Taiwanese news cartoons.”

The faces have uncanny dead eyes. The wrinkles shift in color and depth, like they were drawn on tissue paper no one could line up right. The mouths don’t sync with the voices.

But the voices are real. Human actors who, the reviewer notes, “presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation.”

That’s the trade. That’s always the trade. You take the paycheck and hope the thing you’re feeding doesn’t eventually eat you.

Aronofsky knows this. He made movies about it. Sara Goldfarb popping diet pills until she’s a hollow-eyed husk in a red dress. Randy “The Ram” Robinson taping broken glass to his fist for applause. They all made the same bargain. They all thought they could control it.

The difference is, those were characters in a story. Aronofsky was the artist, the one with the camera and the vision and the hard-won craft.

Now he’s the one feeding his craft into the machine.

In Pi, his first film, Max the mathematician drills a hole in his own skull trying to find patterns in the chaos. The pursuit of understanding destroys the thing that understands.

I think about Aronofsky now, watching his machines generate faces that look almost right but not quite. Feeling what? Pride? Horror? The quiet resignation of someone who stopped caring about the craft and started caring about the output?

The reviewer says the series is “strides better” than other AI garbage. “Real progress,” they call it. Soon the human voice actors won’t be needed. Soon it’ll be “entirely created — written, acted, directed and edited — by prompt alone.”

When that happens, Aronofsky can pat himself on the back for training his replacement.

Making Requiem for a Dream required a director who understood addiction from proximity, not research. A cinematographer who could make a refrigerator terrifying. Ellen Burstyn sitting for hours in prosthetics, digging into places most people spend their whole lives avoiding.

It required the gaffer who rigged the lights. The sound designer who made the refrigerator hum. The editor who cut those hip-hop montages until your brain felt needled.

All of those humans doing all of that work create something a machine cannot create. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The machine doesn’t know what it feels like to want something so badly you destroy yourself for it. The machine has never looked in a mirror and seen a monster.

The machine just generates tissue paper faces and roving liver spots.

And now one of the few directors who understood the difference between craft and product has decided to make products.

Maybe it’s the money. It usually is. AI is cheap. No union crews. No scale. Crank out three-minute Revolutionary War episodes for whatever Time magazine pays and call it innovation.

Maybe he tells himself it’s an experiment. A new tool. Just trying things out.

That’s what they all say. Every artist who sells out claims they’re exploring new territory. Every writer who takes the advertising gig says it’s temporary, just paying the bills, the real work is coming soon.

The real work is never coming. The real work was what you did before you started making excuses.

The last shot of Requiem for a Dream: Ellen Burstyn curled in a hospital bed, finally at peace because she’s finally gone insane. She’s smiling. She’s on television, just like she always wanted.

I wonder if Aronofsky sees himself in that shot now.

I wonder if he’s smiling too.

Source: Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror