Requiem for a Filmmaker

I saw Requiem for a Dream in a half-empty theater in 2000. The last eight minutes — Ellen Burstyn in the electroshock chair, Jared Leto’s gangrenous arm, Jennifer Connelly on her hands and knees for a room full of suits — I walked out of there feeling like I’d been mugged. The guy next to me just sat there when the credits rolled, staring at nothing.

That’s what Darren Aronofsky used to do. He made films that reached into your chest and squeezed until you couldn’t breathe. The Wrestler — Mickey Rourke bleeding real blood for pocket money and the roar of a crowd that barely remembered him. Black Swan — Natalie Portman dancing herself into psychosis. The man understood suffering. He knew how to make you feel it.

Now he’s making AI-generated videos for Time magazine’s YouTube channel.

The algorithm wasteland. The place where people watch reaction videos and ten-hour loops of rainfall sounds. That’s where the director of Pi ended up. Making something called “On This Day… 1776” — AI-generated shorts about the Revolutionary War. And from what everyone says, the thing looks like a wax museum caught fire.

I won’t pretend I’ve watched it. Life’s too short. But the descriptions are enough. Faces that shift and shimmer, wrinkles that can’t decide what color they are, historical figures shown mostly from behind because even the software knows its own creations are nightmares. The human actors doing voiceover work took the gig because the rent was due. We’ve all been there. But their day is coming too.

The word they’re using is “slop.” AI slop. And that’s exactly what it sounds like — the digital equivalent of factory-farm runoff, technically edible, spiritually bankrupt. Mass-produced content for an audience that doesn’t exist, or shouldn’t, or has been trained to accept garbage because the feed never stops flowing.

There’s a passage in Walter Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction — the one every art school kid has to pretend they’ve read — where he talks about the “aura” of an original artwork. The presence it has because it exists in time and space, because a human hand touched it, because it carries the weight of its own making. Benjamin worried that photography and film would destroy this aura. He was an optimist.

What we’re looking at now isn’t reproduction. It’s generation. There’s no original to copy. The machine hallucinates a face, and the face hallucinates expressions, and somewhere in the process the whole thing becomes a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Benjamin’s aura isn’t just gone — there was never anything to lose. The AI didn’t degrade the original because there was no original. It just produced content, and content is not art, no matter how many times the branding consultants tell you otherwise.

Aronofsky knows this. He has to know this. The man spent decades making things that hurt to watch, things that mattered because they came from somewhere real. And now he’s slapped his name on a production company called Primordial Soup and started cranking out historical YouTube videos that critics compare to “animatronic sex toys.”

I keep trying to figure out why. The charitable read is that he thinks he’s getting ahead of the curve, surfing the wave instead of drowning in it. The uncharitable read is that he got paid. The realistic read is probably somewhere in between — a guy who spent thirty years in an industry that chews people up, finally deciding it was easier to join the machines than to fight them.

But that’s a coward’s choice. And Aronofsky, whatever else he is, never struck me as a coward. The guy who made mother! — that biblical fever dream that audiences booed at Venice — that’s not a man who plays it safe. Or at least it wasn’t.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most. Not that someone is making AI slop — that train left the station years ago. It’s that this particular someone, with this particular body of work, decided to be part of it. When the artists who proved they could do it the hard way start signing on to the easy way, that’s when you know something fundamental has shifted.

Francis Ford Coppola spent the back half of his career chasing Megalopolis, a movie nobody wanted him to make, burning through his own money to realize a vision that might have been insane. You can argue about whether it worked. But at least he kept making things that came from him, that bore the marks of a specific human consciousness wrestling with specific human questions.

Aronofsky chose the other path. He looked at what the machines could do and decided to put his name on it. Not as a cautionary tale, not as an experiment in what happens when humans surrender control — just as product. Content. Slop for the feed.

The review says On This Day is “by far the most disturbing thing Aronofsky has made.” It’s meant as a joke, but it lands like prophecy. The guy who showed us a mother losing her mind to diet pills, a son losing his arm to heroin, a dancer shattering her own psyche — his most disturbing work is now an AI-generated history lesson for YouTube. And unlike those other films, this one’s disturbing because there’s nothing there. No aura. No original. Just tissue-paper faces and the faint smell of surrender.

I keep going back to that theater in 2000. The silence after the credits. The guy next to me, unable to move. You don’t get that from algorithms that can’t decide if Benjamin Franklin is Hugh Laurie or Anthony Hopkins. You get that from someone who understood pain because they’d lived it, or at least watched someone else live it and cared enough to capture what they saw.

Aronofsky used to be that guy.

I don’t know what he is now.

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