The results as detailed here play into the well established pop-culture story-line of heroin as the nastiest of the nasty and can't help but romanticize the lives of the characters to some degree no matter how gritty and merciless their ends are. It's the slow-motion suicide, do something up right even if it's self-destruction, no subtleties to be had motif that I'm guessing has resonated so well with the MTV generation. As a result this film has almost reached that cult-like status, on the must-watch list of everyone who knows they're hip to the hardcore realities of the world.

Director Darren Aronofsky does a good job here with gloomy atmospheric scenes with plenty of close-ups of tortured faces and some unorthodox (though such methods are becoming so common as to be less and less experimental) uses of the camera to capture various emotions and moods. The climax is the culmination of a relentless march towards total misery and leaves the viewer hammered senseless with nary a shred of hope.

There is not much in the way of feel-good emotions to be gained by the viewer here, except to marvel at the depths of others despair, feel the weight of empathy and be thankful for your own trivial problems in life.

Now! Where can I score some of that insanely powerful junk so as to induce a wrenching downward slide into hell that will result in my being eulogized by jaded hipsters for generations to come?

Cross-posted at: Pistonhips: misanthropic ravings from an expat in Bangkok