Finite Choices with Drugs

Requiem for a Dream is a movie about four people who become enslaved to the effects of drugs. The movie centers around a young man named Harry who is already an active user at the start of the movie. He and his friend Tyrone take drugs on a daily basis, normally just as a way to kill time and have fun. Later into the movie we see that Harry has a girlfriend named Marion who also uses, and eventually in an attempt to lose weight Harry’s mother, Sara Goldfarb, begins to take diet pills. Harry and Tyrone decide to become dealers so that they can make money and eventually have as much supply as they could ever want. At the same time, Harry and Marion decide to open a store for Marion to design clothes in using the money that they earn in the streets. They become successful at first, but then are brought down to where they were to begin with. Meanwhile Sara is enjoying the pleasant effects of the pills along with the weight loss, but soon becomes ever more desperate and begins taking more pills than prescribed. The movie sends a clear message that drugs lead to nothing but misery. The four characters end up with tragic ends: Harry loses an arm due to a serious infection from injections, Tyrone is sent to prison (for the second time) after taking Harry to the hospital, Marion has sold her body for drugs in return for sexual favors, and Sara has been sent to an insane asylum due to her mental breakdown. 

One thing to consider after watching this movie is if this was an inevitable ending for the four characters. Were they subject to a deterministic system of events, or was it their freely chosen choice? Before I discuss this I just want to suggest that in a world of determinism choices are still made; however, choices tend to become very finite if a certain combination of events occurs. In the case of humans, our will is guided and influenced by our social contexts so that under certain circumstances we can only will ourselves to do a certain number of actions. For example in J. R. Lucas’s Determinism, he states that “Undetermined actions are random actions. But a man’s random actions are not those we can usefully ask him his reasons for undertaking, or hold him responsible for” (535). Humans have the will to freely choose among a certain number of possibilities, but without some degree of determinism our actions become quite random. There are some things about us that cannot be controlled, one example being emotions. If one’s mother dies that person cannot freely choose to be happy or sad. They can, however, make certain choices that will either cause them to feel sad or cause them to feel happy. 

Getting back to the movie, are the actions that these characters chose a product of free will or determinism? I inquire about this specifically due to the presence of drugs. There is plenty of evidence that supports that drugs affect people’s behavior, and so the question is if the choices made by the characters were determined or freely chosen. This is a hard question to answer because another potent question about drugs is if we are truly ourselves when we use them. If the answer is yes, then we can say that the choices the characters made were their own. If the answer is no, then we must turn to the movie for a solution. 

Harry, Tyrone, and Marion were each addicted to the different substances that they used. If they had had an infinite supply, then Harry and Tyrone would have never sold drugs since getting more was their reason for selling in the first place. Marion would have never sold her body and most likely would have stayed with Harry. Harry would have never left the city and maybe Sara would have made a recovery with her son around to help her. Of course there are other possibilities that could occur from such a change, but my point is to try and show that the actual events of the movie unfolded due to a combination of preceding conditions. Another minor change could have been if Harry’s arm wasn’t infected. The hospital scene would never have happened and the two would have had another set of choices to choose from. To address my first question about if the characters feely choose their ends or not, I say that initially they did choose a certain path to take by using drugs. By taking this path some possibilities closed while others opened. I do not think it would have been possible for any of the characters to have stopped everything they were doing and choose something else. Maybe they could have desired it, but because of the decision to take drugs they were too late to choose a differing path.