One fringe benefit to a grueling schedule as high school English teacher: I’m advisor to an active, provocative human right’s club. This club forces me/us to think, to talk, to act.
The club’s overarching goal is education, exposure to ideas and issues that help us think about who we are as individuals and who we are together, as community, as interwoven, interlinking individuals. The club’s primary activity in accomplishing this goal is bringing speakers into the school from various perspectives: educators opposing/supporting the war in Iraq, musicians fusing the migrant experience with American music since the depression era, the A.C.L.U., the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a former recruiter of the Aryan Nations. Another ongoing educational activity the club sponsors is a film series that over the last two years has included “The Laramie Project,” “Bird Cage,” “American History X,” “Edward Scissorshand,” and “The Business of Fancydancing,” among other films.
This weekend I screened the film they want to show this week:
Darren Aronofsky’s film of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Requiem for a Dream.
This weekend I screamed this film, a down-turning spiral, an entropy I was hopeless to avert. Here are the notes I took, I was taken by, an accidental “sonnet,” which I will share with the club as we decide how to present this film, how to facilitate the discussion (if we’re all not speechless at the end), if we decide to show the film at all:
Wreck of a Dream
Soft start: wanting things better
Wanting things better for themselves
They f----- themselves
Then society took its turn
To the mother: restraints, forced feeding
electroshock therapy
To the son: law before medicine
the loss of his left arm
The son’s girl friend succumbed to the mob
the hedonistic masses, her pain
engorging their pleasures
Hard end: they wanted things better
We crush each other
American dreams hardening into nightmares
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