The grapefruit diet won't do the trick, so she ends up going to a sleazy diet doctor for a regimen of uppers and downers (some of which, as we see in labored close-up, are the same pills Harry and company take for fun). While the trio of young people slide into addiction and self-abasement, Sara sits in her apartment getting crazier and crazier, waiting for the summons from Television Land that never comes.

I can understand why Burstyn wanted to take this potentially humiliating part -- Aronofsky is a remarkable talent, whatever you make of his films -- and she does as much as anyone could to make Sara more than an object of ridicule. It's one thing that Selby's story is a relentless downward spiral; you could say the same thing about Greek tragedy. But its irony has grown tired.

We've been hearing that pop culture is addictive for 30 years, mostly from pop culture itself. Furthermore, Selby and Aronofsky seem to be mocking not only Sara's situation but also the corrupt quality of her dream, which is to be devoured by a medium that is itself corrupt. She is allowed only one tiny moment of pathos, when she admits to Harry that she's old and lonely. Shuddering and grinding her teeth from the speed, Sara tells her son, "Millions of people will see me, and they'll all love me. It's a reason to get up in the morning." This is the only time in the film, I might add, when Harry visits his mother without intending to steal her TV and hock it for dope.

Uniting Aronofsky with Selby, a Brooklyn eccentric of another generation, must have seemed at first like a marriage made in heaven. In fact, their strengths (and weaknesses) are very different. Like most practitioners of junkie literature (see William S. Burroughs and Jim Carroll), Selby is essentially a romantic in reverse gear. He never loses his compassionate identification with his junkie characters, or his sense that on some level they are doomed visionaries, even as he follows them into utter depravity. (Does this kind of thing end up encouraging drug use or discouraging it? Probably some of both; I certainly know which way it drove me as an impressionable youth.)

Aronofsky, on the other hand, is pretty standoffish. The movie itself is his subject, and it can be inside everybody's head or back away into a neutral corner, as when we observe Sara being brutalized in a mental hospital by attendants who are talking about an Atlantic City blackjack game. The tremendous power of Aronofsky's filmmaking -- its omnivorous omnipotence, if that makes any sense -- has the curious effect of diluting its emotional impact. People are not especially important to him, but perception is. His movies can't be about drugs (or anything else, really). They are drugs. Can this prodigious, peculiar talent become the Lynch or Buñuel or Godard of the infotainment era? I can't wait to find out.

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