I WAS RECENTLY relieved to discover in myself a new immunity to the manipulative power of gratuitous spectacle. Relieved, because suddenly there were so many things I would not have to waste my time doing: I could happily turn down tickets to Cirque du Soleil; I would never again worry about missing a "great" music video; I felt no need to see more Brian DePalma films; and I could, with a clear conscience, blow off avant-garde Belgian dance companies. In short, I could spend more time drinking wine and watching people just doing what they do, knowing that the spectacle of a handsome man lighting his cigarette was fuller by far than what I was missing.

This pleasant immunity now extends itself to the work of hack auteur Darren Aronofsky, whose previous effort, the vastly overrated *, contained more useless, gratuitous spectacle than a recycling bin full of rave flyers. In his new film, Requiem for a Dream (based on the Hubert Selby Jr. novel of the same name, about the downward spiral of a trio of Brooklyn junkies), Aronofsky again opts to assault us with self-righteous imagery masquerading as some sort of daring bohemian technique. It is a conceit that manages to obliterate the few promising moments in the film: It looks like Ellen Burstyn's performance is a knockout, but who can really tell, what with all the roving lights and lumbering refrigerators and cut, cut, cuts all over the place? Likewise, the rapid-fire montages that are meant to telescope the rush of shooting up instead play like a Nike commercial--Just do it!--promoting the thrills of junk. In the end, Requiem for a Dream comes off as so much high-school posturing: puerile, craven, and, in hindsight, embarrassingly tacky.

An interesting footnote to the production: There was a big stink made about the proposed NC-17 rating for Requiem (it is being released unrated). Ironically, the most gratuitous image in the film--a glimpsed (and faked) moment of forced pornography, meant to describe the nadir of Jennifer Connelly's addiction--is the one that Jack Valenti and his team of zombies singled out to justify the restrictive NC-17 appellation. Of course Aronofsky argued for the scene's essentialness. Would that he had substituted a shot of a handsome man, lighting his cigarette.