Steps Down to Misery: Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of Media in Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream

The postmodern society of America at its dawn with the development of new technology and the capitalist culture, promised hope and prosperity after the disappointments and devastations of the Second World War. However, this hope was crushed as the new developments disintegrated the units of human relations and instead brought about a culture of consumerism and mass media which sought to fill the void—the lack of communication in human relations. Gradually, this consumer culture penetrated into people’s lives, affected their perception of reality and in the severe cases ruined their identities. Intellectuals and critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, Guy Debord, Julia Kristeva, David Riesman, etc. and novelists such as Hubert Selby, criticized this postmodern condition in their prominent works. Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream (1978) depicts this devastation of dreams and fall into misery in the most tragic way. The four main characters, Sara Goldfarb, Harry Goldfarb, Marion, and Tyrone each suffer from individual addictions, but the addiction they all have in common is that of hope for happy endings which the new culture promises. By the use of Jean Baudrillard theories this paper aims to trace the way Sara Goldfarb’s identity and eventually life is destructed by the new age.