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Darren Aronofsky Films, Ranked by Unpleasantness (New Substandard!)

September 21, 2017

In the latest episode of the Substandard (subscribe, review, whatever, it don't matter, none of this matters) we talked a lot about ice cream and then a lot about movies we hated, or movies we loved but never wanted to see again, or ... I dunno, JVL had a bunch of categories. You'll have to listen to find out.

Anyway, since I love ranking things and you love ranking things and then we love to fight about the rankings of things, I figured since the episode is kinda-sorta about Darren Aronofsky's latest, mother! I'd rank his films. Sounds like fun, right? RIGHT? Pour yourself a stiff one and then step on in to my parade of sadness.

Okay, so, these are ranked from least unpleasant to most unpleasant. A sliding sadness scale, if you will. Please understand that I do this with love in my heart and a song in my voice, as I greatly admire Aronofsky's work. Even if it all kind of makes me want to kill myself afterward.

7. Noah

That's right: A movie about literal genocide and the wrath of God and the wickedness of humanity is actually Darren Aronofsky's most pleasant film. It only gets better from here, people.

6. The Fountain

Slightly less pleasant than hoping for the destruction of humanity is realizing that the death of your loved ones is actually a blessing not a curse. For a movie about accepting the inevitability of death, it's really quite upbeat!

5. The Wrestler

Everyone dies alone; if you're lucky, you get to die after jumping off the top turnbuckle at a cheap WWE-knockoff show surrounded by people cheering for you.

4. Black Swan

I would actually put this one higher (lower?) on the list because it's hugely entertaining, delightfully insane, and entertainingly campy. But the body horror stuff makes it hard to watch. Fingernails, cuticles, blood ... ick.

3. Pi

Just remember: If the voices in your head get to be too much, you can always just jam an electric drill into your brain to get them to stop.

2. Requiem for a Dream

I can remember quite clearly the first time I saw Requiem for a Dream: It was a winter break from school, must have been 2001-2002, I was in a friend's basement, and I had no idea what I was getting into. The artistry of the picture was self-evident, from the hip-hop montages to the haunting Kronos String Quartet score to the devastating performances across the board. It was brilliant, insane, bravura filmmaking: And I swore, stumbling out of that basement into the cold December (or possibly January) air, that I was never going to watch it again, ever.

This is a promise I've happily broken several times over the years, though the last 30 minutes or so have never gotten much easier to watch. In fact, I'd happily include Requiem in a list of best films of the 2000s. The only reason it doesn't top this particular list? There's a real empathy for the characters here—hope for them in the earlygoing; despair as their lives crumble—absent from Aronofsky's latest, far more unpleasant, film, the infamous ...

1. mother!

I dunno, man. I have thoughts on this, you can read them here. Perhaps this will be like Requiem insofar as the artistry will overwhelm my initial feeling of disgust and revulsion. Hard to say. Let's give it 17 years and check back in, shall we?