“So Now You're Swedish-American?”

In Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1978 novel, Requiem for a Dream , Sara Goldfarb's middle-aged Jewish-American women friends jokingly jab at her desire for whiteness. All nine of her friends sit in a line of lawn chairs outside their apartment building, a Greek chorus of kibitzers. Sara strikes a movie star, Garboesque pose for them. They respond to her and her freshly red-dyed hair with a mock chorus, “So now you're Swedish-American?” (91). In Darren Aronofsky's (2000) film of the novel, made twenty-two years later, Sara (Ellen Burstyn) is seduced by the promise of being on television, and she readies herself by gradually becoming more and more like a white screen star such as Greta Garbo. Her vulnerability, loss of husband, and absolute naiveté about her only child's drug addiction combine with her lack of purpose to make her susceptible to television's glamour. By working toward becoming worthy of being on TV, Sara gains daily purpose, and she thinks that by being on TV she will have attained affirmation by achieving the American Dream. Sara ultimately becomes addicted to diet pills and commercial images that depict beauty as white, thin, and lucky, and that promise perfectly happy family lives once this beauty is attained. The societal pressure to be a beautiful woman, the weight of Jewish assimilation, and the desire for inclusion in the perceived purity of a predominantly white society all conjoin in the destruction of Sara Goldfarb and, likewise, her son's Jewish girlfriend, Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly).