The Oneiric Break: Dream structures in four major films

I've sensed a recurring structure in a range of highly-acclaimed films, a lot like the self-destructive female archetype I wrote about a while ago. In this case, I've noticed it repeated in four films, all with that sort of "high-concept mainstream" status.  There's an extremely high chance that you've seen at least one, and maybe two or three, of the ones where I've discovered it.

Instead of trying to weave all the criticism together, which I'm sure would result in a big discursive mishmash, I'm going to describe the template right out front, and then describe how each movie fits into it.  Like most of these common structures, it's surprisingly elaborate and surprisingly consistent, once you know what essential elements to look for.

This structure always seem to occur when there's a male protagonist.  This male's sexual desire, somehow unfulfilled, is a key narrative feature; this male is generally pursuing an agenda of desire, mixing sexual, sensual, and romantic desire.  As the story develops, this manifests as pursuit of a particular female.

In the course of the story, there's an initial sense that this protagonist is in the real world (just an assumption of cinema in general, really), but in short order, this reality always gives way to a dream-world.  Sometimes this happens just through implication, other times the transition is quite explicit.  Generally, this dream-world is trance-like and vaguely hallucinatory -- sometimes through subtle touches of surrealism, sometimes in dramatic and disturbing ways.  However, at first, it's a peaceful dream, a dream of comfort and routine.

However, in the climactic moments of the story arc, this dream world becomes a nightmare, manifested as bizarre and sinister disturbances in the surrounding order. This nightmare world is generally unlocked by that obsessive sexual desire -- sometimes right at the moment of its fulfillment.

From here on out, I'll call this moment the "oneiric break" -- when a good dream suddenly turns into a horrible nightmare.

The rest of the plot is the protagonist trying to restore order to this nightmarish world, often through death, either literal or symbolic.

Here are the four test cases. Please let me know if you can think of others!  The first two are films that make the "dream" themes explicit, and then fill into the formula from there.  Also, warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.

1. Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe)

Crowe's unexpectedly cerebral Cruise-vehicle was loose and jumbled... much to the chagrin of his usual fan base, but to the delight of cinematic masochists like myself.  As with many of these, the line between real-world and dream-world is blurry right from the start, as David Aames' self-indulgent playboy lifestyle almost seems like a good dream from the first moment -- complete with references to paintings and echoes of pop songs.

This is the best initial test case, because at the end of the film, Tech Support basically lays out the formula.  The dream officially started when Sofia picked up David from the sidewalk after a humiliating bender.  The oneiric break occurs when David flashes back to his damaged face when looking into a mirror, and its nightmarishness is consummated when Sofia is suddenly replaced by Julianna.  According to Tech Support, this break occurs because of a malfunction in the machine, but according to Dr. McCabe, it might be the result of David's guilt over how he treated Julianna (was it the neglect, or the sexual desire? Or both?)  Finally, Vanilla Sky ends with a return to the real world, via a symbolic death: the fall from the top of the skyscraper.

Vanilla Sky is interesting in that there are TWO objects of desire: Sofia is the ideal, the Madonna, a paragon of love and support and intimacy; Julianna is the whore, a seething sexual cauldron of possessiveness and jealousy.  This variation on the basic pattern will be repeated in one of the other films.

Also, note the plastic surgery theme, which will be repeated later.

2. Brazil (Terry Gilliam)

Again, in Brazil, the "dream" theme is very explicit.  Also, as in Vanilla Sky, the initial "real world" and the parallel dream world hardly vary at all in terms of realism; Sam Lowry's dreams of a monolithic concrete city and an evil samurai, aided by a team of tormented monsters, isn't much more out-there than the clockwork bureaucracy he lives in, the whole of which operates as a sort of Benny Hill Rube Goldberg machine from hell.

If you interpret the whole film as a dream, the oneiric break seems to come when Sam and Jill are finally consummating their romantic interest.  This is when the fulfillment of forbidden love becomes the nightmare of incarceration and torture, and eventually, this implied nightmare of torture gives way to the explicit nightmare of Oedipal confusion and madness.

Three additional interesting notes about Brazil: first, it's named after a song, which will occur in one other movie in this group; this song is used to signal the final, empty disconnect as Sam regresses into a permanent dream-state.  Second, as with Vanilla Sky, the film includes a fascination with deformation and plastic surgery.  Third, there's a "mask" theme in Brazil, though it's not as developed as the mask motifs in Vanilla Sky and a later film.

The next two cases aren't explicitly "dream" films, but when you watch them, it's pretty clear that this is shit that would only happen in a confused person's head while they're asleep.  Plus, the "dream" interpretation of each of these films is widespread in criticism and reviews.

3. Blue Velvet (David Lynch)

In terms of this structure, Blue Velvet is the loosest of the four films.  There's clearly a mixture of hazy dream and lucid nightmare, but the boundaries between them are porous.  Even so, the themes are the same: Jeffrey occupies a sort of idyllic suburban world, ruled by convention and idealism and hope for his future. As the story progresses, this lazy fantasy is fractured by Jeffrey's insatiable curiousity, which attaches to the Ear, and by his unfulfilled desire, which draws him to Dorothy.  This leads him into the strange, nightmarish world of Frank Booth.

The Frank/Dorothy lounge music seems to be an essential signal that an oneiric break is taking place -- that we've been lured by voyeurism and curiousity into a nightmare world dominated by Frank's psyche.  The first lounge-music scene occurs just before Jeffrey first enters Dorothy's apartment; the second one occurs before Jeffrey decides to follow Frank to the saw mill; another occurs in Ben's house, and yet another occurs as Jeffrey is being beaten.

Two of the other key themes are repeated.  First, the object of desire is split into an idyllic Madonna figure (Sandy) and a fallen female figure (Dorothy). Second, the film is named after a song -- and music takes on a pivotal thematic significance.

4. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)

Kubrick's last film is both brilliant and divisive, elliptical, enigmatic, and among his less goal-oriented endeavors. Whether it's really a dream film is up for debate, but I know which side I come down on: I think the film is mostly taking place in Bill's head while he's asleep, right after he and Alice smoke up and have a fight. The fact that a highly sexual post-mortem encounter immediately follows is a good indication: he is entering the underworld of his psyche, and he's going to be working through his subconscious desires and anxieties for the rest of the film.

And indeed, for a little while, it's all fantasy-fulfillment: an intimate moment with a prostitute, a jazz club, a mysterious party, the intrigue of an orgiastic cult out in the wilderness.  The intensity escalates until Bill reaches the inner chamber of the party.

The oneiric break is pretty obvious in this film: it comes when Bill is exposed to the scrutiny and judgment of the cult leaders. From this point on, he continually finds himself brushing up against death, guilt, and retribution.  The dream of fulfillment and pleasure has given way to a nightmare of anxiety and paranoia.

Bill eventually arrives home to find his mask from the party lying on his pillow. According to my reading, this discovery represents Bill waking up from his extended dream/nightmare.  The mask is actually Bill's sleeping face on the pillow beside his wife, and at this moment in the narrative arc, he is finally called to return to the real world.

Note that, though Eyes Wide Shut isn't named after a song, music takes on a vast, important symbolic role. Not least of all, the pianist Nick Nightingale acts as Bill's access point to the dream-world's inner sanctum.

Note, also, the theme of unmasking as a dream transition.  This blatantly echoes the dream transitions in Vanilla Sky.

So yes, there are a TON of shared themes, motifs, echoes, and structural parallels between these four films. It's hard to pinpoint any particular statement or position held by all of them; however, the structure itself might indicate some cultural anxities and obsessions that are being worked out.  The patterns are just too clear and intense to be dismissed as coincidence.

As a supplement, I've mapped out all these common themes and motifs.  Check out the chart below.  Fascinating stuff.

Dreamlike Films: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), with additional notes on Inception

Yesterday was Stanley Kubrick's birthday. In his honor, I'm gonna take a moment away from Inception and talk about his own dream odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut, although there will be a touch of convergence between the two discussions.

What an interesting film, right? So many of Kubrick’s great films (The Shining, 2001, Full Metal Jacket) take place in universes that are wholly divorced from our own – hermetically sealed mansions and space craft, barracks and war zones – even Clockwork Orange’s future-verse seemed to have its own alien logic – that it’s striking to see a film that takes place right here on Earth, in the bowels of New York City. But STILL, it doesn’t feel like our New York City, our Present Day, our Planet Earth, because it’s not a realist film. It’s still a hermetically-sealed universe, but in a deft deconstruction of his own style, Kubrick gives us a real-world that’s sealed up inside a character’s head, shaped and influenced by that character’s jealousies and obsessions.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill escapes into a hypnotic New York City that’s hyper-sexualized, with every remark and casual encounter having an erotic component (except, arguably, passing the frat boys, whose comment is less erotic than emasculating). Read this however you want, but I have no doubt that Bill is experiencing his world this way because of his recent conversation with Alice, which has forced him to confront their respective romantic and sexual roles in their relationship. In the course of the film’s central narrative – which I would suggest is brought on by marijuana and the experience in the presence of death, signaling implosion and descent – there’s something simply off-kilter about the way things happen. This is an alternate-universe New York City, and I believe that it’s Bill’s dream-city.

Some of the best commentary on the film -- like this Film Quarterly article by Tim Kreider -- argue that the psychoanalytical reading of Eyes Wide Shut is a red herring, and that it should really be looked at sociologically, in terms of class, wealth, and human commodification. I'd agree that this is an important pillar of the film's framework, but I don't think it's a dead-end to consider the film on an atmospheric and aesthetic level. The film may include real-world subtexts, but they're all placed within a very cerebral world. I can't read Eyes Wide Shut in a purely realist-symbolic-allegorical way, because there's so much stylization, and because the experience is so distinctly disconnected and hypnotic. So even if I don't go for a strict ego-superego-id reading of the film, I do believe it speaks with an oneiric voice, and that the dynamic of sex and desire is one of its definitive registers.

[EDIT -- on re-reading, I realized I had pretty seriously misrepresented the FIlm Quarterly article. I insinuated that Tim had rejected all psychological and subjective readings entirely, which he absolutely did not do... if anything, he did the opposite. So I edited that part. Sorry about the original misrepresentation.]

There are a couple things that lead me to believe that even if Bill isn’t literally dreaming, he’s at least entered a sort of fugue. It fits with a couple of my first-post principles: the film certainly makes use of an intensely heightened reality, a veritable painting of crimsons and golds, reds and blues injected at key moments, and expressive spaces that sharply influence the mood of the moment. There is also a dramatic emotional disconnect between Bill, the audience's avatar, and the events that he's falling into. At his wife's dramatic confession, he seems to go numb, and at each key emotional moment -- his departure from the prostitute's apartment, his revelatory conversation with Nick Nightingale, his jarring tour through the orgiastic celebration -- his reaction seems blunt and detached, like a man watching the world through a pane of glass. This is because the film is less about Bill himself, and more about the alternate reality he's entered, which now bears his imprint.

Bill’s downtown NYC seems alien, but navigable. At the very least, he manages to find Nick Nightingale, and to acquire a mask and a robe. However, after passing a series of gateways (most notably giving the password to the doorman), he finds himself in a deeper level of his subconscious: a clandestine party where primal urges are given free reign. Here the bystanders are truly faceless, and they’re openly hostile to outsiders. It turns out that Bill’s biggest problem is that he stands out, and almost as soon as he enters the revelers’ sanctum, he starts feeling like he’s being monitored, and forces are rallying against him. Unfortunately, no amount of warning from a sympathetic spirit can dissuade him from exploring this new space that’s opened up.

The revelers in Eyes Wide Shut treat Bill as a pathogen, an outside agent that has to be destroyed, or at least rejected. This is closely paralleled by the behavior of the projections in Inception, and if you read the structure of the latter film retroactively onto the former, you can easily interpret the party as a stage for Bill’s subconscious, an inner layer where his conscious mind isn’t welcome. The Inception protagonists infiltrate this part of the mind in order to achieve a mercenary objective; Bill gets down inside there not knowing what he’ll find, and unprepared for the consequences of digging too deep (eek! Was that a Lord of the Rings reference?).

And so Kubrick’s story shifts fluidly from a fable of descent to a chronicle of unforeseen reversals, apparently the ramifications of his dangerous curiosity. When he emerges from the Dionysian underworld, Bill discovers that everything in his sexually-charged universe is broken, spent, disturbed, and overturned: his friends and admirers have moved away, or they’ve been “disappeared,” or (in the most unsettling developments) they’ve submitted to macabre breakdowns and perversions (I’m referring specifically to the shop owner who’s suddenly become his daughter’s pimp, and to the prostitute who’s been diagnosed with HIV). Bill’s friend Victor is finally there to wrap up Bill’s loose ends – he provides the necessary guilt (“What were you thinking?”) and the rationalization required to move on, and though he doesn’t actually answer our questions, he at least paves the way for Bill to return to the appropriate private spaces of his own life. There, he can go through a cathartic release, and complete the movement of “waking up” in his own bedroom, with his own wife.

My Inception parallels are still thin, but there are probably a lot more to work through. After all, both films rely on opulence and commodification as a subtext, whether it's prostitution and objectification of the body in Eyes Wide Shut, or mercenary ethics and territorialization of the mind in Inception. Both create multi-tiered spaces that provide an allegory for different cognitive functions, with an "inner sanctum" as the final, dangerous, and unstable destination for the unscrupulous explorations of the main character(s). And both of these main characters embark on these explorations in order to come to terms with their marriage issues.

I'm always fascinated by these kinds of shared structures in unrelated films. Both Inception and Eyes Wide Shut play with the concept of oneiric interiority and infiltration of the subconscious -- the padlocked bank vaults and sacred spaces of the protected mind.

Inception: the elusive architecture of the mind

Okay, I think Inception warrants a series of blog posts. I'm doing my best to resist blind fandom, but I thought it was a brilliant movie, rival to The Prestige, Nolan's other personal masterpiece. Still, I have to make a number of remarks that don't have much to do with each other, and unless I split this endeavor into a few different critical exercises, my thoughts will end up sounding as fragmented as these films I've been reviewing lately.

On that point -- I've been watching films that replicate the dreamlike experience, and writing about them, over the past week or two. Originally, that was because I wanted to see some films by Terrence Malick, and "dreamlike" seemed like a good access-point for his work. However, after seeing Badlands, Days of Heaven, Inland Empire (Lynch), and Heart of Glass (Herzog), it seemed appropriate that the series would culminate in a discussion of Inception, which leans heavily on dreaming as a plot device. It didn't hurt that I've been excited about Inception since the first trailer hit.

Now, having seen Inception, I've realized (drumroll) it is NOT a dream-film in the way those other films are. Lots of reviewers mention this in the course of their reviews. It's true... directors like Lynch and Malick recreate the hazy, loopy experience of oneiric unreality, and Nolan simply doesn't do it, probably because he's not really interested in it. He's less a poet than a crypto-mathematician engineer of narrative architecture, a speculative baroque fabulist whose aesthetic is becoming more focused with every film. There's nothing deeply intuitive or organic about Nolan's worlds. It's all lucid, logical, and aestheticized, without the murky inscrutability of images from the subconscious. Indeed, in Nolan's world, the subconscious is embodied as generic bystanders or militarized Agents (*coughmatrixcough*), prone to hostility if anything breaks the glassy surface of the world they've been placed in.

How different from Lynch, whose worlds are the product of many significances but no clear connections or translations! Whose language is an organic mass developing on a scene-by-scene basis, rather than a streamlined structure of jargon giving names to the rules of a complicated, unwinnable game! But despite their vast difference in tone, Nolan and Lynch are kindred spirits in some ways -- both love creating puzzles for us to solve, fractal structures of mutually-referential ideas. Both love narrative mobius strips and recursive motifs. Both have an unmistakable style that acts like a signature on their most important films. And some day Nolan, like Lynch, will have an adjective of his own (Nolanesque -- I'll explore this idea more in my next post).

If you'd like an academic-sounding way to describe Nolan in general, and especially Inception, I'd say "Baroque" is your best bet. According to Webmuseum, baroque art and culture is defined by its self-confident aesthetic, its dynamic movement and emotional intensity. It's an inarguably ornate, dramatic, uninhibited style that (like all broad artistic styles) was expressed in painting, music, literature, sculpture, and especially architecture. It's the forerunner to the formalism of neoclassical and modernist styles, more sweeping, less focused, but absolutely distinctive.

Baroque was an unapologetic "stylistic" style, focused on appearance and decoration, on outward displays of opulence and complexity, and on overwhelming sensory effects. Read over the features listed on Wikipedia: it was all about spectacle and display and illusion. Inception follows the same sort of philosophy, presenting dream-space as a series of nested interiors for the display of different sensory experiences: a gritty urban landscape, opening up into a 5-star hotel, whose rooms contain a snow-covered mountain fortress, which contains a vast blank canvas, reconstructed by the protagonist's imagination.

Normally, the building/mind metaphor is articulated in terms of levels, from elevated to subterranean. Zizek's analysis of Psycho using Norman Bates's house as a metaphor for his mind is the perfect example of this kind of reading: the top floor represents the superego, the ground floor the ego, and the basement the id. Inception has a much more explicit treatment of the "mind as building" metaphor, but it doesn't just structure this as a question of elevation. It also structures it as a question of container/contained, of security and vulnerability, and of infiltration. In Inception, the mind is a stage for theater (the theater of con-games), an archive, and a bank vault, something to be deciphered, navigated, and penetrated.

Strange, isn't it, that there's no comfort zone, anywhere in Inception's myriad dreamscapes? If the mind is a building, a space to be penetrated, shouldn't it feel like a place where the dreamer can be at home, at least until the thieves arrive? In the spaces Ariadne designs, there is never a sense of true safety: from the urban landscape to the busy hotel to the mountain fortress, and even in Limbo, which was Cobb's own creation, there is never a place where we, the audience, identifying with one of the dreamers, feels at home. Vigilance is a constant requirement in the dream-worlds of Inception, even though they're in our own heads.

I was tempted, at first, to say this is a side-effect of Nolan's large-scale, high-stress baroque narrative constructions, his drama and stylistic flair getting the best of him. But then I think about it, and realize something that Nolan already seems to know, and that David Lynch certainly realized long ago: there is no safe space in dreams, either. According to my sources (okay, I only really have one source), anxiety is the most common emotion experienced in dreams. And maybe Cobb and his team could steal something from a euphoric dream, but it doesn't seem too likely, when their strategy is clearly to make the mark feel paranoid, off-balance, and intensely aware of the secret that's supposed to be stolen.

By and large, the insides of our heads are actually twisted, hostile, and unknowable places, steeped in uncertainty, the expressions of voices issuing from so deep in our minds that they may feel entirely alien. And these are some of the central motifs of Inception: when so many of our thoughts come forth from beyond our reach, can we really trust them to be our own? How much of ourselves can we access, and how hard should we try to do so?

David Lynch's Inland Empire: An oneiric language

Studios expect us to pay for movies... theaters expect us to stay quiet for them. Some filmmakers expect us to sit back and enjoy them, or to be moved by them, or to relate to them. These are all worthy expectations for us, the fickle film audience, and by meeting them, we determine the success of the film, artistically, financially, and historically.

But can we really be expected to decipher a film? To be able to put its pieces together, as if it's a jigsaw puzzle or a game of Sudoku, and work out a meaning that sometimes seems intentionally obscured from us? This is an expectation that David Lynch seems to have for us, if you believe his own claims about his work; and whatever you think of his method or his artistry, you'll always be taking this into account: his films aren't just pure stories, self-expressions, or records of experiences. They're puzzles, complete with solutions, and though Lynch himself never deciphers them for us, he generally informs us that we can figure them out, if we look for them.

Mulholland Dr. was defined, if anything, by its shape. Though it was filled out with striking images, it was really the product of a central inversion, the interaction between the narrative threads, and the shifting relationship between the main characters. However, with his more recent Inland Empire, Lynch seems less concerned with sculpting a shape and more concerned with creating a language. He does this in a stream-of-consciousness visual poem, filmed without an overall plan or a well-defined shooting schedule. The result is a fragmented narrative full of significance-laden people and objects, the words and phrases to which the film gives voice.

This has been said before of dreams... Jung says dreams, like poems, have their own language, and in concert with his psychoanalytical brethren, he believes that this language can be heard and understood. And this helps give us a sense of Lynch's mission: he wants to talk about a certain life experience, but he wants to do it in an oneiric language. Among all filmmakers, he may be the most proficient at accomplishing this goal.

So it turns out this puzzle is to be solved through translation (more goal-oriented than "interpretation" in general). David Lynch refuses to tell us the intended meaning, so he removes himself as a source, and it becomes a lot like the act of reading a dream: we know these images have sources, objects of reference, but we have to determine them through context, and trust our determination. It's hermeneutics, returned to its pre-postmodern relativism level... we can stop asking "What did this movie mean to me?" and go back to asking, "What did this movie mean?"

This is Lynch's dream-logic at work. No meaning is readily apparent; reality is heightened to its peak, and you know every object and word and gesture is pregnant with significance, but you're denied direct access to that significance, and even the code that determines them isn't transparent. This paragraph isn't going to add much to the above discussion, so I'll just let it remain an abortive little tribute: nobody can match Lynch in creating meaningful images, ripped out of their explicit structure and allowed to create their own semiotic system within the space of the film.

Of course, if you're going to make a movie like this, you have to do what Lynch has done here: you have to give your audience something to involve themselves in, even if they can't immediately apprehend the overall meaning you're going for. Luckily, Lynch is a master of mysterious and intriguing images, and I have to confess, the shot of Susan running toward the camera was one of the most terrifying moments I remember seeing in cinema. This shit hits you in the visual cortex, where it will always count, even in the midst of the most oblique narrative imaginable.

It's worth noting some other dreamlike aspects of Lynch. His dialogue is dissociative, like everyone in the film is in a trance. It's as if they're not real people, but rather mere projections of the dreamer in their own mind. Further, once we get into the heart of Inland Empire, everything seems to take place in an interior, including the scenes out on Sunset Boulevard (reinforced when we discover that it's actually a film set). After all, the real world, the expansive landscape of California geography, isn't really our setting... how else could it feel, spending three hours inside the mind of a stranger?

Dream-state in the cinema of Terrence Malick: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978)

Terrence Malick's films are simultaneously realistic and hypnotic, both grounded in historical situations and transcendent in their evocativeness. Both Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) seem to rise above the times and places that provide them with such decisive settings; the characters are not archetypes or mythological heroes, but they aren't mere humans, either, with those quirks and textures that are so important to unique personalities. These characters are projections, spiritual avatars of desires and emotions, and the histories they inhabit are luminous stages for their dramatic interplay.

Malick's films are broad, sweeping dreamscapes, where acts take on special significance, and where emotional reactions are blunted. The acts depicted may be chilling, or traumatic, or disheartening, but rather than strong notes, they evoke sustained tones, extended feelings of bliss and preponderance. Ebert makes much of this in his acute reviews of the films. There is narrative logic, and there is emotional content, but the threads binding them together are tenuous at best... the result is an experience like a daydream, or a revery, where our feelings unfold peacefully no matter what's on the screen before us.

Yet, despite the lack of strong emotional involvement, there is movement and momentum in Malick's narratives. From the very beginning, Badlands is a desire-fulfillment fantasy, chronicling two impulses: first, Holly's romantic desire, her infatuation with and idealization of Kit; second, Kit's violent tendencies, those sudden "heroic" rage issues mixed with paranoia and self-preservation, the emergence of the suppressed death drive. Holly's voiceover and Kit's mean streak are remote from each other, the signs of parallel desires bubbling up from the subconscious and overflowing into everyday life.

Badlands takes place in a messy world, smoothed over by the bright sunlight and deadpan direction. It may be a place of oneiric nostalgia, but it's infused with the mundane. Days of Heaven takes Malick's dreamlike aesthetic one step further, giving us a world that's focused, illuminated, and deliberate, a heightened reality if ever I've experienced one. The film is shot in color, but the golden wheat fields and late afternoon sunlight evoke sepia-toned photographs. The endless emptiness of the Great Plains provides a canvas for the placement of objects, people, faces, bodies, and landmarks. Every element becomes a focal point: the plow, the farm workers scattered along a pathway, the master's house, the gazebo, the airplane; later, the locusts, the fire, the gun, the automobile. There is a sense of isolation that pervades this lonely landscape and filters down into everything, from the objects and locations to the people themselves.

According to some commentators, it's the material nature of the camera itself that brings about this effect. Consider, from Kinema Journal's article LIKE A DREAM. A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE ONEIRIC METAPHOR IN FILM THEORY:

"The cinematic apparatus, in fact, presents the spectator with representations, which offer themselves as perceptions. Even more, it creates an impression of reality which has no comparison with the one provided by normal perception; in front of a film, one has the sensation of seeing something 'more than real'. For Baudry, it is not the film's imitation of reality, of varying precision, which creates the illusion, but the functioning of the apparatus itself. Spectators are like the prisoners in Plato's cave: they see only shadows which, moreover, are projected by statues, that is to say not by reality, but by a reproduction of reality. Analogously, by projecting shadows cinema creates the same 'more than real' effect that is experienced in dreams."

Whether or not the camera is the primary agent, it's undeniable that Malick's direction heightens this sense of hyper-reality, through his flawless control over mis en scene in these earlier films. This is a large part of what replicates the dream-world: each object in each scene transcends its physical referent and becomes a mental image, representing an abstraction of something below the level of awareness.

In Days of Heaven, Malick strengthens this effect by bringing the general mood on the farm into alignment with the emotional states of the characters. Part of the reason emotions flow so naturally through the film is that they're prompted and prefigured by changes in setting. This is true of the dusty and exhausting train ride that begins the film, and it's true of the luminous, idyllic beauty of the Farmer's estate. The correlation becomes even more acute late in the film, as the Farmer starts to feel a loss of rationality and control, and the biblical advance of locusts and fire heralds the tempest of his anger. His anger doesn't shock, because it's been foretold by the apocalyptic changes in the environment. This identifies Days of Heaven as a work of Romanticism, a movement that treats nature as a corollary to man's emotional life.

And after all this discussion, we return to an important observation: Malick's films are not irrational or random, nor full of non-sequitors, nor chaotic and unresolved. They're journeys through a sensory world that's tinted by the imagination, and though they maintain emotional distance, they're strikingly lucid. This is notable different from the other dream auteurs I'll be covering in the next few posts, who surrender their continuity in favor of elliptical causal relationships. What Malick achieves, uniquely among his contemporaries, is a world that's hazy and cerebral, and yet fully plausible, an acceptable surrogate for everyday life. And this is what dreams do: they become our lives when we're sleeping and confined to our own minds, so they're eminently believable, even though they're nothing but the manifest expressions of our restless thoughts.

Malick's style is hard to encapsulate in a description, even if it's a rather long one. However, his affinity with the dream-state should offer some insight into what makes his direction so compelling, timeless, and universal.

Next entries: David Lynch, and Warner Herzog's Heart of Glass.

Dreamlike Films 1 - Definitions and Exclusions

I don't know about ya'll, but I'm super-excited for Inception. I love Christopher Nolan's piercing intelligence and twisted imagination, and I'm a fan of the cast, an ensemble of new-millennium noir superstars. Also, I've been thinking about the oneiric experience and how it's been captured, and Nolan's film, which appears to be an art-deco dreamlike noir film, is a perfect focal point for these ruminations. So in homage and preparation, I'm going to dedicate a few blog entries to dreamlike films.

The experience of dreaming is a very elusive one to capture and describe. Superficially, you might say that in dreams, "weird stuff happens", and this is certainly true. However, as far back as prehistory remembers, we've known there's a deeper significance to those nighttime non-sequitors. Skipping past Freud and his psychosexual descriptions, we find Jung, telling us that dreams have a language comparable to poetry, able to be deciphered and interpreted. It's worth submitting: studies have shown that this language is often expressing suppressed mental content, disgorged by the mind in its rejuvinative semi-aware sleeping state.

More recently, there have been a bunch of studies of dream content. They've discovered that the dominant images in dreams, across ages and cultures, include being chased, falling, and "loss of close persons." As these images suggest, anxiety is the most common emotional content of dreams. Though it hasn't been covered in the studies I read, it seems to me that these reports are probably strongly affected by another factor, the relationship between dream and memory... dreams are infamously hard to remember, and any recollection of images or emotions from dreams are bound to be blunted by forgetfulness.

Synthesizing this research with my own personal experience of dreams, I think I've worked out some characteristics that skillful directors use to make their films feel dreamlike. None of these are necessary or sufficient conditions... they all just contribute to the effect I'm talking about.

1. HEIGHTENED REALITY - In dreams, perceptions drawn from daily life are being filtered and reorganized, so anything that appears tends to be imbued with enhanced significance. Unnecessary details, textures, and contexts are filtered out. Some filmmakers (Malick?) do this with framing and editing; others (Lynch?) do it with colors and production design.

2. EMOTIONAL CLOUDING - For those who have scary-ass nightmares, it may sound unlikely, but at least in my experience, the events in dreams tend to be shrouded in an emotional haze, allowing only simplified, blunted emotional reactions to the events being visualized. The emotion is almost always there, but is rarely complex -- positive emotions tend to be reduced to a feeling of well-being, negative ones tend to manifest as general discomfort. Even the terrifying climaxes of nightmares (the primary exception to this rule) tend to be the culminations of much more gradual build-ups of anxiety. Consequently, the best dreamlike films have a minimum of musical cues and jump-scares, allowing narratives to flow evenly, rather than twisting and rupturing as they move along.

3. DREAM LOGIC - This is the one that people tend to fixate on; I think it's actually the least important of the four characteristics here. Still, it's definitely worth noting: in dreams, conventional continuity and cause-and-effect logic tends to be severely undermined, logic being replaced by more subtle associations and intuitions. This results in locations blending into one another, people changing identities, and inexplicable turns of events. David Lynch is probably the true master of this technique; other, more rational writers and directors can ruin a good "dream" film by leaning too much on logic, or by rejecting it too adamantly, when they attempt to reproduce the voice of the subconscious.

4. IMMERSION - This is simply to say that within the dream world, reality is never questioned, even if it's absolutely distorted, illogical, or discontinuous. Obviously lucid dreamers are the exception to this. The phenomenon is closely related to #2 above, emotional blunting; the shock and confusion that would normally result in skepticism never triggers.

Feel free to revisit this entry if you keep reading this little series. When I discuss the next few films I'm planning to talk about, I'll return to these three aspects. In the meantime, I'm going to touch on a few films that have made an explicit attempt to evoke a dream-state, but that, in my humble opinion, didn't really hit the mark (although some of them were great films).

1. Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006) - a fun, wild anime that's supposedly about a character who can flit in and out of dreams... but there's such an overflowing abundance of intentional strangeness, it overwhelms the fluid, intuitive feeling that we usually get in dreams. Dreams tend to feel familiar, even when things are surreal or amiss. Maybe this is what dreams look like in Japan?

For the record, Satoshi Kon's earlier film, Perfect Blue (1998), is a brilliant example of a dreamlike film. The general sense of interconnected events, the growing anxiety and uncertainty, the fluidness of identity, and the murder and chase themes that provide the film's undercurrent -- this was a fantastic nightmare film, among the best dreamlike films in history.

2. The Cell (Tarsem Singh, 2000) - The Cell, while a gorgeous and engrossing film, has the same problem as Paprika. There's too much detail, too many intentionally bizarre and ultimately irrelevant details, and a general sense of alienation from the inner world of the dream. If my dreams were that vivid, I would definitely stop eating pizza before bed. Incidentally, again, I think Tarsem's later film, The Fall, is more dreamlike, because the reality of the main character's narrative world is more focused, more archetypal, and less intrusively shocking.

3. Waking Life (Richard Linklatter, 2001) - Waking Life was intended to take place inside an extended lucid dream. The director's decision to make the whole film in rotoscoped animation may have been to divorce it from the messy realism of normal film photography; however, in my opinion, it backfired: the world isn't immersive (see #4, above) because the animation style looks two-dimensional, calling our attention to its materiality and artificiality.

Consider the above an explanation as to why I won't be discussing any of those films much in the next few posts. Here's a list of the work I will be discussing. Hopefully it's interesting reading.

1. Terrence Malick - a storyteller whose epic historical tales evoke the sense of drifting reconstructed memory common to dreaming.

2. David Lynch - a classic weaver of dreamlike tales, Lynch is considered cryptic because he operates in an oneiric space.

3. Warner Herzog - I discuss this guy a lot, but there's something about his earlier narrative films that feels both intensely human and totally disconnected from reality.

Over the next few days I'll discuss oneiric evocation in the works of these filmmakers, and sometime next week I'll include something on Inception, which I'm very excited about. For more credible information on the experience of dreaming, check out these sources:

Dream Rebound: The Return of Supressed Thoughts in Dreams
Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory
The Wikipedia article on Dreaming
The Wikipedia article on dreaming in film theory