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.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence - A defense of the bittersweet ending

With Cinematical's recent Shelf Life column on the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I thought this would be a good time to articulate my own thoughts on this film, which I believe is vastly underrated... partly because nobody's given it the analysis it deserves. Commentators uniformly appreciate its daring visuals and its quietly sinister atmosphere, but many (Tolcrist of Cinematical included) seemed to hate a few things about it.

Some hated its general tonal unevenness, blamed on the fact that it's a hybrid of Stanley Kubrick's starkness and Steven Spielberg's love of spectacle. This, in itself, isn't a sin, but because of this unevenness, the film requires total commitment and immersion from the viewer. As with other towering, ambitious stylistic films (Snyder's 300 being an example), any detachment will destroy the engagement, causing the film to alienate the viewer instead of involving them.

Other critics thought it was simply too emotionally manipulative, which, in a film like this, is something that may simply have to be forgiven... both Kubrick and Spielberg are dramatic stylists, melodramaticians, in a certain way, and the film itself is a tortured exploration of desperate childhood longing and the core of the human condition.

The most common specific complaint, though -- and the one that's most vulnerable to an actual analytical response -- is the hatred for the film's ending. Many viewers, including very open-minded ones, and including ones who saw it in the theater, felt that the ending was truly unnecessary and excessive, like a coda that somebody attached to the end of the film to make it more family-friendly. Many say it should have ended when David was at the bottom of the ocean, gazing at the Blue Fairy, wishing to become human.

I'm going to argue that the far-future ending wasn't just appropriate -- it was essential to the structure of the film, turning it from a tortured drama of frustrated longing into what it was truly meant to be: a dystopian fairy-tale in which every act is answered and every movement is integrated into the whole. The ending, though it may have been unexpected, unfamiliar, and incongruous with the preceding events, was also what elevated the film into something that will stand the test of long-term critical scrutiny.

(WARNING: Spoilers for Brothers' Grimm stories, in case you missed out on them for the last 150 years)

David's passage through the collapsing modern world in search of the key to humanity is famously analagous to Pinocchio's journey through the hazardous world of adults to eventually become a real boy. Now, Pinocchio was originally written by Carlo Collodi, was an Italian scribe who learned his craft with the translation of fairy tales, and the feeling of these fairy tales is impressed upon his work. This includes the sense that the world outside the home is dangerous and unpredictable, with no real place for heroism and personal glory. Indeed, the lack of a hero might be one of the strangest aspects of traditional fairy tales, like those of the Brothers Grimm -- the protagonist is always a commoner whose humble virtues are honesty and a sense of duty. These protagonists never discover that they're exceptional, and they never find some kind of inner strength to save the world.

This is a starting point for understanding where A.I. is coming from. David may indeed be exceptional in a scientific sense, but he isn't a hero. In fact, one of his greatest challenges is facing the fact that he's a manufactured creation, no more worthy of love than any of his boxed-up brethren.

Most of the Brothers' Grimm protagonists DO overcome some sort of personal challenge. Hansel and Gretel defeat the witch by taking advantage of a golden opportunity to push her into her oven; in The Robber Bridegroom, the bride arrives at the groom's house when he's not there, and she finds sympathy in the old woman whose head always shakes (damn, what a troubling image...); the prince, through wit and observation, finds a way into Rapunzel's room to win her love; the queen convinces Rumpelstiltskin to wager her child, instead of simply taking it from her.

Each of these represents some willfulness on the part of the protagonist to oppose their fate, and it is the same with David: his search for the Blue Fairy, though it means everything to him, is ultimately a token gesture of agency in the midst of an impossible situation. And yet, none of the above moments of triumph is really a solution, because each of these characters is stuck in a greater bind: Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest, the bride is caught in a marriage to a criminal, Rapunzel is still in the thrall of an evil sorceress, and the queen is still caught in a promise to a tiny, evil man who's great with a loom.

But the thing is, each of these characters DOES find a happy ending, and it's not because they're heroic -- it's because of the grace of nature, of forces larger than themselves. It's because, when they remain true to themselves, they are rewarded with an escape from the impossible situations they're part of. Hansel and Gretel somehow find their way home (there are no breadcrumbs to guide them), and they discover their mother is dead; the bridegroom, by pure luck, acquires proof of her groom's evil deeds, and once she finds her way home, she is protected by her community; the blind prince stumbles across Rapunzel, and in what seems to be a miracle, her tears of sadness cure him; and after the queen is given Rumplestiltskin's name by a messenger, who was in the right place at the right time, and once she has defeated the little monster, she simply stands by and watches him destroy himself.

This moment of grace is essential to fairy tale structure. It's a message that's both hopeful and frightening: when you've done all you can to solve your quandry, you just have to hope that the fates smile down and solve it for you.

And this is what happens in the bittersweet ending to A.I. Humanity might have collapsed, but through their creations, these strange machines that exist beyond the singularity, their spiritual nature has been preserved by the universe, and they finally give David the happiness that he deserves because he so kindly and whole-heartedly desires it. There's also a mythical point here, too: the point that David is the Adam to these robots, that his first glimmer of human emotion is what has allowed them to evolve in the way that they have. However, this wasn't particularly an accomplishment on his part -- he never asked to be the beginning of a new cybernetic species. He's granted mercy simply because he's a thinking, feeling creature, filled with infinite longing, and that entitles him to whatever happy ending the universe can provide.

If he really had been stuck at the bottom of the ocean, which no broader, more transcendental resolution, wouldn't the tale have felt incomplete? Wouldn't the film then be saying that emotion, desire, and human frailty are anchors? That our longing, desperate hands reach for nothing, because there is no grace in the universe that we occupy? Wouldn't the frozen bottom of the ocean have been a truly chilling final image in this vast, cyclical film?

Personally, I would never have asked for any ending but the one I got.

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.