How good is that bit in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey where Matt Damon skydives naked with the sexy chimp who talks just like his Grade 6 English teacher?
asserted
who → skydive → teacher
No, wait, that’s a dream I had, and I won’t bore anyone further with the grubby details.
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I → wait → details
Nobody likes to hear another person’s dream, especially my partner and children.
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Nobody → like → dream
Christopher Nolan knows that dream sequences are the worst, which is why the director famous for his flashbacks and flash-forwards and all sorts of timey-wimey shenanigans generally steers clear of sleepytime nonsense.
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director → know → nonsense
He even directed an entire film set within dreams that strenuously avoided surrealist imagery or flights of fancy.
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that → direct → fancy
This is the storytelling equivalent of waving your palms and pleading, “No, no, I take it all back!”
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I → wave → it
The irony here is that James himself could really knock out a killer dream story.
uncertain
James → knock → story
He wrote in an autobiography of “the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life,” in which he was chased through The Louvre by a terrible creature, the whole affair lit only by lightning.
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affair → write → lightning
But James would agree with Nolan, who recently argued that audiences “devalue” dream sequences.
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audiences → agree → sequences
How many times does a film or TV show just start to become interesting before our protagonist bolts upright amid a snarl of bedsheets, panting with relief that none of what they’ve just experienced really happened?
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they → start → what
This is the storytelling equivalent of waving your palms and pleading, “No, no, I take it all back!”
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I → wave → it
It’s like ending a chapter of your book with the line “haha not really, lol”.
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It → ’ → line
It’s a failure of commitment, undoing the very thing that is likely the dramatic highlight of your tale.
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that → ’ → tale
Rather than escalating tension and ratcheting up the stakes, it deflates whatever energy the dream sequence was supposed to generate.
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sequence → escalate → energy
Thanks to Freud and Jung, storytellers feel justified in treating our complex and jumbled inner worlds as if they were simple ciphers describing our fears and desires.
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they → feel → fears
Not everything that appears in our dreams represents something at the core of our psyche.
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that → appear → psyche
Freud was forced to remind us that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as I’ve been forced to remind my partner and children that sometimes a naked skydive with your Grade 6 English teacher is perfectly innocent.
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skydive → force → teacher
I can already hear the cinephiles unsheathing their poison pens, so let me issue a caveat: I’m not against stories that are dream-like.
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that → hear → stories
In fact, they’re some of the best.
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they → ’re → best
The films of directors as diverse as Yasujiro Ozu, Ingmar Bergman, Sofia Coppola and Lynne Ramsay all possess a dreamlike weightlessness, even though they’re grounded in the waking world.
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they → possess → world
Henry James himself pulled off the same trick with his classic The Turn of the Screw, in which the boundary between the real and the imagined is never resolved.
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boundary → pull → real
Then there’s David Lynch, whose art was almost entirely defined by dream logic but who rarely stooped to anything as low as an actual dream sequence.
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who → ’ → sequence
From Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive, dreams and reality overlap to the point that there’s little difference.
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dreams → overlap → point
Lynch often said that our partial, fragmented perception of existence means that we all essentially live inside our own private dream.
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we → say → dream
His films, then, were dreams within a dream, and that’s a phrase that a whole bunch of his characters would repeat across his work.
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bunch → ’ → work
If a film is already a fantasy, then why not go the whole hog and commit?
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film → go → hog
How much more compelling is it to happen upon the moment in a story that has you thinking, “This can’t be happening, not really”, only to gradually realise that yes, we’re going there, and you won’t believe what happens next, too.
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what → happen → story
No need to tell us it was just a dream all along.
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it → tell → us
- Femme fatale: Why killer women are better than boring alpha men
- Nice guys finish first: Why this film is criminally underrated
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film → finish → men
Binge-watching: Short seasons are ruining TV; bring back the 22-episode season
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seasons → ruin → season
Mr Beast: The billionaire YouTube star is a charisma black hole, and I respect it
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I → respect → it
The Aporia
