Films and dreams

The phrase ‘dream-like’ is often misleading in cinema.

In the Internet age, many leading film critics have their own websites and interact with readers through the comments space, which engenders provocative, democratic public discussions that wouldn’t have been possible in an earlier time. And there are certain types of movies that stir such intense reactions — both positive and negative — that the conversations about them become elaborate film studies in their own right.

Take Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Personally

I liked it well enough, but I was flabbergasted by the shrillness of the early hyperbole that proclaimed it a modern masterwork (incidentally, this was also the reception accorded to Nolan’s last film, the bizarrely over-hyped The Dark Knight). Not because of the proclamation itself but because I’m suspicious when a vast majority of movie-goers are in one mind about a film even before it comes out — it seems more like the spreading of a meme than a judgement based on considered analysis.

Thankfully, the initial euphoria has made way for tempered discussion. For example, on his blog Scanners (blogs.suntimes.com/scanners), one of my favourite movie writers Jim Emerson speculated about Inception’s concept of dreams as “architectural labyrinths — stable and persistent science-fiction action-movie sets that can be blown up with explosives or shaken with earthquake-like tremors, but that are firmly resistant to morphing into anything else”. In Emerson’s view this suggests a lack of imagination on Nolan’s part, but one response (among many) could be that the director wasn’t interested so much in creating a hallucinatory world as in using the dream premise as a pretext for plot development.

At any rate, the discussion got me thinking about what exactly it means to say that a particular film is “dream-like” (an often lazily used adjective) and about my own favourite movies that capture something of the vivid, vertiginous sensations present in the subconscious. There are too many to mention here but a short, casual list would include David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Federico Fellini’s Eight and a Half, Luis Bunuel’s The Milky Way and Tarsem Singh’s superbly designed The Cell, about a “coma-therapy psychologist” entering the mind of a serial killer. To varying degrees, all these films create a sense of temporal and spatial dislocation, of time being stretched out or compressed, and uncertainty about the line between dream-life and waking-life. They are littered with detours and dead-ends that frustrate the main characters.

A few days ago I saw a movie, Robert Altman’s 3 Women, which was the direct product of a dream; Altman claimed that its basic framework — a desert-town setting, a story about two women whose personalities gradually merge — came to him while he slept, and that the plot details were subsequently improvised by him and his writers. The final product is full of vivid, recurring images. Conversations are punctuated by the faraway sound of dripping water, or the distant echoes you might hear if you were submerged in a tank — you might be lulled into thinking the whole movie is taking place underwater. Even when the plot seems to be moving along “normally”, something feels a bit off.

3 Women is just as quiet and still as Inception is noisy and busy, a reminder that there is more than one way of making a dream-like movie. But it occurs to me that the very phrase “dream-like” is misleading, for all films are like fascinating dreams in a sense. They take place in the dark and are built on an illusion — the illusion of movement created by the rapid projection of still pictures — and they can haunt our senses for long afterwards. I suspect that if you were to take a magnifying glass to the eye of an attentive viewer in a movie-hall, you might see something very similar to rapid-eye movement!

(Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer)