With Inception being the conversation du jour, one key splitting point on whether or not you are going to cry “Masterpiece” or merely “Top Notch Entertainment” for the film is how ‘mundane and rational’ the dream-state is portrayed. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb and his heist posse infiltrate, steal secrets and implant ideas into the mark by having him (or her) consciousness ‘shared in real time’ under the constraints of a maze-maker, The Architect, sort of a con-man (or woman) of the subconscious. The dreams as envisioned onscreen are represented in excruciatingly obvious metaphor at some times, with an elevator down to Cobb’s ‘basement of his subconscious’ and at others, like a full blown James Bond set-piece, as in the wintry fortress of solitude or elaborate car chases through town. It all looks like a (hundred) million bucks, but does it really dig into your brain? Nobody in Nolan’s world is standing naked in public or anxious (or self-indulgent) about much of anything, let alone violent sexuality or other taboo areas that the subconscious id may process when the super-ego is out of the picture.
It seems that dreaming and the movies have always been in sync with one another, from Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. up to and including Guy Maddin‘s entire filmography (being a one artists personal cinema-laced fever-dream) and to action fare like the collective dream of The Matrix flicks.
So let us take a look at some other films that handle ‘dreaming’ portion of their narrative with a little more icky and a little more sticky, that is a lot less steel and polished glass and a lot more wounded flesh and psyche. Chime in with more entries I may have missed, there are many, some more obvious than others!
David CronenbergeXistenZ and Videodrome, a pair of films nearly 20 years apart look at two forms of technology as an extension of our dream-states. ‘The new flesh’ is essentially one mans trip down his own rabbit hole of the subconscious, perhaps a suicidal venture. eXistenZ takes a closer look at the collective dream state when a bunch of game designers enter into a new form of role-playing video game. Sex and violence come together in the collective environment, but nothing is quite as exciting or strange as eating a full meal of some disgusting sea-creature, then fitting the bones together to form a gun.
SecondsWhile John Frankenheimer’s film is ostensibly set in the real world, it is very much set in a dream-like state, very much underscored by the ‘waiting room’ and the ‘wine orgy’ scenes in the film. Arthur Hamilton lives a comfortable if dreary, upper middle class existence. He did the ‘right’ things to get where he is, but pines for something more. What went wrong with his life? When offered a chance to be re-born by a secretive company that erases his previous existence for a chosen new one complete with complicated plastic surgery and a jet-set bohemian life style, he is all in. The questions is: How many people can live this ‘dream’ without eventually thinking back to the previous existence and the safety net of the ‘real’ identity vs. the very different new lifestyle. The cost of this dream is one of the great exercises payback that borders on poetic justice and tragedy.
The TrialTowards the end of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, we watch a man (tough guy Robert DeNiro) completely consumed by merely discarded paper. It is a memorable image that is likely to owe a debt or two to Orson Welles ode to Franz Kafka. The Trial is the story of a man who is charged with a crime and scheduled to be tried by a grand jury. He is not told what he did or why it was wrong. Over the course of the film he futilely grinds his way through a labyrinthine bureaucratic society that seems to operate totally by dream-logic (or nightmare-logic!). His attempts to navigate avail little other than to dig himself deeper into confusion. Shot with some of the best black and white cinematography, and Welles pulling out all the expressionistic fervor he can muster and combined with a post-Psycho Anthony Perkins as the victimized Josef K. This film with its concept taken to the extreme will haunt you for days or weeks, it may be haunting you right now whether you have seen it or not.
TarsemSet in the imagination of both the story teller and the listener, a sort of shared dream of The Fall plays with how we tell and receive a story and how much of real life factors can into the imagery but still remains a slave to the inhibited (either drug induced, or childlike naïveté) imagination. Meanwhile The Cell sees a Child Psychologist (and dream-specialist) played by Jennifer Lopez navigate the damaged (and often innocent) mind of a deranged serial killer by use of a special machine (See also Inception and Paprika). Both of Tarsem’s art-genre films are highly visual and highly unusual films that make the most of their dreamlike interiors.
David LynchMulholland Dr. and Inland Empire are often described with the phrase ‘fever-dream’ and never is this more appropriate than with these two (Ok, throw in Eraserhead for good measure). Mulholland Dr. gives us both the hopes and the desires of Naomi Watts’ young ingenue before smashing them on the rocks, hard. All of this is told in such a elliptically dense fashion that many people do not realize just how coherent the film can be understood. Inland Empire takes things much, much, much further into disconnected dreamland. You get very, very anxious and well down-right scared watching the latter in a darkened cinema with your fellow dreamers.
Mr. NobodyString Theory, the existence of parallel universes branched at all decision points and sub-atomic states of uncertainty, makes Nemo Nobody’s moment before his own death a dream-like distinctly non-linear existence. He has multiple wives and children all existing alongside one another, and various degrees of success and each failure. He is seemingly aware of all of this at the same time. No wonder his brain is a little addled. Could the ending of Mr. Nobody be akin to waking up from a dream or digging deeper down into another one? Telltale element that makes us think of this as a fractured dream as much as an endpoint in the state of the universe: The same actress, Diane Kruger, plays both Nemo’s Mother and Nemo’s true love. Paging Dr. Freud.
PaprikaFrom Disney-like fairies to aggressive rape, Satoshi Kon’s film encapsulates the power and the liberation of dreaming. And it goes one further to equate the collective way of viewing and talking about film to be one of the ultimate extensions of dreaming. Together our dream is cinema. Is the very iconic parade a celebration of power of the subconscious or some sort of collective that we cannot escape from? That this film is exhilarating and profoundly disturbing (often simultaneously) makes it one of the best films ever made about dreaming, and it is quite subjective in the way it splashes it all on screen.
Charlie KaufmannMuch of Charlie Kaufmann’s ouvre deals with a nagging subconscious interfering with getting on with life. In three of his films (one could probably make the argument for Adaptation as well) he has something literal-ize this. Being John Malkovich as the actor entering into his own brain to creat a sort of infinite loop of the subconscious. It is a terrifying moment. Jim Carrey as a child under his mothers table is a wonderful representation of anxiety and regression in the dream state (a further scene when is reality is being pulled up out of existence behind him is another) within Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindand. Finally, the loops within ever weirder loops of Philip Seymour-Hoffman’s brain in Synecdoche, NY might just be the dream movie at its apex.
La JeteeChris Marker’s 1962 short film (later remade and expanded as 12 Monkeys), is told with static photos and a monotone voice-over is the original and far more succinct version of the tale of a man who cannot shake the image of airports and children whilst toiling his days in a post-apocalyptic world. The grainy black and white photos which feature a grimy and desperate future world after some major world-wide disaster are a disturbing combination of memory and dream, a form of haunting laced with a curious ennui.
The FountainThe three simultaneous states of Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in Darren Aronofsky’s wonderful film on the life, the universe and everything. Ostensibly they are three different stories (or two stories and one representation of a novel written within the ‘present.’ But the way the film is laid out, it is as dreamlike and evocative as any of the other explanations.
Waking LifeRichard Linklater’s non-narrative dream-scape plays out more like an overview of the philosophy and science of dreams and cognition, but it also functions itself like a dream. The protagonist even refers to himself as a dream walker. How one scene shifts (and drifts) into another as well as the wobbly and bouncy nature of the Rotoscoping technology is one of the best on screen attempts at simulating dreams.
Eyes Wide ShutStanley Kubrick puts Tom Cruise through the meat-grinder after his wife confesses that she almost left both him and the children in a split second of lust for an anonymous sailor glanced fleetingly across the room. The movie is Cruise’s waking dream through the various layers of Manhatten and his own subconscious.
Total RecallThe sweaty, ugly, bluff-moment of the head of the Rekall corporation trying to convince Douglas Quaid that he is just on the brain-induced memory-vacation that he ordered from a storefront is one of the films signature moments where the film questions its own reality and the power of suggestion. A bullet may answer the question, but it is persistent enough to cast a shadow of a doubt over the entire film which features more noise and gore than most blockbusters.
Shutter IslandLeonardo DiCaprio’s other ‘subconscious reality’ film has the hero confronting his own demons all the while demonizing the space around him. It’s guilt and powerlessness manifesting itself as the ultimate paranoia trip. The fact that the hospital staff indulge the poor victim is either noble naïve or incredibly condescending. Either way, DiCaprio spends a lot of time sweating, vomiting and looking around wild-eyed.
After HoursNot literally a dream, but it might as well be, the title of the film even indicates what goes on in the mind after we’ve laid head to pillow in the witching hour. Paul Hackett spends a lot of time running ‘naked’ and afraid through a small Manhattan space. His character in real life is a bit of a narcissistic asshole (a moment early on with Bronson Pinchot underscores this) that he is punished by his subconscious by all the women of his dreams.
Carnival of SoulsThose familiar with An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, will spot the dream reality right away in Herk Harvey’s micro-budgeted haunting tale. A car crashes off a veers of a bridge and into the rushing river. Everyone is presumed dead and the cops haul the vehicle out of the water, but a short while later, a survivor claws her way out of the drink frightened and confused. As life movies on for our heroine, she gets a job as a organist at a church in Utah. But ghosts and spirits have been haunting her and preventing any form of joy despite her miraculous survival.
I am sure there are more that I’ve missed. Enlighten Me!
I think the term “dream” is almost a little misleading in Inception. It’s more like a highly constructed virtual reality accessed via specific drugs and machines that happens to involve an interaction with the subconscious. More like Snow Crash’s Metaverse with a bit more interference from a given individual’s memory. Weirdly, I just finished a sci-fi novel called Vurt that had a virtual reality system accessed via specially formulated drugs that’s EXTREMELY similar to the way Inception plays out, though it does get crazier and more fever-dreamish in places than Inception does. I wonder if Nolan has read it.
or K Dick’s VALIS. Inception takes cinematic liberties with the sensation of dreaming, I don’t think things explode when we are waking up, and that is perfectly fine. Lets not heap verite on top of the grocery list of things we want from this movie. that said, wrought metaphors make sense, the subconscious is not so snobbish in what abstractions it chooses, the elevator, the train, they feel like suitable constructs considering.
Hmmm, It maybe a hang-up on my part (I am not alone in this though, in reading some of the ‘splats’ at Rotten Tomatoes) is that it is implied very strongly that it is ‘dreaming’ and not The Matrix. I’ll re-iterate that i did adore the film, the time simply breezed by, but I am not without my criticisms, nearly all of them leading back to the subconscious as a pristine collection of anonymous people and shiny objects.
I would be more tolerant of Inceptions ‘real architecture, game environment’ visual look and feel if it was not supposed to be some ones inner self. Yet, even so, Inception does not deviate too much from just being a very SMART action movie, and barely probes even the one relationship it spends any time one – Cob/Mal. Not that there is anything wrong with that, the world needs good popcorn films to go along with good art-house films. Inception just did not tug at my soul the way many (but certainly not all) of the above ‘dreaming movies’ do.
I guess but I don’t think even Memento was trying to tug at your soul, so this could be an issue of misplaced expectations. I love Memento and Inception for the immediacy they provide
Memento ‘tugs at my soul’ when you consider Leonard’s desparate answer to himself at the end (beginning) of the film. I actually find his state of immediacy to be horrifying and interesting all at once. Yes, this film had an effect on me beyond its puzzle and structure. More than Inception, if i can hazard a guess after one viewing. More viewing may tell the tale.
No, it’s not just you, I’ve seen a lot of people wishing that the dreams were more dream-like (notably Jim Emerson over at scanners::blog). I’m just going based on how the movie actually uses dreams, which is far more as a virtual world than as a normal dream – we never see a ‘real’ dream, for example; we only see the ones that are constructed for purposes of extraction or inception. The fact that there is this element of the subjects’ subconscious threatening to destabilize the pristine worlds that the architects create is what separates Inception’s dreams from more pure virtual reality constructs, and perhaps Nolan could’ve/should’ve gone further with the destabilization, but I didn’t have a problem with the initial dream being fairly clean pedestrian. After all, it’s carefully constructed to convince the subject that they AREN’T dreaming.
“After all, it’s carefully constructed to convince the subject that they AREN’T dreaming.”
Jandy – you’ve nailed my feeling of the dreams with this sentence and you bring up an interesting point about the audience never being shown a dream that isn’t constructed is something I’d totally missed. Not sure if it makes much of a difference in the interpretation of the film but it’s not something I’d realized.
i feel good about myself for seeing all this films, but i just saw Mr. Nobody 2 days ago and that film is a complete wankfest.
Seconds is an awesome film, the B&W work Frankenheimer was doing at the time was as good as Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Fellini.
We are going to talk about Mr. Nobody on the cinecast this week, and we happen to think it is a lovable wankfest!
Also, Darcy, I agree that John Frankenheimer is seriously underrated and underappreciated. Because he stuck mainly to genre flicks. But dang those are some amazing genre flicks.
anyway I really like the list (though maybe the wrong Cronenberg film was chosen) here’s some dream-films, good and bad that you might not have seen:
The Fourth Man (Verhoeven 1984, a very chonky-film)
Spellbound (Hitchcock does only great interp-of-Dalin in film)
City of Women (Fellini, into dreams as much as anybody)
also i think Fantastic Planet (1973 animation) is suppose to be one big nightmare, can’t remember fully.
I love Memento, but Inception blows it out of the water, in my opinion. Yes, Memento is more character oriented, the tricks are there but it is in service of one man’s sense of loss. I still feel though in the end, its the awe of the story that gets me more than Leonard’s plight, that I was shaken into an immediacy from the way Nolan told his story, and it had nothing to do with tugging at my soul, and there is NOTHING wrong with that. It wasn’t a cheap trick, because everything was working in unison, no one part supreme (character depth was as deep as it needed to be for the whole of the experience). The same goes for Inception, there are character moments in it that are deep enough considering the whole of the experience. I didn’t need profound pathos, I need glimpses of it, a sense of stakes that keeps pace with the rush of the story, so that all of it builds together into this amazing crescendo, that cuts abruptly to black, and I am left dazzled. That to me was the point, and that to me is on par with something deliberately paced and mulled over, in both I was given a high, a sense of being out of body. I ceased to be a reviewer, and got lost in the experience of cinema, what more do I need? This long into the game, its harder and harder to accomplish, Inception did it, and did it incredibly well, entertaining me while provoking my imagination while tipping the scales into the realm of the sublime, giving me vertigo… just awesome. 5/5 easy.
That said, sure, tugging at my soul is something of higher value depending on the film… I don’t put the onus on every film that it has to be Malickian in intent and effect, I don’t think any Nolan film has really aspired or reached that level, they are working on your mind more than your heart. I guess what I am trying to say is there are different ways to get to a state of bliss, for me anyways. My experiences don’t hold the bar so high that soul-tugging is the dividing line… you stir my imagination in a way that keeps me up at nights thinking about things, that is in its own way brilliant. Primer is an example of that, no soul-tugging but I LOVE that film.
A strong set of films, Kurt.
Brian De Palma has been exploring dreams throughout his career – both CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL end with people waking up from nightmares and a lot of his films allude to or feature dreams. His extremely heightened mise-en-scene (the way he often slows down time, for example) also has a certain dreamlike quality, much like Hitchcock. His horribly underrated RAISING CAIN has a magnificent dream within a dream within a dream sequence that’s as suspenseful and horrific as it is ridiculous.
There’s also the great dream sequence featured in the best film of all time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgBQyhrQJJo
Actually, now that you mention DePalma, FEMME FATALE should have been on this list. It’s DePalma dreaming in cinema. I love that damn movie!
Yes, it’s an amazing film. It works like a synthesis of De Palma’s career, plus it’s filled with some of the most exciting, purely cinematic scenes of the 00′s. Who else would build a heist sequence around Ravel’s Boléro? I adore this guy – I even really, really like MISSION TO MARS.
Well we differ on M2M, and I only like small chunks of The Black Dahlia, but I still very much adore Carrie, Raising Cain, The Untouchables, Carlito’s Way, Sisters, Casualties of War and some of his shoe-string stuff like Hi Mom!
I must admit there are some holes in his filmography (The Fury, Blow Out, Snake Eyes) for me still. I can totally see why many critics go gaga for his work. He was Quentin Tarantino before there was a Quentin Tarantino (Just as Francois Truffaut & J.L.Godard (some theoretical mixture of both filmmakers) was the ‘original pastiche’ forebearer – the pioneers of cinema as a dream of cinema – before DePalma.)
You should definitely check out Blow Out, that’s one of my favourite De Palma films.
I keep meaning to watch The Black Dahlia, because I’ve read the book and love it. The casting seems bizarre though – Josh Hartnett as Dwight? Plus I imagine they’ve changed quite a lot as the book is pretty sprawling and very fucked up.
I’m not a big fan of THE BLACK DAHLIA either and RESTRICTED, although interesting, isn’t very good. He certainly has a few other mediocre films spread around his filmography, but the three you mention having not seen are top tier material, especially BLOW OUT, which to me is his masterpiece. FURY might have the most orgasmic ending ever filmed.
The parallels between De Palma and the French New Wave are very true, especially regarding Godard – HI, MOM! and GREETINGS are essentially American Godard films, only much funnier. Unlike Godard though, De Palma quickly started developing his political, theoretical and stylistic ideas within the conventions of genre films, which might make him more akin to other French New Waver Claude Chabrol, another highly unique filmmaker often misguidedly accused of stealing from Hitchcock. De Palma’s and Chabrol’s films and approaches to Hitchcockian suspense are wildly different, though. Anyway, I’m getting a bit off-topic here….
I’m due for a revisit of Welles’ THE TRIAL, which I found surprisingly cold and distant given that Kafka’s novel, which I’d just finished, was a very emotional experience – sometimes hilarious, too. The endings are very representative of the differences between the book and the films; Kafka’s ending feels intimate and tragic while Welles enhances the absurdity and irony of the situation to the point where emotional response isn’t welcome. It’s been a while, maybe I’d have a completely different point-of-view now. It’s still one of the most visually detailed and beautiful films I’ve ever seen though.
The most accurate portrait of the dream state I’ve seen on film has to be from SYNECDOCHE, NY. The strange cadence, time ellipses, repetition, characters not being completely aware of events or people surrounding them, etc., etc. It’s probably as realistic a depiction of dreams as cinema can get.
Great list, Kurt. Though I haven’t yet seen it, one film that feels like it deserves a place on this list is Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Apparently some people have been drawing comparisons between it and Inception in certain reviews, though according to Film Comment, Nolan actually never saw the film until a few weeks ago.
Yea, I’m missing Resnais and Bergman (Hour of the Wolf, Persona) on there too. I think this list could double in size easily given enough time to do more looking around in my own memory!
Whereas Inception has several possible solutions that could fit, I don’t think Marienbad has a single one…Boy is it gorgeous though.
I think that Seijun Suzuki’s Taisho trilogy (Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za, Yumeji) could all fit into the list of films with fever-dream like imagery. Most of his films could actually.
Lest we forget, there is also Hitchcock’s Spellbound with its Dali-designed dream sequence. And like Inception it also features a skiing sequence on a mountain!