“...it was all just a dream.”
It’s funny that the “it was all a dream” trope is considered the textbook example of bad storytelling across fiction because not only do you almost never actually see it show up in popular media (or at least I rarely do), but when it does show up it’s usually employed in pretty riveting and highly regarded movies — The Wizard of Oz, Mulholland Drive, Jacob’s Ladder, to name a few. And part of what makes these movies so riveting is exactly that: they adhere to the “rules” of dreams, which is where the best filmmaking resides.
I love dream sequences. They’re usually my favorite part of any movie because they’re a perfect, seamless intersection of abstract and cerebral:
They can be used to further the story or give insight into a character without any exposition or character development.
They’re visually-driven, yet their inherent substance in the context of the story is immediately recognizable to the audience.
They allow the writer to be ‘direct’ with his pen, and they allow the director to ‘write’ with his camera.
You can get away with damn near anything in a dream sequence - all rules go out the window. Those are the rules. Even the most stringently ‘logical’ moviegoers (you know the type) will accept it. They’re a free pass to do surreal shit in mainstream fare.
Dream sequences are, for all intents and purposes, what cinema is really about. The brilliance of movies like the ones I mentioned (Jacob’s Ladder, Mulholland Drive, etc) is that the entire movie is a “dream sequence.”
Below are some of my favorites (emphasis on ‘some’). There are too many to put them all in one post, but these are a handful of examples of what I consider to be pure cinema:
Anomalisa (2015)
The whole movie is surreal, as you’d expect. Charlie uses stop-motion animation to accentuate the lead character’s existential crisis by literalizing his numbness to other people’s humanity - every other character has the same face and is voiced by Tom Noonan. However, this quasi-meta approach goes full-tilt meta during a dream in which Michael (our lead) imagines his plastic face falling off. We get to literally see inside him, all of the plastic inner-workings. It’s like seeing ‘the Man behind the curtain’ but creepier.
The Exorcist (1973)
Few films are able to achieve what this scene does: dreams depicted in movies rarely feel like they’re actually taking place inside the character’s mind. I can’t explain exactly how this scene pulls off that distinct ‘feel,’ but that’s why I love it. I suspect it has something to do with the sound design: we think we can sort of ‘hear’ what’s happening in the dream, but we can’t. We feel far away from it yet simultaneously and paradoxically trapped in it. And when the scene is over, it feels half-remembered, vague, illusory, which only adds to its spookiness.
Friedkin’s best shit was always the abstract stuff in my opinion. If you haven’t already, check out Sorcerer and make note of the “Where am I going?” scene toward the end. Peak cinema.
The Conversation (1974)
This one brings me to another point I want to make about these types of scenes: they can sort of embody a film’s entire aesthetic/vibe/atmosphere in its most potent and distilled form. The heavy-handed execution of this particular scene would never work for the entirety of a feature-length picture, but if you do it just once then it can permeate the rest of the film in a palpable yet intangible way. This scene depicting Harry’s paranoid nightmare is definitely what the entire movie feels like, but this is the only part you can actually point to and say “See?!”
Amour (2012)
Another Conversation situation: this sequence encapsulates the film’s whole vibe. It used to be one of my favorite movies all-around, and this scene was 99% why. The movie as a whole is extremely depressing - like everything Haneke does - but also like all of Haneke’s other films, the high points are when things get explicitly frightening. He never made a ‘horror film’ in the traditional sense of the word (I suspect he feels such a thing would be ‘beneath’ him), but if he ever did, I don’t think I’d survive it.
Okay, here’s the scene: Jean-Louis Trintignant is getting ready for bed when his doorbell suddenly rings. He asks who is there but gets no response. He exits his apartment to find that the elevator has been destroyed and his neighbor’s front door has been kicked down. He calls out for anybody but no one answers. Further down the hallway he finds that the floor is completely flooded - the water is up to his ankles. Before he can call out again, a disembodied hand reaches from behind his head and muzzles his mouth. No music sting, no score, only ambient sound.
Hellraiser (1987)
It feels strange to say, but I always forget about this scene. Not because it’s bad, but because this is the opposite of Amour and The Conversation: it doesn’t feel like the rest of the movie at all. The rest of the movie is a hard and fast plunge into gooey body horror and salacious sexual humidity, but this part feels so much more artful and delicate in its execution compared to the incendiary maximalism of everything else. Whenever I put the movie on I have a moment where I go “Oh yeah!” once I realize we’re in Kirsty’s dream.
The scene in question depicts a premonition of sorts: Kirsty envisions her dead father covered in a sheet adorned with candles and falling feathers from God-knows-where. Gradually the sheet begins to soak through with blood before the corpse rises and reveals itself. It’s shot in slow-motion and features the sounds of a crying baby - I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired Silent Hill to some extent.
Enemy (2013)
This is another Anomalisa situation: the entire film is abstract, but there are some sequences that are explicitly dreams - more than one - and they are among the most impactful movie moments that I’ve experienced in my entire life. The first involves a recreation of a scene from a fictional movie that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character watched earlier in the film, except there’s no dialogue or sound FX aside from some frighteningly raucous horns and drums courtesy of Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. Aptly titled “The Dream,” this piece of music remains, to this day, one of the scariest pieces of film score I’ve ever heard.
The second dream - or nightmare - is more terrifying to me than 99.99% of horror films. Partly this is due to my own arachnophobia, but I don’t wanna pin it just on that; I’ve seen tons of horror movies that employ spiders as a scare tactic but none of them affected me at all whatsoever. Really it’s the execution that makes this so deeply unnerving: the formaldehyde-yellow color filter, the chiaroscuro lighting, the eerily gentle music, and most importantly: the design of the ‘head,’ which I find more hellish than just about any demon or Devil ever put on film. This is the kind of stuff that Denis should be doing instead of hanging out with sci-fi nerds.
