How Useful Are the Analogies That Can Be Made Between Films, Daydreams, and Dreams - Essay Example

How useful are the analogies that can be made between films, daydreams and dreams? The relationship between films, daydreams and dreams is fascinating, and brings together various questions regarding not only the nature of film art and fantasizing/dreaming, but also the very nature of human consciousness and identity. The idea that spectators looking at something being performed (whether live or on a screen as in film) is somewhat similar to a dream, is not new to the Twentieth Century, when movies first appeared. One of the most famous creators of performances in history, William Shakespeare, constantly referred to the similarity between drama and dreaming within his plays. Indeed, one of his plays is actually called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and at the very end of the play one character speaks to the audience. This speech may be a useful framework for the discussion which will follow: PUCK: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumberd here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, . . . (Shakespeare, 1982) The idea that drama is a dream, and a dream is akind of drama suffuses much of Shakespeare. There is also something more ominous about dreams, and their dramatic nature, as illustrated by Shakespeare’s most famous character (Hamlet) in his most famous speech: HAMLET: To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, tis a consummation Devoutly to be wishd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, theres the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: theres the respect That makes calamity of so long life; (Shakespeare, 1982) (emphasis added) The idea that death may be a kind of extended dream adds a more ominous tone to the dream-drama equilibrium. The lack of control that we have over our dreams may lead death into being an eternally extended nightmare from which we cannot wake up. This leads to Freudian psychoanalysis, which claimed that dreams are often expressions of subconscious desires and fears that the conscious mind either does not want to consider or cannot accept the existence of (Freud, 1991). Within Freud’s point of view dreams relate to the aspect of a human being which is often associated with the id. In order to understand this, a brief overview of the Freudian view of psychology is needed. This will direct relate to the manner in which movies and dreams are both similar and different from one another. Psychoanalytical theory suggests that there are interactions among various components of personality according to occurrences that effect us at very stages of our lives. Thus Freud identifies personalities with particular psychosexual stages of development (Freud, 1991) . The oral stage lasts up to the age of one year, while the anal stage occurs from one to two and the phallic stage between three and six. These various stages effect the development of the three main elements of the human personality: the ego, the superego and the id. The id is the instinctive, aggressive self that everyone is born with and which, especially in a violent and sexual sense, needs to be satisfied. The ego is the part of the personality which helps the id expresses itself as the self realizes that the satisfaction of wishes needs to be planned and realistic rather than immediate and unrealistic. The superego is the last function of the personality to develop, and is generally regarded as the relationship of an individual to his or her society. The conscience, obedience to laws and an ethical sense of needing to co-operate within society occurs with the superego. Much of what occurs within dreams is, according to Freud, related to the id: it is the unconscious, primitive part of the mind seeking to have its desires met. Within normal life these cannot be met as the ego and the superego step in to make the human being able to live functionally within a world in which co-operation rather than immediate satisfaction of desires is the way of surviving. There are no consequences to what occurs in dreams in the ‘real’ world, at least as far as what we might do. They have an effect upon the conscious mind according to Freud, but no-one is going to be arrested for something they have “done” in a dream. These ideas can be related directly to film. As in all drama, there is conflict within movies, and this conflict is often resolved at the climax of the film, followed by a resolution. This conflict being resolved is essentially a catharsis for the audience. The whole experience of watching a film may also be a catharsis. Thus the audience may be able to live through emotions, actions and desires through watching a movie that they cannot in real life. There is thus, according to this interpretation of movies, an innately sexual element (in the Freudian sense that all repression is related to sexual desire) which can be released through watching a movie. This may be particularly the case when men watch female actors in movies. As Walters (1995) suggests, the camera – a very phallic instrument with its long lens and shiny surface – is essentially a tool which is used to “invade” the woman, and then capturing her body for the edification of men. The camera is used to “gaze” at the woman in a manner which enables the man to avoid the normal consequences for doing so within real life. This brings about the idea that a man is both dreaming and day-dreaming when he is watching a movie. The process can be reversed of course: the bodies of many male film stars are equally objectified by the camera in seemingly gratuitous scenes. But it is true that the female body comes in for special treatment in this way. The male viewer of a movie is “dreaming” as he does not have direct control over what he is seeing: i.e. that is controlled by the director, but also day-dreaming as he can then move that uncontrolled experience into a controlled fantasy (person, 1995). Often the camera itself acts as a more or less conscious device for this watching, and it may explore the nature of this uncontrolled dreaming/controlled day-dreaming amalgam and make the viewer question their thoughts when movies are at their best. Take for example the classic thriller Psycho, by Alfred Hitchcock. The film opens with Hitchcock introducing this world of illicit sex through slowly moving in on the bedroom from an extreme long-shot of the city, to a medium shot of the hotel, to a medium shot of the window of the lovers’ room and into the actual room where they have apparently just finished having sex. The camera takes on an almost voyeuristic embodiment at the very beginning of the film. Hitchcock seems to be suggesting to the viewer that similar scenes are being played out in many rooms, in many hotels and in many cities. If only the viewer could open the doors to those rooms, or, as the camera does in Psycho, voyeuristically “spy” on the affairs going on he/she would understand the true nature of the world. As the film began with the camera “spying” on Marion and her lover in the hotel room, so Hitchcock gives Norman’s POV shot with his “spying” (in this case literally) on Marion through the peep hole from his office into her room: The audience becomes more or less complicit with spying on her. It is spying along with Norman, experiencing the vicarious excitement of watching when the person doesn’t know they are being watched. The close-up on Norman’s eye accentuates the fact that this could be anyone’s eye, and though the audience’s complicity, it actually is: Within a few minutes another eye will make an appearance in the film, this time within the aftermath of perhaps the most well-known murder scene in any film. It is the disjointed nature of the murder with numerous cuts that make the actual details impossible to discern which makes the murder so memorable. As Rothman (1982) suggests, this shower-scene “has passed into the consciousness of the world . . . an uninitiated viewer – one who does not already know Norman’s story or Marion’s fate – can scarcely be found.” It has become an iconic scene in which the audience lives out their previous experiences of the moment every time they see it. This relates precisely to the sense of dreams as a subconscious element within the human personality. Dreams seek to enable the subconscious mind to understand what is occurring within the conscious world: they repeat the same “themes’ over and over again from childhood according to Freud. We cannot change what occurred to us in our childhood, but we can change how we interpret it. Very famous movies, especially ones such as Psycho, that are essentially engrained on the human subconscious through constant repetition and reference, serve the same purpose. It is indeed difficult to now imagine what the original audience of Psycho must have thought of this scene. This was an audience that did not know that Norman was going to kill Marion, but rather may have thought that he was “only a minor character, one more shrewdly drawn American type encountered by Marion, punctuating her journey only to pass out of the film . . . .” (Rothman, 1982). Even Norman’s peeping on Marion through the spy-hole might put him in the same group as the policeman, the used car salesman and even the lascivious business partner in her home city. She is the object of desire more or less explicitly stated. Norman Bates just goes one step further and watches her in secret. Thus the shower scene may have been as much as a surprise to the audience as it was to Marion within the dramatic context of the film. The audience at the film’s opening did not see the film in the context of times within the shower when they have had a flashback to this scene while having a shower themselves (Freedman, 2003). So a viewer of the film today experiences it in a completely different manner to those who were in the audience when it was first released. The audience member experiences the murder scene as a series of confusing but powerful jump cuts that do not allow concentration on a particular aspect of the murder. One thrust of the knife occurs, but the viewer (and Marion) does not have time to fully experience it before another thrust comes. Once it has been finished the sequence starts to slow down and then eventually “stops” as it concentrates on various parts of Marion’s now dead body: Bodies are thus broken up into their constituent elements (both literally and metaphorically) and Hitchcock seems to comment upon both the commonality and yet the innate difference between the “live” and the “dead” person, using the image of the eye as his device. After her death Hitchcock pans the camera from the famous revolving close-up of her eye onto the newspaper with the $40,000 rolled in it and onto Norman’s placid face. The audience has lived out his fantasy, both from the point of view of the murderer and from that of the victim. It has also gone on a voyage of discovery through the details of a dead woman’s body. And all of this occurs without the audience needing to leave the safety and comfort of their cinema seat or, increasingly, the privacy of their home media center (Treasure, 2007). Yet while there are clear similarities between dreams and movies/watching movies, there are also profound differences. First of all, as one of the most long-running and successful movie franchise suggested (The Nightmare on Elm Street Series) there are huge differences between what occurs in a dream and a movie. First of all, a dream occurs within the human head rather than on a screen. It is completely out of the individual’s control. The same can be said of a person watching a movie, although in fact they can always get up and walk out of the cinema, or turn off the DVD player if they are watching it at home. Despite a person’s best attempts, when they are asleep they cannot avoid dreaming. There is thus something innately “real” about a dream which does not occur with watching a movie. In movie-watching, however involved the audience gets with the action, characters or plot, they are always actually remote from it: they are watching. Dreams tend to mirror real life in the fact that the individual having it is always the “star” (to put it in movie terms):- he/she is the center of the action. Unlike real life however, a person within a dream has virtually no control over what is going to happen. It might be argued that none of us know what is going to happen in the future. You or I could die within an hour of my writing this paper, or you reading it; but we do have some influences over the choices that we make and the risks that are undertaken. Thus if I finish this paper and decide to drive at 150mph while completely drunk, I know that I will be sensibly increasing my chances of dying. Alternatively, those chances are diminished greatly if one is sober and driving at the speed limit. But dreams may be seen as essentially the drunk driver who comes out of nowhere and hits us: however much carefully planning has gone into our lives, there is always the chance that someone else will ruin all of them. In some ways the watching of films may be seen as a preparation for the terror of being utterly at the mercy of others, both theoretically in our lives and actually within dreams (Stam, 2000). Watching movies is thus an act of catharsis that prepares a person for the much more difficult task of dealing with dreams. But what occurred before movies were invented? The answer may be found within all forms of dramatic, written and representative art. It is perhaps not a surprise that the first signs of an artistic sensibility within human beings: cave painting, also come at a time when people appear to have been buried with some ceremony rather than just being discarded away from the group (Curtis, 2006). Art, and film may be just the most modern (and overwhelming) manifestation of this is thus related to the need to control what we know is in fact uncontrollable: the fact that we will all die. The first cave paintings are of hunters trying to kill much larger animals such as mammoths etc.. They see to control the animal through portraying what they want to happen in the future. Films may be a 20th/21st Century method of dealing with the same paradoxical knowledge of the uncertainty of the future combined with the certainty of death. Human beings seem to have an indelible sensibility that to portray something is to control it. In many ways, the most recent movies, for example the current spate of Marvel superhero films perhaps more closely resemble dreams than any other kind of movie before them. In these movies, which look increasingly realistic in their fantasy portrayals, human beings can do literally anything. If a Terminator wants to walk through a wall, he can do so by becoming part of it. He can also become part of the metal floor. Spiderman can fly through New York on a massively strong piece of spider silk. The Hulk can survive a fall from space, a member of the Fantastic Four can pick up one end of the Golden Gate Bridge and move it to Alcatraz . . . all of these are of course literally impossible, except within the imaginations of movie makers/watchers, and within our dreams. Of course dreams are less controlled and do not tend to end happily, or with a deliberate sense of unhappiness. Their ending, as with events within our live, is fearsomely unpredictable. This analysis started with a quote from Shakespeare, a writer how perhaps typified the fantasy, mysterious nature of all artistic creation. Movies are perhaps different form any other art form because they bring us nearest to that fearful dream that Hamlet presents the possibility of within his famous soliloquy. They are simply so ubiquitous that they have essentially become a subconscious through-line for much of the modern world that has access to them. The word “movie” can also be extended to the televisions that are now almost constantly on, whether people are watching them or not, and also the Internet: which involves staring at flat screen in much the same manner as movies/television. But the Internet offers another form of ‘dreaming’ – the person can control where they go on it to a large extent. If a person wants to experience someone being beheaded on a terrorist’s home video, they can do so. If their tastes run to reading the score of every piece of music that Mozart wrote, they can do so. If they want to do both simultaneously, they can also do this through simply opening two windows on their computer screen at the same time. In this way the Internet user can create their own film, both literally through mediums such as YouTube and figuratively through the endless combinations of sound, pictures, streaming video and text which is available to them. This supreme adaptability may be the reason that Internet movies/television have never caught on: they are trying to compete with a medium that is even stronger than they are. To conclude, the element of fantasy and escapism which exists within watching a film makes it very similar to day-dreaming, and as the discussion of the male gaze illustrated, it may actually catalyze pleasurable fantasies. Movies are also similar to dreams in that they are overwhelming and essentially under the control of “someone else”:- with our dreams it is the subconscious controlling, and with movies the direct/actors etc.. But dreams are dissimilar to movies because the individual experiencing a dream is always present within it, whereas however involving a movie is, the spectator is always just that – someone watching. The Internet may be seen as the latest example of the human tendency to attempt to escape reality through controlling an artificial version of it. _________________________________ Works Cited Curtis, Gregory. The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists. Knopf, New York: 2006. Freedman, Jonathan. Millington, Richard. Hitchcock’s America. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2003. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Penguin, London: 1991. Person, Ethel. Creative writers and day-dreaming. Yale University Press, London: 1995. Rothman, William. The Murderous Gaze. Harvard University Press, Boston: 1982. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Penguin, London: 1982. --------------------. Hamlet. Penguin, London: 1982. Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, New York: 2000. Treasure. Joe. The Male Gaze. Picador, New York: 2007. Read More