For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Luis Buñuel’s surrealist satire The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which a small party of upper-class snobs are repeatedly deprived of their dinner.
I’m a sucker for genre movies about the supernatural power of dreams, since it frees filmmakers up to visualize just about anything they want onscreen. From obscure oddities like Paperhouse & Beyond Dream’s Doorto beloved horror-nerd classics like the Nightmares on Elm Street to artsy-fartsy pioneers like Un Chien Andalou, some of the most powerfully surreal images ever achieved in cinema have resulted from dreamworld genre fare. That’s why it’s a little disappointing when a dream-logic horror movie lacks that ambition to astonish, instead relying on more pedestrian thrills like, say, rubber monsters and naked breasts. The early Full Moon feature Shadowzone is one such disappointment: a low-budget, straight-to-VHS sci-fi horror about an Extended Deep Sleep trial in which the power of the dream-state human brain unlocks a doorway to an alternate dimension . . . and all that comes through that doorway is tits & monsters. In any other context, tits & monsters would be a satisfying payoff for renting VHS-horror schlock, but here they’re a little bit of a letdown, especially considering how much more expensive and less expressive Shadowzone is compared to its fellow sleep-study-horror Beyond Dream’s Door.
Louise Fletcher revives her role as the low-energy sleep study doctor she plays in The Exorcist II: The Heretic, except now with a mad scientist bent. Along with a fellow drowsy mad scientist played by James Wong, she conducts Extended Deep Sleep studies on naked models in the low-rent version of the hypersleep pods from Alien. Just as they’re starting to discover the awesome, supernatural power the human mind can unlock when submerged in Deep Sleep for days on end, their work is suddenly scrutinized by a military investigator because one of their test subjects inconveniently popped like a balloon. The flayed corpse of that experiment gone wrong promises a level of gore the movie will not match again until the very end. Instead, the still-sleeping subjects’ powerful minds let an interdimensional monster through the doorway between worlds that the remaining survivors in the lab (and the audience at home) cannot actually see. It’s only visible to the lab-equipment monitors, not to the naked eye. Still, it kills them off one by one in their sealed underground bunker, like an invisible version of The Thing . . . until it finally reveals its admittedly fantastic creature design in a strobe-lit ending borrowed from Altered States.
There’s a meta-element to Shadowzone, where it’s so boring between its mutant creature attacks that you can’t tell whether you actually saw them or you dreamed them during an unplanned mid-film nap. It’s possible that my unenthused experience with it was a result of presentation, since the version currently streaming on Amazon Prime is a half-hour longer than its normal listed runtime of 80min, and none of the additional footage includes the tits & monsters that provide its only sources of entertainment value. What’s left is just empty space that could have easily been filled by whatever surreal, outlandish images the fine folks at Full Moon could dare to imagine, and instead is just long stretches of nothing. The good news is that you’re likely in no danger of being bored or let down by the film yourself, since the only scenario when any reasonable person would have sought this out would be if it were still 1990 and your local video store had already rented out every VHS of the better titles it visually references: Alien, Altered States, and The Thing. Now, you can just stream Beyond Dream’s Door instead without worrying that Tubi is going to run out of copies.
The recent career-overview documentary The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin is a decent enough introduction to the sci-fi author’s big-picture concepts & beliefs. The posthumous doc unfortunately highlights Le Guin’s Earthsea series as a source of inspiration for Harry Potter, of all indignities, but it’s a faux pas I’m willing to forgive since it also indulges in some transcendent Loving Vincent-style animation that illustrates her ideas beautifully. I’m also willing to forgive it because there is so little visual, extratextual material to pull from when marrying images to Le Guin’s words. Goro Miyazaki’s condensed anime adaptation of the Earthsea series also felt like a lazy cash-in on the popularity of Harry Potter in the 2000s, mixed with generic Games of Thrones-style fantasy tropes. Tales from Earthsea certainly didn’t engage with the meaning behind the story of its source text in any authentic or substantial way, so it makes sense that The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin would have to re-illustrate its central concepts instead of licensing Miyazaki’s imagery from Studio Ghibli. There wasn’t much else to pull from beyond the Goro Miyazaki movie either – a noticeable void of extratextual illustration that becomes exponentially unignorable the further the documentary digs into Le Guin’s legacy.
It’s outright absurd that there are only four direct film adaptations of Le Guin’s work listed on her official website. Half adapt stories from Earthsea – including the Ghibli movie and a Syfy Channel miniseries. The other half are TV movie adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven – one for public access and one for A&E. That’s a shockingly thin catalog for an incalculably influential author with dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories to her name. Luckily, there’s at least one great work lurking among these meager titles, one that eases the bitterly bland aftertaste of the middling Earthsea anime. The very first film adaptation of Le Guin’s writing was also credited as the first made-for-Public-Access-TV movie ever. The 1980 Lathe of Heaven is something of a cult curio for New Yorkers who happened to catch it on WNET Channel 13 in its original broadcast, and its scarcity on home video has only intensified its status as a niche object of sci-fi nerd affection in the decades since. Made by experimental video art weirdos from the NYC area (David Loxton & Fred Barzyk), the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven is much more stylish than the A&E version from the 2000s. Le Guin also had so much direct involvement in the production that she earned an official “creative consultant” credit, which is something you won’t find in the other adaptations of her work.
The Lathe of Heaven stars Bruce “Willard” Davison as a troubled citizen of near-future Portland (Le Guin’s home city), a suicide attempt survivor who’s assigned to a “voluntary therapy clinic” to assess the mysterious sleep disorder that’s tanking his mental health. He’s isolated by his suffering, since he is being plagued by phenomenon he describes as “effective dreams”: dreams that alter the fabric of reality in waking life, unbeknownst to everyone but him. Against all odds, the patient convinces his new sleep therapist that the “effective dream” phenomenon is real in just a few sessions, but instead of working towards a cure, the doctor immediately exploits his fantastical power. Using suggestive hypnosis, the therapist influences the content of his patient’s dreams, attempting to improve society and the planet through the unwieldy power. After a couple minor successes transforming the famously rainy city of Portland into “The Sunshine City” and dreaming his way into a bigger office, the therapist quickly starts dreaming bigger – to the entire world’s peril. His patient effectively has a cursed Monkey’s Paw for a brain, leading to a series of Twilight Zone style ironies in dreams fulfilled. Dreaming the planet’s relief from over-population leads to genocide. Dreaming for world peace leads to global suffering under alien invaders. Dreaming the end of racism leads to oppressive cultural homogenization; etc.
There’s an overt philosophical conundrum at the heart of Le Guin’s story, stemming specifically from her interest in Taoism. Although the therapist is relatively well-intentioned in his efforts to improve the world by exploiting his patient’s effective dreams, he’s constantly violating the natural flow of life & the universe, suffering grand-scale consequences for the transgression. The dreamer, by contrast, is much better suited to a proper Taoist lifestyle, gradually accepting that there is no grand purpose or meaning to Life, explaining to his doctor, “It just is.” The philosophical clash between those opposing forces would only be enough material to cover an hour-long block of Outer Limits, though, so it’s for the best that Loxton & Barzyk bring some much-needed visual flair to the dream sequences & sleep study experiments to translate Le Guin’s written ideas into cinema. The directors’ video art psychedelia shines through on the display screens of the retro-futurist lab equipment and in the film-negative illustrations of invading UFOs. It’s an effect that’s only been amplified by the film’s degenerated imagery. Since its original production materials were lost, its most current DVD prints were remastered from time-damaged video elements – leaving it with a “ghosting” effect that smears all rapid movement onscreen in a transparent trail. That would be a frustrating limitation in most archival contexts, but it’s appropriate to the film’s deliberately dreamlike visual style in this particular instance.
Truth be told, The Lathe of Heaven is more “great for a TV movie” than it is great for a movie-movie. There are a few flashes of brilliance in its planetarium laser shows, its stage-bound visualization of a global plague, its Ed Woodian stock footage of jellyfish & space rockets, and its stunning montage of Portland landscapes warped by their reflection in skyscraper windowpanes. Otherwise, the production is glaringly limited by its Public Access TV production budget, and so it’s most commendable for the imaginative & philosophical strengths of Le Guin’s writing. The most you could say of the 1980 Lathe of Heaven as an art object is that it lands as a more level-headed, made-for-TV version of Ken Russell’s much wilder Altered States, which happened to be released the same year. Otherwise, it’s a scrappy, serviceable illustration of its much more substantial source text. That service just can’t be overvalued in this case, since the text’s author is so greatly talented and so strangely underadapted, with only a few relatively puny competitors, all devoid of any discernible visual style.
There’s something distinctly Kaufman-esque about Dream Scenario, and it’s not just that the film stars Adaptation performer Nicolas Cage. All of Charlie Kaufman’s films are ambitious narratives that revolve around a man who is in some way, be it major or minor, removed from the reality of the people around him, and who ends up caught up in a widespread event that is (usually) not of their own making or volition. In Adaptation, meek screenwriter Charlie ends up caught in a criminal enterprise as a result of simply trying to adapt a non-fiction book into a workable film adaptation; in Anomalisa, Michael Stone’s apparent mental disorder causes him to see all faces as identical, and he gets swept up in a nightmare scenario of bureaucratic intrigue; in Synecdoche, New York, Caden Cotard’s creation of a nesting doll of reality takes on a life of its own and he is swept away inside of it. All of his works are also about a person being forced into a situation that is, to their mind, completely unfair, and their myopic reactions to it exacerbate the situation. It seems unfair to Joel in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that Clementine has intentionally lost her memories of him, so he pursues the same avenue to have her removed from his thoughts; it seems unfair to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Synecdoche that his wife has left him and taken their daughter with her, and his imaginings of the worst possible outcomes of that situation contribute to his declining health; the unfairness of a life of unfulfilled dreams causes the janitor character in I’m Thinking of Ending Things to fantasize a completely different life, which has its own horrors.
Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is, like many of the Kaufman protagonists listed above, a man with a fairly decent life, including a tenured position at a small college. He and his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) have a pleasant enough life, living in her spacious childhood home with their teen daughters, elder typical teen Hannah (Jessica Clement) and younger Sophie (Lily Bird). Paul isn’t a bad person, but he is hapless and overly invested in other people’s perception of him. The film opens in Sophie’s dream, where objects begin falling from the sky, and although she calls out to the Paul in her dream for help, he doesn’t react; when she tells her parents about the dream the next morning, Paul gets hung up on the fact that the dreamed version of himself was apathetic to his daughter’s concerns and worries about what his daughter thinks of him. On campus, he’s too focused on his students talking about him behind his back. He has the respect of his school’s administrator (Tim Meadows), but he yearns for acknowledgement from his former academic colleague Richard (Dylan Baker), who is known for hosting fabulous dinner parties for other people he considers elite. This seems terribly unfair to him, even though there are actions he could take to better himself. Instead of humiliating himself by pleading for a co-author credit from a different former colleague on a subject he claims to have conceived of first, he could stop talking about “thinking about writing a book” and actually do some of that research and writing himself.
Despite his relative anonymity, Paul finds himself a sudden subject of internet virality. After running into an old girlfriend (Marnie McPhail) after a play, she tells him that she has been dreaming about him and asks if she can blog about the experience. In doing so, she links to his Facebook page, which results in a huge influx of notifications from hundreds, then thousands of others, all who have seen Paul in their dreams; Paul is flustered that he seems to be a passive observer in all of these scenarios. Suddenly flush with positive attention, Paul attempts to leverage this into a book deal, and signs up with a P.R. firm headed by the neurotic Trent (Michael Cera) and Mary (Kate Berlant), who swings back and forth between sycophantic and self-absorbed. In so doing, he meets assistant Molly (Dylan Gelula), who leads him to realize that doing nothing in people’s dreams is actually the best case scenario here. The general public turns on him for reasons I won’t spoil, and all of it is out of his hands.
I couldn’t have imagined that I would reference the 2007 novel Mon Cœur à l’étroit (My Heart Hemmed In) by Marie NDiaye in a single review this year, let alone two. In writing about Beau is Afraid, I talked about how the protagonist of the novel awoke one morning to learn that all of her neighbors despised her, or perhaps that they suddenly all despise her at once, after years of apparent tolerance. Like her, Paul is a teacher here, and although the reason for the sudden change of heart among her peers results in not just the loss of academic prestige, but its conversion into outright hostility. Although the reason that the narrator of Hemmed is ostracized is less explicit than in Scenario, the reasons are nevertheless just as ethereal, and the horror comes from the way that something over which one has no control can completely destroy their life. Hemmed never mines that field for comedy like Scenario does, but they exist in the same rhetorical space nonetheless, wherein a fairly well-liked educator becomes a pariah because of circumstances in which they have no say.
There’s a deft handling of the metaphor of fame in Dream Scenario that I really enjoyed. Like many people who achieve a modicum of viral fame, he didn’t do anything to make himself the center of attention, at least initially. His sudden appearance in people’s dreams has no explanation and isn’t the result of anything that he has done. Although he initially appears in the dreams of people who know him like his daughter and students, he only becomes known to the public because of his ex-girlfriend’s blog post, when strangers become aware that the man that they are seeing in their dreams is a real person. Like all internet fame, however, it’s fleeting, and his attempts to leverage it into achieving his actual desires are stunted when his dream persona moves from being an apathetic bystander in their dreams to an active participant and, eventually, a source of terror, all of it once again having nothing to do with anything that Paul himself has done. Sure, he’s hapless and selfish, but no more so than the average person, and it’s hard to blame him for wanting to use this unwanted stardom to get something that he actually wants. Although he is pathetic, letting his ego get the best of him, there’s nothing malicious about anything that he does, which makes his sudden turn into Twitter’s villain more pitiable; his poorly received, self-serving online apology makes things worse (as they often do, just look at Colleen Ballinger), but unlike a lot of the internet celebs whose attempted apologies are dissected to hell and back for their insincerity, Paul actually didn’t do anything to deserve his backlash.
The film ends on an ambiguous and bittersweet note, which reflects the film’s slow turn from being a comedy about an upper middle class nobody to a horror story about being a public figure with no control over his perception. There are still comedic moments as the final minutes approach, including a scene wherein Cage goes full-camp in a photoshoot with a bladed gauntlet that is similar to but legally distinct from Freddy Krueger’s, as well as a visual call back to an earlier discussion of Paul’s Halloween costume from a few years prior, but it ends without setting everything in Paul’s reality back to where it was before, ultimately making it the kind of somber movie that so often plays so well during this time of year.
Most of my favorite art tends to get labeled as “Bad Movies” outright, as if “Bad Movies” were a legitimate, defined genre. Snarky mockery of low-budget genre films accounts for a lot of movie-nerd culture in a post-MST3k world, without much thought to what the “Bad Movie” label even means. Friends will gather for regular, celebratory Bad Movie Night rituals, and then log the films watched on Letterboxd with a half-star review that reads “I had the time of my life watching this! The most entertaining movie ever made.” It’s driven me to the conclusion that what most people label as “Bad Movies” is really just underfunded outsider art. There’s a discomfort in stepping outside the systemic quality controls of a professional production, but those same controls can also dampen the personalities & idiosyncrasies of the artists behind those productions. When someone says they love watching Bad Movies, there’s a cognitive dissonance between objective quality in craft and the subjective enjoyment of the audience. To me, nothing made with ecstatic passion and highly entertaining results could ever truly be “Bad”; it’s just art that requires you to readjust what you expect out of Movies in general. What good is consistency, coherence, and logic in a robust, mainstream production if the images feel limp & uninspired when compared to their no-budget equivalents?
Beyond Dream’s Door is A+ outsider art that I’m sure has made the rounds among the irony-poisoned Bad Movies crowd. It’s an easy target for that kind of mockery, inviting laughter as soon as you hear the first few sitcom-level line deliveries from its subprofessional actors. If you can stifle your snickering long enough to stick with it, though, Beyond Dream’s Door proves to be an ideal example of passion outweighing resources. It recreates the nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences and waking “reality.” The emotional & narrative logic behind its nightmare imagery isn’t especially deep or nuanced; it hinges its entire premise on the cryptic idiom “Beyond dream’s door is where horror lies,” and it contextualizes all of its action within a university’s Psychology program so it can make room for brief, vague lectures on “psychosis.” It also relies on frequent dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream rug pull surprises, making it clear that nothing in the characterizations or story matters as much as establishing a consistently fun, unnerving sense of dream logic in its low-budget aesthetics. At times, it’s transcendent in what it achieves within that seemingly limited frame, even recalling the headlights crime scene terror of a David Lynch nightmare (years before those exact images were echoed in Lynch’s Lost Highway). And yet, it’s the exact kind of sub-professional production that instantly gets slapped with the “Bad Movie” label, while more venerated, traditionally trained artists like Lynch are afforded the benefit of the doubt.
The story of a Psychology student’s stress dreams breaking out of his skull to infect the reality of (and physically attack) his classmates isn’t sketched out with much detail, give or take his dreams finding a demonic mascot in the movie’s special guest star The Suckling. Mostly, Beyond Dream’s Door follows its moment-to-moment whims to create movie magic on a college student budget. Beyond posing a few dreamworld images in a blacked-out sound stage void, most of its action is staged in generic, practical locales. The film attempts to make liminal spaces out of the mundane, Skinamarinking its suburban homes through confused geography and warping the empty halls of its academic institutions through video surveillance displays. It conjures a literal demon through a college sleep study gone awry, but most of its horror is established in the uncertainty of where its dreams begin & end. Lightbulbs explode in slow-motion close-up to punctuate the shock of being dunked back into a recurring nightmare. Clear glass skulls fill with running water to erase the physical humanity of the characters navigating the dreamworld. Disembodied arms rise from an open grave like time-elapsed flower growth, shot in psychedelic red & blue crosslighting. The narrative may be simple, but the visual language is constantly surprising, never lazy or needlessly repetitious. This is clearly the work of cinephiles striving to make the best possible movie they can with the resources they have within reach. It’s noticeably cheap, but it’s also thoroughly wonderful.
The main reason I love horror as a genre is because it makes this kind of dream-logic outsider art commercially viable in a way no other medium can. If a group of college students made an avant-garde art film about the thin veil between dreams & reality, it’s extremely liable to have been forgotten to time (unless it was an early project for a director who later earned a mainstream fanbase, like Lynch). By contrast, Beyond Dream’s Door has a kind of built-in, infinitely repopulated audience who will always be voracious for more nightmare-logic horror schlock, especially after they’ve run through the official Elm Street films a few dozen times. It seems conscious of its debt to the larger horror genre in that way, reaching beyond the visual touchstones of an obvious Freddy Kruger knockoff to instead make allusions to Hitchcock’s Psycho and Steven King’s novel IT. The need for scares & gore to attract an audience serves the film well structurally, giving it momentary goals to achieve beyond crafting artsy images with literal arts & crafts supplies. The would’ve been just as great without its more overt horror elements, though; it would just also have far fewer eyes on it. A lot of my favorite filmmakers fit into that same category: underfunded visionaries like Ed Wood, Roger Corman, and William Castle, who managed to make & sell wildly entertaining pictures on shoestring budgets by working on the B-horror margins. They’re the exact kind of names that end up on lists titled “The Best of the Bad” instead of earning the label they truly deserve, “The Best Outsider American Filmmakers.” I haven’t seen enough of Jay Woelful’s directorial work to say he belongs in that same conversation, but I can confirm Beyond Dream’s Door admirably continues the tradition.
I don’t know that we’ve ever given Michel Gondry his full due as a visual stylist and an auteur. While other Twee-era directors who came up while I was a high school art snob are still regularly working and relatively celebrated—Wes Anderson, Miranda July, Spike Jonze, etc.—Gondry’s name isn’t often referenced as one of the aughts’ absolute greats. And yet, his combination of arts & crafts whimsy and gloomy French New Wave dramatics are so specific & idiosyncratic that I often see direct echoes of his work in titles like Dave Made a Maze,Girl Asleep, and Sorry to Bother You (which does name-check Gondry, to its credit). You’d think that this year in particular would be the one that inspired the most breathless, fawning articles on Gondry’s post-Twee legacy, though, considering that two of the best films of the year so far—Strawberry Mansion & Everything Everywhere All at Once—are so strongly, undeniably influenced by his work. I wonder if it’s the bitter taste of Gondry’s debut feature as a writer-director (as opposed to his more iconic music video work or his non-writing credit for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) that has tempered his legacy as one of the greats. Beyond its surface-level cuteness, The Science of Sleep is a deeply unpleasant, emotionally troubling watch, which makes it a tough sell as the purest feature-length form of Gondry’s vision as an auteur (despite that being a fairly standard internal conflict for Twee art in the aughts). It’s also pretty great.
Revisiting The Science of Sleep felt like reliving the best and the worst parts of my college years in the aughts: the excitement of for-its-own-sake art collaboration and the complete ineptitude at healthy romantic interaction. I even acquired my used DVD copy of the film in the exact way I would have back in 2007: plucked it off a shelf at the Goodwill (although I just as likely would have found it on a Blockbuster Video liquidation table the first time around). Gael García Bernal stars as a toxic indie scene fuckboy who immaturely rejects the idea of settling for an office job even though his macabre, mediocre illustrations of famous tragedies are never going to pay his bills. He’s a dreamer in the truest sense, struggling to differentiate between his nocturnal fantasies and the doldrums of his waking life. He’s also a selfish baby. When he moves in with his mommy to take a dull calendar-printing job that she arranged for him, he finds himself smitten with her next-door neighbor, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. The neighbor is delighted by the fuckboy’s crafty creativity and values him as a friend & artistic collaborator. The fuckboy badly wants that friendship to turn into a romance and throws a feature-length temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way. From the outside, The Science of Sleep looks like a cute, whimsical romance between a couple of wide-eyed twentysomethings who’ve watched one too many Agnès Varda films. On the inside, it’s a rotten little story about how inept all twentysomethings actually are at friendship & romance, especially entitled young men who don’t know how to handle rejection with grace.
Gondry offers plenty ammunition to audiences who want to treat Twee art as whimsical fluff. The film opens with the whiny babyboy hosting a dreamworld cooking show, explaining to a delighted TV studio audience how dreams are prepared – stirring random thoughts, reminiscences of the day, memories of the past, and earworm pop songs into a giant gumbo pot, and voila. The stop-motion, papier-mâché, cut-and-paste surrealism of the dream sequences that follow is a wholesome delight, in sharp contrast with the toxic, selfish behavior of the manic pixie fuckboy protagonist. Gondry shoots the waking scenes in a handheld documentarian style, while the dream sequences that frequently interrupt that real-world drama directly echo his iconic D.I.Y. dreamworlds in music videos like “Everlong,” “Bachelorette,” and “Fell in Love with a Girl“. In general, I don’t think people give the aughts era of Twee art enough credit for being emotionally challenging & bleak, likely because the romance & whimsy of its visual style is so pronounced. Even at the time, though, The Science of Sleep tasted sourer than most of its peers, smashing the romance of its dreamworld fantasy sequences against its characters’ cruel, immature behavior in a volatile mismatch of tones (as opposed to the more subtle melancholy of most Twee art). It’s a conflict that worked for me a lot more on this recent rewatch than it did at the time, because all I knew then was that the lead made me uncomfortable and the movie wasn’t as romantic as I wanted it to be. That discomfort feels more purposeful & self-aware now, especially since I can see my younger self’s worst behavior reflected in the main character’s glaring faults.
Gondry continued to work well after The Science of Sleep, with plenty of highs & lows in his creative flow. His underseen, underrated drama Mood Indigo was an excellent continuation of the bittersweet Twee of his debut; his director-for-hire work on the superhero action comedy The Green Hornet was an all-around disaster; and the quirky crowd-pleaser Be Kind Rewind falls somewhere in-between those extremes. I’m not sure he ever recovered from the perception that his debut as a writer-director was a step down from his much more beloved work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though, which in effect made Charlie Kaufmann appear to be the true genius behind that project. That’s a shame, since I find Gondry to be the more consistently rewarding, emotionally engaging artist of that pair, and the works that have been inspired by his distinct visual style are more often among the best new releases of their respective years (whereas I can die happy without ever seeing another Kaufmann-inspired psych drama about writer’s block, or whatever).
I grew up in a time when Michel Gondry was a golden god to artsy teens everywhere and not a kitschy fad everyone’s embarrassed to admit they were super into. Gondry’s proto-Etsy music videos for classics like “Everlong,” “Bachelorette,” and “Fell in Love with a Girl” might still hold nostalgic value, but there isn’t much of a vocal reverence for him as an established auteur these days. No one’s going around sharing screengrabs from Mood Indigo or The Science of Sleep with copypasta tags like “We used to be a country, a proper country.” I’ve always been on the hook for Michel Gondry’s distinct brand of twee surrealism, though, to the point where I still get excited when I see it echoed in films from younger upstarts who were obviously inspired by his work, like in Sorry to Bother You or Girl Asleep. Maybe I should be rolling my eyes at his visual preciousness now that I’m a thirtysomething cynic with a desk job instead of a teenage poetry student, but I’m happy to swoon instead.
So, of course I was won over by a twee fantasy epic about dream-hopping lovers dodging pop-up ads in a hand-crafted, near-future dystopia. Strawberry Mansion continues the Michel Gondry tradition of playing with analog arts-and-crafts techniques to create fantastic dream worlds on a scrappy budget. If you still get a warm, fuzzy feeling from stop-motion, puppetry, tape warp, and low-tech green screen surrealism, there’s a good chance you’ll be charmed by Strawberry Mansion too, regardless of whether Michel Gondry’s heyday happened to overlap with your internment in high school. I have no evidence that directors Kentucker Audley & Albert Birney were consciously channeling Gondry here, but they demonstrate a similar knack for illustrating fantastic breaks from reality with the rudimentary tools of a kindergarten classroom. Strawberry Mansion is likely too cute & too whimsical to win over all irony-poisoned adults in the audience, but if you can see it through the poetry & emotional overdrive of teenage eyes, it’s a stunning achievement in small-scale, tactile filmmaking.
In the year 2035, a humorless IRS bureaucrat is tasked with auditing the recorded dreams of an elderly artist who mostly lives off-the-grid. He’s supposed to create a running tally of various props & cameos that appear in her dreams, each of which can be taxed for pennies. However, he’s quickly distracted by how much freer & more imaginative her dreams are than his, which tend to be fried chicken & soda commercials contained to a single room (painted entirely pink like the sets in What a Way to Go!). It’s not surprising that his limited, commodified dreams are part of a larger conspiracy involving evil ad agencies and governmental control. What is surprising is the romance that develops between the young tax man & the elderly artist. They flee persecution for discovering the ad agency’s subliminal broadcasts by retreating further into the VHS fantasy worlds of the artist’s recorded dreams, forming a delightfully sweet bond in the most ludicrous of circumstances: demonic slumber parties, swashbuckling pirate adventures, cemetery picnics, etc. The imagery is constantly delightful & surprising, even though you know exactly where the story is going at all times.
At its most potent, cinema is the closest we get to sharing a dream, so I’m an easy sucker for movies that are about that exact phenomenon: Paprika, The Cell, Inception, etc. I’m also always onboard for a psychedelic Dan Deacon score, which adds a needed layer of atmospheric tension here. Even so, Strawberry Mansion joins the rare company of films like Girl Asleep, The Science of Sleep, and The Wizard Oz that feel like totally immersive dreamworlds built entirely by hand. They evoke the childlike imagination of transforming a cardboard refrigerator box into a backyard rocket ship, except that every single scene requires a new arts & crafts innovation on that level – more than history’s most creative child could possibly cram into a single adolescence. No matter how sinister this film tries to make its corporate-sponsored dystopian future (or how grim Gondry tries to make his own doomed relationship dramas), nostalgia for that lost childhood whimsy cuts through. The closest we can ever get back to it—without the aid of movies or drugs—is in lucid dreams.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic sci-fi anime Paprika (2006), an explosively imaginative movie about shared dreams from the genius Satoshi Kon.
One of the more uniquely impressive strengths of cinema as an artform is its ability to mimic the loopy, transcendent quality of dreams like no other medium. My favorite films tend to be the most highly-stylized, shamelessly artificial indulgences in cinematic fantasy, the ones that disregard the limitations of real-world logic to instead achieve something distinctly subliminal & surreal. The 40-minute mini-feature Electric Swan taps into that subliminal dream space with an impressive sense of ease. It’s a quiet, low-key drift through a retro-futurist dystopia that’s just as mesmerizing & frustratingly unresolved as any nightmare you’ve had during a mid-afternoon nap. It doesn’t have anything especially novel or pointed to say about the class disparity conflicts that give shape to its story, but the hypnotic, dissociative filter it processes those themes through help them to upset & resonate in a way only a movie or a nightmare could allow.
Almost the entirety of Electric Swan is confined to a retro-futurist apartment building in Buenos Aires. Like in a lot of dystopian sci-fi, the wealthiest residents live on the top floor of the building, with levels of class descending with the floor levels all the way to the basement – where the building’s Indigenous, impoverished security guard lives alone. We mostly watch the guard make his daily rounds, acting as a doorman, handyman, therapist, and babysitter at the beck and call of the building’s residents. Both the wealthy and the working class children he serves describe their dreams to him while he struggles to keep up with his daily duties without assistance. Meanwhile, the building itself takes on a menacing presence, as if it were literally haunted by the class divisions it upholds. The wealthy on the top floors become mysteriously nauseous with motion sickness as the building sways; the security guard’s humble basement dwelling floods from an unknown water source; and everyone in-between acts as if the world’s about to end at any minute. Then, same as if in a dream, their shared reality abruptly shifts entirely in a way that cannot be explained by logic or by narrative tradition.
Electric Swan might only get away with its subliminal loopiness because it’s so firmly tethered to familiar genre tropes. The whole thing plays as if someone explained the plot of High-Riseto you as a bedtime fairy tale and then you scrambled all the details in a half-remembered dream. The ease in which it distorts its matter-of-fact portrait of class disparity through a surrealist dream lens is only really paralleled in recent post-Buñuel oddities from South America like Zama, Icaros: A Vision, and Good Manners. Its style vs. substance balance is more befitting of a music video than a feature film, which is likely to agitate anyone who looks to movies for “a good story” rather than a transcendent sensory experience. If you’re typically drawn to movies that play like dreams or to the eerie space where dystopian sci-fi meets fairy tale fantasy, this is one of the most vivid class allegories you’re likely to find this year. And even if you don’t fall under its spell, it’s too short to truly waste your time.
I remembered really liking Tarsem Singh’s debut feature, The Cell, when I first saw it as a blockbuster VHS rental in my impressionable teen years in the early aughts. That fond memory has faded over the last couple decades as the details of the film itself became overwhelmed by critical complaints that it was a thematically thin bore and, frankly, by an increasing number of goodwill-tanking stinkers within Tarsem’s own catalog. I have since left The Cell behind as if it were a childish plaything, convinced that The Fall was the sole fluke when Tarsem had stumbled into creating a feature film worthy of his consistently stunning imagery. It was a pleasant surprise on revisit, then, that The Cell holds up to the exquisite nightmare I remembered it being in my initial viewing. Contrary to its reputation, Tarsem’s debut absolutely fucking rules, meaning the “visionary” director has two anomaly masterpieces under his name, and one of them stars Jennifer Lopez.
If The Cell is lacking anything that’s achieved more eloquently in The Fall, it’s certainly a matter of narrative & thematic substance. While the latter film is a morally complex exploration of the nature of storytelling, deceit, and imagination, Tarsem’s debut leaves all its ideas & plot machinations in plain view on the surface. Its dumb-as-rocks premise is an attempt to take the “Entering the mind of a killer” plot from Silence of the Lambs as literally as possible. That’s it; that’s the entire movie. JLo is our de facto Clarice Starling in this ungodly mutation of the Silence of the Lambs template, with Vincent d’Onofrio putting in a deeply creepy serial killer performance in the Hannibal Lector role (and Vince Vaughn taking over some of her on-the-ground detective work). Like in the psychedelic anime Paprika & the dream-hopping blockbuster Inception that followed nearly a decade later, JLo literally enters the subconscious mind of her maniacal serial killer patient via futuristic sci-fi- tech that essentially allows her to lucidly dream inside someone else’s head. Once lodged inside the nightmare realms of his twisted mind, she must race against the clock to discover clues that could save his latest potential victim from death (and hopefully help him heal along the way).
I could maybe see this Dream Police setup being disregarded as too convoluted or silly to be worthwhile in certain audiences’ eyes if the nightmare fantasy realms it facilitates weren’t so intoxicatingly lush. Bolstered by breath-taking creations from legendary fashion designer (and frequent Tarsem collaborator) Eiko Ishioka, The Cell often plays like a haute couture fashion show by way of Jodorowsky. Nature footage, fetish gear, and babydoll-parts art instillations serve as mood-setting set decorations for Ishioka’s designs, which look like they were inspired by the Royal Court of Hell. On its own, the police procedural wraparound story that fames those high fashion nightmares might have been the boring, thin genre exercise The Cell has been misremembered as. I don’t understand how anyone can indulge on the exhilarating drug of these high-fashion kink hallucinations and walk away displeased with the picture, however, as it sinks all its efforts into the exact sensual pleasures & dreamlike headspace that only cinema can achieve. It’s disguised as a single-idea genre film, but its ambitions reach for the furthest limits of its medium (and the medium of fashion while it’s at it, just as lagniappe).
If you boil down the most common complaints about The Cell to their most inane essence, the movie has been largely dismissed for following a “style over substance” ethos. This would be an incredibly boring take on any movie in my opinion, but it’s especially egregious considering just how exquisite the style is here (thanks to Ishioka, largely). My best guess is that Tarsem’s prior work as a music video & television commercial director had helped contextualize this piece as an exercise in pure style in critics’ minds, as he even calls attention to that professional background by recreating his sets from his “Losing My Religion” video in the killer’s troubled mind. Helpfully, though, he also calls attention to the aesthetic differences of this film and the grimy torture porn visuals that would soon become an industry standard. The next potential victim is locked in a time-controlled torture device (the titular cell) that will drown her if JLo doesn’t heal the serial killer in time, making the film’s real word setting feel just as much like a precursor to Saw as it is an echo of Silence of the Lambs. That grimy torture device helps establish clear, tangible stakes for JLo’s literal trips into the killer’s mind, but it also serves as a wonderfully illustrative contrast to the lush nightmare-couture of the dream sequences. In comparing that titular torture device to the serial killer’s nightmare realms, you can clearly see how Tarsem’s distinct sense of style transform a potentially mundane genre picture into an impeccable work of fine art – substance be dammed.
The only shame is that Tarsem’s struggled to repeat that miracle in the decades since, with one major exception in The Fall. Still, two five-star achievements in a single career would be an impressive feat for anyone. It’s a miracle that he got away with even that much.
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