This surreal dramedy doesn't so much reach a resolution as just stop. Maybe it's because it still hasn't ended
With a creative twist on the Kafkaesque dread of The Twilight Zone, yet fortunately without the cheap moralizing of Black Mirror, Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli's 2023 film Dream Scenario presents the bizarre case of Paul Matthews, a random guy who for whatever reason starts showing up in people's dreams. Not quite prepared for the stresses of overnight fame, Paul staggers his way through some innocent blunders and some less innocent ones until his life is toppled over and swept away by the unforgiving tide of public opinion.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that Dream Scenario is trying to satirize. The dialogues include painfully unsubtle lines about cancel culture, but if we take that interpretation at face value, the movie becomes a misfired barb at an unrealistic target. The reason why Paul becomes a hated figure is that people stop seeing him as a passive background character in their dreams and start having horrible nightmares where he commits brutal violence against them. In essence, he's assigned undeserved blame for purely imagined misdeeds. And here's where the presumed allegory for cancel culture fails, because if that's what the movie claims is happening in real life, that people are just making up traumatic events in order to smear bosses or teachers or intimate partners who didn't do anything, then we have a vile instrument of victim invalidation before us. However, watching this movie provides ample evidence that we're dealing with a clear-sighted, self-aware story, born from a mind far too sophisticated to resort to such banal role-reversal tactics. Something more complex is at play here.
The casting of Nicolas Cage in the lead role is a first clue. More than for any other Hollywood star at this time, Cage's public persona occupies a peculiar place, one where embarrassment can't reach him. He's inherently memeable, because you know you can seamlessly drop him into any ridiculous scene, in the confidence that he'll perform his part with utmost seriousness. This is how the people in Dream Scenario first perceive his character's unobtrusive presence in otherwise outlandish dreams.
But for the middle-aged college professor Paul Matthews played by Cage, that's not enough. He's simply there. He's at the blurred edge of public awareness, even if it's everyone's awareness. In a bitter blow of irony, he has achieved what every TikTok influencer desires: he's become the world's most recognized person through no merit of his own. But he wants more. He's even disappointed that the collective unconscious doesn't give him something exciting to do. So there's an undeniable element of ego in Paul's characterization, but I'd err on the side of seeing this as not really unhealthy. I've learned that I'm in the minority.
In online discussions about Dream Scenario, I find an almost uniform trend of unwarranted meanness. At IndieWire, critic David Ehrlich finds the character of Paul "pathetic and annoying." He strikes Cracked's Tim Grierson as "a massive putz." Writing for Digital Trends, Alex Welch labels him "a constantly grinning vessel of pure cringe." "Nebbishy to the ninth power" and "a fiercely memorable loser," says Justin Cheng at the Los Angeles Times. For Rory Doherty of Flicks, he's an "insecure narcissist" and a "needling braggart." And finally, Kyle Anderson of Nerdist describes him as "an a-hole who plays the victim."
And that reminds me of the public attitude that emerges in the second half of the movie, once Paul's presence in dreams shifts into that of a serial murderer. Paul becomes a public enemy because of atrocities that happen entirely inside people's heads and that he has no control over. His students vandalize his car, a stranger spits on his food, he's suspended from his job, his wife doesn't want him anywhere near her, and one wants to shout at all those people: What's wrong with you? Why are you making him responsible for what your own head invented? What did this man actually do to you?
I get the same feeling when I read press articles about Dream Scenario that go out of their way to point out how utterly unlikable Paul is to the reviewer. And now it's time for me to jump to conjectures. I think this is where Borgli set his trap: outside of the movie. The character of Paul is portrayed, both in the script and in Cage's acting choices, as socially inexpert, eager to be liked, with a number of badly concealed resentments under the surface. (I think there's much to be inferred from the fact that his children are unusually young for a man of his age, possibly suggesting he didn't find a wife until sometime in his 50s.) So we have someone who has a very comfortable life but can't enjoy it because he hasn't really connected with people. But critics have gone into full detail to state en masse how much they find Paul detestable and pitiful. And I'd like to say in response: This is a person who carries a burden of loneliness that still haunts him, and who is desperate to feel that he matters. Plus he doesn't even exist in real life. And you go on the internet to call him all sorts of ugly names. What did this man actually do to you?
To be clear, there are things to dislike about Paul. But they are to be seen in his actions, not in his person. I can understand if you find fault with his ill-advised choice to barge uninvited into a school auditorium full of people who hate him. I don't understand why you would mark his nervous speech habits as a deep personal failure.
But perhaps Borgli does understand it, and he deliberately created a character who doesn't hurt anyone but that he knew you would still despise. And the events of Dream Scenario seem to match my speculation: all the people who dream of Paul are effectively watching a Nicolas Cage movie. They only turn against him when they no longer like the character he's playing in their heads. This is not a story about woke mobs and cancel culture; this is a story about hate raids by trolls who agree on a defenseless enemy to pick on. Paul isn't mistreated because he's a bad person; he's mistreated because he meets totally arbitrary criteria for cringe.
To speculate a bit further, I guess this is why Dream Scenario feels so off near the end. It doesn't have a true ending because it's still happening. The collective hatred for the character of Paul Matthews lives on in professional reviews and forum discussions, even though, just like in the movie, all you're hating is an image of a person, not a real one. I suspect Borgli knew viewers would react in that way, and he set out to steer our perception of this character in order to replicate in us the behavior the movie merely dramatizes. That's the trap Borgli built, and even some who think seriously about movies for a living fell into it.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
