When I first saw the trailer for Dream Scenario I expected batshit crazy Nic Cage doing all sorts of batshit crazy things. When I saw the movie I was surprised by how sedate it is considering the concept and the star. What threw me off, though, is that a lot of people involved said this film was about cancel culture. When people start bitching about cancel culture, I tune out. They are usually fools, but almost all of them are to the right, politically speaking, and the right is the king of canceling stuff. If you think that's unfair of me to say, ask a drag queen how they feel about it. Or someone who has written a book about their LGBTQ+ experiences. So I prepared myself to not like this movie because of that.
Nic Cage plays an ineffectual man who is more of an observer in his own life than a participant. Things get weird when people start talking about how they've seen him in their dreams. He does nothing. He just observes. At first it's a little odd, but as more and more people say it, the crazier it gets. Yet it never gets into batshit territory until the end, and even then the batshit crazy stuff is NOT coming from Nic Cage.
There's a scene in which a woman who saw Nic Cage in her dreams invites him over so he can reenact his role in her dream. It turns very sexual for him, and he creams his jeans. I think this is the turning point for him, because after this scene people start getting terrified of him. Apparently he's no longer doing nothing in people's dreams. Now he's doing unspeakable things to these people, and when they see him in real life they can't stand to be in the same room with him. It gets to the point where his job is on the line and his family wants nothing to do with him, all because of their dreams.
And that's what, at first, stuck in my craw about the cancel culture explanation. Because there is no such thing. There *is* suffering the consequences of your actions. That is definitely a thing. And it's because of this that the explanation didn't make sense to me. Those who complain about cancel culture always, every single time, miss a crucial detail: the key part of so-called cancel culture is someone *doing something* to get canceled. As far as I could tell in the film, Nic Cage didn't actually do anything. It's the equivalent of your partner getting mad at you for something you did in their dream.
And then comes the ending, and here there be spoilers. It turns out that the batshit crazy thing is that a company has built a device that allows you to go into other peoples' dreams. This is after Nic Cage's experience. They built these things because of him. He can go into other people's dreams naturally. He just wasn't aware of himself doing that. Which means, yes, he actually did do all of those things he was accused of doing in those dreams. Every person he tortured and raped? He really did do those things. He just didn't know he was doing it to people.
That's where the message makes more sense, but the morality of something like this is never explored, which seems like something the filmmakers should want to do. And I think perhaps that's why this movie was released and disappeared so quickly. The next logical step is ignored, so the rest of the movie doesn't really serve much of a purpose.
I don't know much about the director of the film. There's not a lot about him online, so I can only speculate that he made the movie to wallow in self-prescribed cancel culture. It's the only thing that makes sense. Why else did he not want to go any further into the story idea? Because it's a great analogy for someone who was "canceled" and doesn't understand why. People like that aren't typically introspective, so they probably wouldn't care to explore what they think of their own morality versus what their actions reveal about their actual morality. I enjoyed the movie up until that reveal in the end about the device. Now I'm just baffled.
Anyone else see Dream Scenario? Your thoughts?
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