What were dreams before movies? Like trying to imagine how tornadoes sounded before the freight train, picturing a pre-cinematic dreamworld is all but impossible in a post-cinematic reality. So entangled are dream life and moving images, each under the other’s constant influence, that it’s not always easy to separate the two. Even when they’re distinguishable, movies and dreams frequently serve an identical purpose: the place we return to, night after night, to escape our waking lives.
Summer 2008: in the weeks leading up to The Dark Knight’s much hyped theatrical release, I keep having vivid dreams about it. In one, Joker has taken over Arkham Asylum, guarded by walruses in Joker make-up, and I, Batman, must infiltrate the hospital through a cavernous basement. In another, creeping down a long hallway in Joker’s secret mansion, I open one of its many doors to find a bedroom filled with marijuana plants. In the final dream, I’m back in Arkham’s dim basement labyrinth, caught by Joker’s goons, forced into battle against a trio of shadowy, faceless opponents within the narrow confines of the cave, whose fragile walls quickly crumble, a jumbled heap of rotten birchwood and fallen stalactites burying me, Batman, before I, John, am jolted awake.
Christopher Nolan took Batman to new and interesting places, though nowhere near as new or interesting as my unconscious adventures in the summer of ‘08. Real Batman could not compete with Dream Batman. Not many movies can stack up against a crazy dream, yet David Lynch always pulled it off. Lynch’s films are all, to varying degrees, oneiric distortions of normal movies, not really different from those my brain conjured in anticipation of The Dark Knight. Like dreams, Lynch’s films function according to their own idiosyncratic, often insane logic, their narratives unfolding and refolding, moving forwards and backwards, sideways and diagonally, drawing us deeper and deeper into the hypnogogic wilderness. Even his more straightforward films contain moments that don’t feel quite real, as if spliced in by none other than the candy-colored clown himself, like when Frank Booth yells, “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” before disappearing from the frame to the screech of tires—or the following scene, in which a strange woman dances on the roof of a car to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” and Booth recites the lyrics to the terrified, bewildered Jeffrey: “In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you, in dreams you’re mine…”
Some moments in Lynch movies make little sense as anything other than dreams. Midway through Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Laura Palmer meets James Hurley in what appears to be a deserted custodial storage room in their school. Laura tells him that she’s “gone, long gone, like a turkey in the corn.” James says she’s not a turkey, “one of the dumbest birds on earth,” and to this, Laura bows her head solemnly and, after a pregnant pause, lip quivering, she looks at James with misty eyes and speaks: “Gobble… gobble.” This is ridiculous dialogue. I think Lynch knew that. Peculiar exchanges like this were part of his grand design, just one of several elements which conspire toward that unmistakable Lynchian™ atmosphere, those red flags meant to call the dreamer’s attention to the fact that they are dreaming—why this location? what is James referring to when he says, “it does matter”? Why is Laura wearing nothing but a skimpy towel?—but which more frequently overwhelm the senses through sheer abundance. The scene ends, as dreams so often do, not with sex but an intimation of sex—a passionate kiss, the soft caress of Laura’s breast—before Lynch summarily moves on to the next scene, leaving his audience of dreamers to stew in stupefaction, wondering what it is that we just watched, pinching our forearms to make sure we’re not asleep.