December 2024 – The Little Pakeha

2023, directed by Kristoffer Borgli

Dream Scenario is a movie about a mild-mannered (read: kind of pathetic and outright whiny) professor played by a nigh on unrecognisable to me Nicolas Cage who suddenly starts appearing in people’s dreams. At first he’s not doing anything other than just watching, failing to intervene in various scenarios that you would really want someone to intervene in, but then suddenly they switch to being nightmares where he attacks people in horrifically violent ways, which everyone reacts to by treating him as though he has done or would do those things in real life. The IMDB summary actually says that this is triggered when he encounters a dreamer whose visions of him differ substantially from the norm but I’m struggling to remember who that was… I think probably Molly, who I’ll get back to later.

This set up seemed interesting to me because there’s actually someone in my life who is consistently threatening and malicious towards me in my dreams despite that being the furthest thing from the truth in reality. It’s weird and I have no idea why. Admittedly in the dreams they never get really violent, but you know how much it’s affected my relationship with them? Zero. Zero much. I’ve never even told them about it. But this is a movie, and it’s a movie with a metaphor. It might not be obvious yet but it should be if I bring up the scene where he posts a breakdown video where he cries (literally) that people are treating him badly because of nothing he’s done, just things they imagine him doing, and how that makes him the real victim in all of this. Also notably it’s not literally everyone who’s having these dreams. Quite a few people simply don’t – including the only significant Black character in the movie.

Okay. So there are some major issues with this metaphor. Like, they aren’t actually imagining him doing those things. They’re dreaming them. With the exception of the few people who’ve learned lucid dreaming techniques, we cannot control our dreams (see above paragraph about my person). This naturally removes a whole lot of agency from the people mistreating him, in particular his students who are legitimately traumatised by the dreams and are shown almost universally to be too scared to complete a cognitive behavioural exercise designed to help them see him as harmless and non-threatening. It’s also very one-dimensional with a single exception of the young woman who dreams about him as an exciting sexual aggressor who confidently and assertively takes the lead in their encounters. Fear is a very base emotion that’s designed to be difficult to overcome when it’s strong enough to become panic, and it’s not the primary expression of most racists. Even if there is a layer of fear baked into many widespread social attitudes towards Black people, the ways racism plays out are not as obviously motivated by it as they are in the film. And while for the most part you could take the position that it’s not editorialising on whether people’s reactions to him are valid, the scene with his students very definitely presents their position as sympathetic and understandable – and that’s not just one person, it’s two or three dozen. Between that and the way his own responses range from lashing out in anger to a snivelling, blubbery mess of an apology video that he’s outright told is embarrassing to a persistent and stubbornly confused denial, it’s easy to get impatient with him even though he’s actually completely right that he is the victim. In fact I’d speculate it’s designed for us to get impatient with him, making for a movie which tells us that it’s not everyone else’s fault that they’re scared of him, but it is his fault for being upset about it.

Yeah. Not too impressed with that one.

2014, directed by Tim Burton

I didn’t expect to be watching a Harvey Weinstein movie today.

How it happened was, I had a few hours to kill before my regular afternoon streamer came on, so I was browsing Netflix looking for something I hadn’t already seen that didn’t look terrible, and I came across Big Eyes, which purports to be based on true events about a woman who left her controlling husband in the 1950s and promptly married another guy who stole her art, selling it under his name – Walter Keane. I put it on and not long into the credits, there was his name: produced by Harvey Weinstein. Seems like a weird movie for a guy like him to be so heavily involved in and I was curious so I shrugged and kept it going.

If Big Eyes is a decent movie, it owes it to two things: the story and (some of) the acting. Between the movies I’ve written about before this one and a few more that I watched but never got around to writing up I’ve recently seen quite a few subtle, evocative, oppressive performances of both victims and villains (and people who refused to be victims). This movie did not feature any of them. The funny thing is that the movie actually highlights its own flaws, at one point having the narrator question why Margaret stayed with Walter, something we never really get a feeling for. Even earlier than that Walter announces himself that he’s not capable of subtlety. It’s true – there’s nothing subtle about his performance, which is a problem I have with most of the Tim Burton films I’ve seen. At one point when he’s drunk and menacing Margaret in their flash home, flicking lit matches at her and chasing her to her studio, I had a flashback to Jack Nicholson’s famous “Here’s Johnny!” scene from The Shining and almost laughed out loud. Big Eyes isn’t a horror film, but it is a drama about a relationship that should feel horrifying but somehow never once did.

The closest thing to effective cinema we got was probably the court painting scene (the preceding minutes having been another example of Walter being far more ridiculous than unnerving – I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to Edward Norton’s film debut Primal Fear in which he also rapidly and suddenly swaps between personas in a courtroom, only far more chillingly), and even that no doubt could have been done better. It’s the sort of scene that you know should be really memorable, but some people know how to produce that vision and some people don’t.

But then that’s about what you’d expect from a film about a woman being controlled and manipulated by a man, produced by a man who’s only ever been on the wrong side of that particular balance of power. With the right director it could have been much better – producers rarely have that much creative influence – but Burton is a German expressionist whose early influences were sci fi B-movies and Hammer horror films. Visually, the big-eyed waifs that Margaret painted might be reminiscent of Burton’s art style, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good fit to direct a story about her emotionally abusive marriage. Abuse is a subtle monster that knows when to strike and when to charm, and Burton… well, he’s just not capable of subtlety.