At that moment, we are ready and the lights dim and images appear. Sometimes the images are trivial. Sometimes they are inscrutable. Mostly, they are forgettable, though a few seem so profound that we sense they must have some significance and we remember and ponder them for the rest of our lives.
Such are our dreams. We all dream and we all know our dreams are special. Dreams can shed light as well as confuse. We have happy dreams, sad dreams, dreams of the future, dreams of the past. Dreams fill our nights, spice our days, and make their way into our souls.
To compare a movie to a dream is apt. Like the images that float through our minds during our dreams, movies too find their ways into our souls. They contain the same types of stories and often have analogous constructions. They tap into our desires and clarify our fears. And like dreams, movies are not reality but a representation of reality.
A dream though occurs only to one individual. A movie is experienced by many. We all watch the same movie. In essence, we share the dream. This shared dream gives us a common experience, but often we disagree on the interpretation. A movie’s specifics are easy to understand, but its vagaries are difficult. The most powerful of movies lend themselves to vigorous investigation and interpretation. And just as exploring a dream reveals something about the dreamer, so too does exploring the movie reveal something of the viewers. Movies, like dreams, allow us to confront, enjoy, and understand those ideas and events too enormous (or too trivial) to look at consciously. The rewards of this investigation great. Seeking to understand a movie gives us (that is, the collective “us”) hard-won knowledge about world and our place in that world. The power of movies is that they can allow us a way to confront or enjoy an idea or fact that affects the society.
Certainly most movies don’t rise to the level of profound, or even interesting. A movie that passes time is straightforward and benign, even if entertaining. These movies pass and usually are forgotten. But occasionally a movie (or moving image) comes along that demands reflection and speculation. How the individual and the collective interpret this shared dream yields insight to all. Thus studying movies is sharing the dream and the dream’s meaning.
What is the Shared Dream? It is the experience of the movies as viewer and as participant, as critic and creator, as individual and community. We watch a movie but we rebuild its narrative within our mind as we watch it and within our memory as we remember it. Sharing our interpretations along with our experience helps unlock the meaning of a movie for ourselves and those who share the dream in the future.
Filed under: movies, cinema, dreams, exegesis, film, Film Is, movies, opinion
