Dream Scenario - The (Lethal) Power of Perception

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Nicolas Cage? Weird? Amazing? Nutty? Unfulfilled potential? Living his best life? GOAT? Over the top? Subtle? Unleashed? Restrained? Unique? Incomprehensible? None of these answers would be wrong. And yet, they don’t fully describe the man. They can’t, because he’s not just one thing or the other – he’s everything, he’s everywhere… Wait a minute. That’s Dream Scenario. A film in which Nic Cage’s Professor Paul Matthews is Everything Everywhere All At Once!

But this is a film directed by Kristoffer Borgli (known for his absurdist black comedy, Sick of Myself) and produced by… Ari Aster. Distributed by… A24. So don’t expect wholesomeness or warmth or even happiness – it’s absurd, it’s real (or unreal, depending on your PoV)… it’s a 100-minute Black Mirror episode. Look at this synopsis: Hapless family man Paul Matthews finds his life turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. But when his nighttime appearances take a nightmarish turn, Paul is forced to navigate his newfound stardom. Let’s get one thing straight – Paul Matthews isn’t a remarkable man. At all. He’s a college professor who dreams to be published one day – for a book about ANTS. He’s married to a rather pragmatic woman, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and has two Gen Z daughters – Sophie and Hannah (Lily Bird and Jessica Clement). Clearly, they think their dad is ‘boring’ and uncool. Even Janet seems to be the one ‘wearing the pants’ in the relationship, as it were. Until one day, when Paul and Janet are stepping out of a theatre, an old friend of Paul’s catches up with him, telling him that she saw him… in her dreams. Soon, multiple people from all over the city start talking about Paul and recognizing him on the street, talking about how he is appearing in their dreams. This is when Dream Scenario goes full Inception. The once nondescript, average family man has now turned into a viral sensation overnight – because he keeps getting into people’s dreams. Paul, a man desperately craving positive validation and reinforcement (in the worst ways possible), sees this as an opportunity – even if Janet is rather wary about the situation. There is one thing Paul isn’t happy about – and that in all these dreams, he’s just a passive bystander with no real action in them. He wants… more. He wants, THROUGH his dreams, to be remembered for the book he’s going to write (about ants). He doesn’t want to be some glitzy viral star. He wants to be known in a ‘serious capacity’. Does this whole ‘scenario’ (pun intended) sound familiar to you? If you thought it was reminiscent of Iñárritu’s Birdman, you’re not entirely off the mark. Sure, in Birdman, Keaton’s Riggan Thomson is a washed-up superhero franchise actor trying to REGAIN lost glory, and Paul Matthews never had any glory to begin with. But the craving for ‘serious’ success, something ‘meaningful’, is a common thread in both films. It’s all about perception, isn’t it? A lot of ‘stars’ won’t tell you this, but deep down, aside of all the billion-dollar franchises and money-making opportunities, all they want is to be loved by their audiences. And that feeling is amplified in a common man, who literally has nothing else going on in his life (speaking about Paul, of course). But Paul’s ‘stardom’ is a lot harder to maintain. The filmmaking does a fine job of showing the pitfalls of instant stardom (as gratifying as it may be), from a storytelling point-of-view, there is a clumsy attempt at mocking cancel culture – one of those instances where good intentions do not lead to right execution. Yet, the message is there, and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are even name-dropped. In the age of hyper information, when opinions are made to be facts even before their verified, Dream Scenario is a wonderfully absurdist slice-of-life fantasy that, even if just for 100 minutes, makes us question our insistence of always ‘staying in the loop’. Yes, this film gets really personal for me too – as a Creative Director in a digital marketing agency that offers influencer marketing as one of its services, to see Paul Matthews being approached by a ‘viral marketing firm’, headed by Trent (hey, Michael Cera) who tells him to use his situation to advertise for companies like Sprite (and maybe even get Obama in as an ‘influencer’) hit a little too close to home. The agency is called ‘Thoughts Thoughts Thoughts’ – and at their office, we see an LED screen where a stream of the word ‘Thoughts’ keep scrolling on the screen – possibly a nice reference to Carpenter’s THEY LIVE (OBEY, CONSUME etc.) and a commentary on the ‘doom scrolling’ phenomenon – where young people just prefer to scroll on social media without applying any actual ‘thought’ to what they’re scrolling.

Think of it almost as an information-heavy existential crisis, which has been portrayed to perfection by the man who can seemingly do no wrong at this point in his career – Mr. Nicolas Cage. Last year, we had the ‘okay’ Renfield that was elevated by his outstanding performance as Dracula. Just see his filmography from 2021 – you have Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Butcher’s Crossing, The Old Way, Renfield, Sympathy for the Devil, Dream Scenario, Arcadian, The Surfer and Longlegs (to name a few). Now they’re not all amazing award-worthy films (Pig comes close) but what’s common to ALL of them is the presence of Nicolas Cage – he’s just there to elevate the experience from the mundane to much more. Even in Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, we have a hammy, crazy Pedro Pascal who plays off Nic Cage’s restrained, IDGAF self (IDGAF is what the kids say these days). The ending is as ambiguous as Birdman’s was. But even amidst all the questions, the takeaway (at least for me) is – the perfect ‘life’ would be to be famous, to be wanted, to be loved, and yet, to not be hounded on a constant basis, to not have your private life become public knowledge and yet, to not be ‘out of the loop’ at any time, as it were. That would be living the dream.