Dreams within Dreams
by Jack Lehman
Did you ever wonder what would it be like if you
could program your dreams before you went to sleep each night? What plots would
you choose? What stories? In what situations would you want to find yourself?
You might ask yourself, “What would I enjoy? Sex? Romance? Adventure?” At first
many of your dreams would be wish fulfillment. You’d begin with subjects you
feel comfortable with, then after awhile you might try some you are curious
about which are less safe. Occasionally you might even want to scare yourself. Why
shouldn’t you? It’s only a dream.
Perhaps you would interject yourself, or some
aspect of yourself, into different kinds of scenes. Sometimes you appear in
these dreams as yourself—as in a documentary—sometimes you appear as a
fictional character in a plot that’s obviously not factual. You put
people and places you know into the story, then restructure events so they come
out well. Conversation is witty, relationships are poignant. Life outside of
your dreams—or should I say your writings—seems lackluster, full of
irrelevancies, beyond your control. But the day’s experiences provide raw
material for your nighttime dreams, and this makes even mundane experiences
more interesting. During the day, for example, you’re in a meeting and afterwards
you think: I wish I’d have
thought to say something more insightful. Later that night writing about it you do. You
see alternative possibilities with every person you meet, in every situation in
which you find yourself. Everywhere you go there are people, actions and
places you want to incorporate into your private dreams.
These dreams are effortless; one image suggests
the next. You seek challenges now, dare to face unpleasant problems.
Troublesome feelings and emotions are bearable, if only because you know you
can pull back. You even select traumatic situations—rejection, death, someone
you love betraying you. You feel the power of these experiences, but also take
refuge in the fact that the story you’ve constructed, no matter how realistic,
is something you can stop or leave.
I asked you what it would be like if you could
program your dreams every night before going to sleep. The fact is we do program our dreams, but we do it unconsciously. And we choose the
things that we dream, whether pleasant or unpleasant, just as we choose the
things that we write about. The use of our imagination to explore possibilities
adds richness to our lives.
And here’s what’s so great
about doing this on paper or in film. Eventually someone else can share in
these dreams. At first you feel embarrassed, but over time your audience grows.
Others see the stories as part of the writer, but also as something that’s
different from you—something to which they too can relate. They find meaning
significant to
their lives.
their lives.
How does it end? It’s hard for you to imagine
life without these stories. Participating in them fuels the imagination,
expands the realm of possibilities, lets our unconscious express itself. Let it
wake up.
Jack Lehman is editor/publisher of
Lit Noir as well as founder of Rosebud
Magazine and literary editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas.
Mitchum
& Stewart
by Bob Wake
(This essay was originally an addendum to the short story “Summer of
the Cinetherapist,” which appears in the Autumn 2011 issue of Rosebud.)
Robert Mitchum’s narcoleptic
acting style was perfected within the shadows of 1940s and 50s noir crime
drama, where his existential resignation in the face of darkness (annihilation
of the self) was an embryonic precursor to the sadistic ennui (rupture of the
id) of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson in the 1960s and 70s. Cultural
attitudes toward the urban landscape shifted over the decades, moving away from
an appreciation of Mitchum’s noble self-willed loner. A sizable segment of
Vietnam War-era filmgoers seemed eager to grant Eastwood and Bronson blunt
fascistic license to rid the streets of drug dealers, pimps and assorted
crazies running rampant in a decaying inner city. Such agitprop scenarios
played handily into audience fears (particularly racial hostilities), and
Hollywood’s cynicism ran deep enough not to question the moral integrity of
these increasingly violent productions. Mitchum’s work, however, comes to us
formed of a subtler—or, if you will, more repressed—aesthetic. If his early
films evoke a kind of Hollywood innocence, it is in part due to the stylized
nature of film noir, which seems to appeal directly to our unconscious
anxieties and longings, rather than to our overt prejudices. Film noir is at
heart a kind of Rorschach cinema—the shadows are ink blots in which we all see
something different.
The 40s city was a Freudian
labyrinth of desire and instinct (re)pressed into concrete and steel. The
postwar economic boom was real enough, but so were the postwar nightmares and
shattered psyches. Mitchum walked the city’s streets in the guise of a
battle-weary survivor who’d long ago witnessed the worst of mankind’s urges
unchained, and whose soul was thus inoculated against the petty machinations of
criminals too stupid to realize the insignificance of their dirty deeds. This
is a crucial point: the classic Mitchum character was never altered
significantly by his scripted fate; he enters and exits the picture as the same
man, monolithic and complete. The storyline, in essence, happens around him
rather than to him. What some critics have derided as “one-dimensional” acting
was in fact an almost Buddhist impassivity: the studied calm of the bodhisattva—transcendent,
poised, fully integrated.
The essential Mitchum performances
are to be found in a handful of sui generis B-movies: Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947), The Big Steal (1949), His Kind of Woman (1951),
and Angel
Face (1952). [1] Although
his two celebrated performances as violent sociopaths in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear (1962)
are as vivid as anything assayed by Brando or DeNiro, they function more as
displays of acting “chops” than as emblematic Mitchum roles. Ironically,
Mitchum’s spirit seems a bit diminished in flashy roles. “Bad guys” or troubled
characters—such as his portrayal of an alcoholic in El Dorado (1967)—are always victims of the storylines
they must serve. Plot and characterization, indeed acting itself, all seem
beneath the authentic Mitchum cool. He is an American original at his best when
his own imperturbable aura is in a sense at odds with the melodrama surrounding
him.
James Stewart, on the other
hand, forged a long and healthy career as a well-directed team player. In
smooth performance after smooth performance, he placed his hard-working
loyalties at the service of the designated narrative and theme. And it is
because Stewart served the storyline so assiduously that he represents a film
presence much different from Mitchum’s rebellious implacability. Stewart’s screen
persona became our most Jungian vessel: always jumping enthusiastically into
the alchemist’s fire to be transformed physically and spiritually into a
“better” man, a more forthright and engaged citizen. As a standard-bearer of
the country’s self-flagellating moral mandate, Stewart’s roles at any given
time unfortunately tended toward civics lessons. Nowhere is this more
forcefully brought home than in his films for Frank Capra, especially Mister Smith Goes to
Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). [2] Regardless of how “beloved”
these rather unhinged and over-the-top Stewart performances have inexplicably
grown in the minds of mainstream movie fans, I am hard-pressed not to agree
with Pauline Kael’s famous put-down of Frank Capra’s work: “No one else can
balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra
can—but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.” [3]
The submerged narrative
of It’s
a Wonderful Life is of course the
all-too-familiar story of male midlife disillusionment and frustration. But
rather than allow George Bailey the truth of his psychological breakdown—i.e.,
the quite accurate realization that small town American life really is a morass
of economic and marital despair, mean-spiritedness and broken dreams—Capra
chooses instead to unleash Clarence the Angel, a heaven-sent Pillsbury Doughboy
of societal repression and sublimation, who convinces George to shut up, stop
complaining and get his sorry ass back home to the wife and kids. [4]
It wasn’t until the 1950s
that the true psychotic nature of Stewart’s screen personality came to the
forefront and cracked the veneer of innocence. Only in Hollywood, where
absurdity reigns, could the nearly 50-year-old Stewart attempt to impersonate a
fresh-faced and tireless 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Stewart’s neon blond wig, garish rouged
cheeks, and layers of pancake makeup are as frightening to behold as Bette
Davis decked out as Baby Jane. It’s as if we longed to forbid both Lindbergh
and Stewart to grow up. Certainly Lindbergh’s controversial WWII neutrality
stance had long ago tarnished the unprecedented glory that trailed him for
years following his 1927 transatlantic flight. Lindbergh once symbolized and
distilled the essence of middle-class virtues: youth, indomitability and the
inevitable hero’s crown born of perseverance; it seemed only fitting that the
anointed Lindbergh had conquered the very heavens themselves. Such were the Boy
Scout qualities that Stewart, too, embodied for a generation of filmgoers. In a
sense he was ordained to play Lindbergh, just as Clark Gable had been the only
acceptable choice for Rhett Butler. However, The Spirit of St. Louis is surely one of the eeriest representations of
America’s unresolved Peter Pan complex.
When Stewart the following
year chose to play a character scaled to his own advancing age, how appropriate
that the film was Vertigo (1958), the
apotheosis of both Stewart’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s long Hollywood
careers. Vertigo is the true endgame of George Bailey’s
“wonderful life”: sexual hysteria and madness. Stewart’s performance is
powerfully closed off from any paths by which audience empathy might
comfortably follow. Watching him desperately trying to insinuate himself into
Kim Novak’s life during the film’s third act is as disturbing in its own way as
Brando’s assault and rape of Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. Vertigo offers
few of Hitchcock’s patented crowd-pleasing thrills, and its morbid complexities
were misunderstood or missed altogether by audiences and critics in 1958.
First-time viewers today are frequently disappointed that Vertigo isn’t a higgledy-piggledy hybrid of Rear Window and Psycho. The
film only gradually earned its current “classic” status, still eliciting
critical reservations as late as 1982, when it was re-released to theaters
along with four other then out-of-circulation Hitchcock films. [5]
Painstakingly restored in 1996, Vertigo again
played theaters, this time to critical huzzahs, but it remains a difficult
film, and general audiences have yet to really embrace it. Hardly the ideal
“date” movie, Vertigo might be better
classed as a suicide-watch: the film’s chilly and unsettling moral is that
desire’s true object resides not within those individuals we purport to love,
but rather within the dark soul of our own obsessions.
[1] Also worth
including here is the atypical but charming A Holiday Affair (1949), starring Mitchum and Janet Leigh. The
film is long overdue for reappraisal and enshrinement as an annual yuletide
video and television offering.
[2] Stewart’s first
film for Capra was You Can’t Take It With You (1938),
based on the play by Kaufman and Hart. Joseph McBride provides an insightful
revisionist critique of this film in his definitive biography of the
director, Frank
Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,
published in 1992 by Simon and Schuster.
[3] The quote is from
Kael’s capsule review of It’s a Wonderful Life in
her book 5001
Nights at the Movies.
[4 ] Clarence
disingenuously “stumbles” upon a means to scare the crap out of George Bailey.
The game of “You Were Never Born” is similar to Fritz Perls’s notorious Gestalt
Therapy “hot seat” sessions, which employed confrontation and intimidation to
supposedly cure neurosis.
[5] The others
were Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Trouble With Harry (1955),
and The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
Critical consensus in 1982 afforded only Rear Window with the encomium of “classic,” while the remaining four were
considered minor or flawed Hitchcock efforts. Stewart appeared in all but The Trouble With Harry. Since ’82, Hitchcock’s oeuvre has been subject to
innumerable re-evaluations and re-shufflings as to where individual films ought
to be ranked.
Bob Wake lives in Cambridge, Wisconsin. His short stories have appeared
in Madison Magazine, Wisconsin People & Ideas, The Madison
Review and Rosebud.
Michael
Kriesel is the president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, a
well-published poet and good friend of Lit Noir.
Movie Quotes
“If you
want to play with matches, that’s your business. But not in gas-filled rooms.” ―Angel Face, 1953
“Crime is a
left-handed form of human endeavor.” ―The Asphalt Jungle,
1950
“I’ve done
a lot of lying in my time. I’ve lied to men who wear belts. I’ve lied to men
who wear suspenders. But I’d never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears
both belt and suspenders.” The Big Carnival, 1951
“Hey,
that’s a nice perfume.” “Something new. Attracts mosquitoes and repels
men.” ―The Big Heat, 1953
“My, my.
Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.” ―The Big Sleep, 1946
“Bourbon,
straight! With a bourbon chaser!” ―The Blue Dahlia,
1946
“When I
lose the championship, they’ll have to carry me out.” “This gym is full of guys
who were carried out.” ―Body
and Soul, 1947
“What I
like about you is you’re rock bottom. I wouldn’t expect you to understand this,
but it’s a great comfort for a girl to know she could not possibly sink any
lower.” ―Cape Fear,
1962
“I came to
Casablanca for the waters.” “But we’re in the middle of the desert.” “I was
misinformed.” ―Casablanca, 1942
“What do
you want, Joe, my life history? Here it is in four words: big ideas, small
results.” ―Clash by Night, 1952
“Well, the
place looks lived in.” “Yeah, but by what?”―Cry Danger,
1951
“I know
what’s going on inside you, Frank. You’re just like any other man, only a
little more so.” ―D.O.A., 1950
“That’s
life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”―Detour, 1945
“If I’d
been a ranch, they would have named me the Bar Nothing.”―Gilda, 1946
“In this
world you turn the other cheek and you get hit with a lug wrench.”―Impact, 1949
“I wouldn’t
give you the skin off a grape!”―Kiss
of Death, 1947
“Live fast,
die young and have a good-looking corpse.”―Knock on Any Door,
1949
“I felt pretty
good–like an amputated leg.”―Murder,
My Sweet, 1944
“You make
me sick to my stomach!” “Yeah? Well use your own sink.”―The Narrow Margin, 1952
“You’re
like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.”―Out of the Past, 1947
“Blind man
without a cane could see you’re in a bad way.”―The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946
“What does
a dame like you want with a guy like me?” ―Sorry, Wrong Number, 1948
“Some
people are better off dead. Like your wife and my father, for instance.”―Strangers on a Train, 1951
“Wait a
minute, haven’t I seen you before? I know your face.” “Get out.” “You’re Norma
Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big!” “I am still
big. It’s the pictures that got small.”―Sunset Boulevard,
1950
“Can you
deliver?” “Tonight. Before you go to bed. Cat’s in the bag, and the bag’s in
the river.” ―Sweet Smell of Success, 1957
“In Italy,
for thirty years under the Borgia’s they had warfare, terror, murder and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo DaVinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred
years of democracy and peace―and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.” ―The Third Man, 1949
“You know,
you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything and you
don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to
whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” ―To Have and Have Not, 1945
