“The most interesting person in the world,” a media head qualifies Paul, the protagonist of the woozy yet menacing Dream Scenario. It’s a remark casually fed into the uneven rhythm of a conversation between a person who has found surreal overnight fame and a media company attempting to milk it with bone-chilling urgency. It’s an awkward, at times hilarious, chat that underlines the cynicism behind the vague currency of fame. The fact that in the internet generation, anyone, literally anyone, can become famous despite being unremarkable. Dream Scenario explores what happens when what we dream of becomes reality and when reality eventually wades into the safe space of something imaginary, uncontrolled yet securely improbable. It’s bizarre, unsettling, funny and has a startling Nicolas Cage performance to boot.
Cage stars as Paul Matthews, a tenured professor of biology who spends his days delivering boring lectures his students couldn’t care less about and his nights haggling with jealousy, self-pity, and the knowledge that his peers are living comparatively fulfilled lives. Matthews despises the fact that his colleagues have recently published books or have appeared on television shows, while he has unceremoniously deposited himself on the banks of contentment. A sudden epidemic of surreal and unexplained nature, however, propels him to become an unused prop in people’s dreams. People he has known, people he has never met, literally start to see him in their dreams. He, rather exasperatingly, though, does nothing in these dreams except witness disaster, cruelty or bizarre accidents take place. It’s when he begins to participate and act in them that the problems actually begin. It’s absurd, ridiculous but also surreal and wildly affecting.
Directed by Norwegian Kristoffer Borgli, Dream Scenario uses absurdism to get to the heart of celebrity culture, more so the experience of fame as opposed to its creation and management. His inexplicable leap to global popularity notwithstanding, Matthews remains at heart a bitter crone who continues to believe he deserves better without ever really working for it. There is this vein of entitlement in him that prevents his commonness from actually qualifying his new-found privilege as a gift. He sizes it, measures it against his insecurities and rejects it still. Fame to him is merely belated acknowledgement, for something he seems to have been prepared for. Except not in the form that he has found it.
The narrative highlights the fact that fame can befall anyone, especially in a time when anything can become trendy, viral or popular. Moreover, nobody really knows how to evaluate, position or dissect it, except use it as a vessel for transporting unrelated cargo. “We can make Obama dream about you,” the media head (played by the exceptional Michael Cera) tells a jittery Matthews.
Cage as Paul Matthews embodies middle-aged disillusionment about the young generation’s methods and its seductive instantaneousness. (Screen grab/YouTube/A24)
Dream Scenario falls into the category of films like Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, cerebral studies of human behaviour, narcissism and the notion of the celebrity beyond the figure of flesh and bones. But unlike the former, it speaks to the generation of today, merging fantasies with the idea that omnipresence even if ineffectual or un-intellectual is now regarded as a kind of quality (like the Orryverse back home).
People don’t watch celebrities because they are particularly good at something or because they’re relevant, but because they are everywhere, to the point that they enter the human subconscious and become that thing that you cannot get out of your head. Decades ago, it could have been regarded as the manipulation of the media, today it feels far more subversive, and voluntary at least from the side of watching, observing and obsessing about them. To which effect Dream Scenario is as much a film about the man who becomes the centre of attention as it is about the people drawing the circle of focus around him. Without them, he wouldn’t exist, or become this absurd story worth telling. The merits of fame have been long vanquished by the algorithm that propels it.
To add to the uncanny plot, a stellar visual language and some lovely cinematography, Dream Scenario also has a Nicolas Cage performance that maybe only he could have pulled off. It is equal parts vile, unsettling, bitter, nervy and yielding. Cage embodies this middle-aged disillusionment about the young generation’s methods and its seductive instantaneousness. Despite being a learned professor, when popularity arrives, he doesn’t exactly sit with it or write a lengthy dissertation about its nature. Instead, he follows it up with a mean streak of opportunism, the way most disgruntled men who think they are better than they put on would. It’s precisely what makes the film’s core ruminations so enriching. Handing the key of the locker to the person who least wants to admit he’d use it. It’s what makes fame, popularity and the dizzying powers that come with it so corrupting and maybe even satisfying. That is, unless and until everyone’s opinion of you changes.
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