But the nature of both dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible. We can try our best to explain it, to understand it, to conceptualize it, compartmentalize it, or track it, but in the act of dreaming time is stolen and made unreal.
Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
At the beginning of the movie Dream Scenario, a teenage girl (Sophie) is seated next to a glass table outdoors, about twenty feet away from a swimming pool. In the background of the scene, between Sophie and the pool, her father Paul (played by Nicolas Cage) is slowly raking leaves. The scene is quiet. Suddenly, a set of keys falls from the sky, loudly crashing through and shattering the glass tabletop. Sophie yelps and jumps, while Paul pauses and looks up for a moment, then resumes his raking. Sophie looks up to the sky for the source of the keys, then a shoe splashes down in the pool, followed a moment later by what appears to be a corpse. Sophie calls out to Paul, and he tells her it’s okay, and turns back to raking. In the next shot of Sophie, we see the dead leaves around her begin to float, and then Sophie herself starts to lift from her chair, panicking at the sudden loss of gravity. She begs her father for help, while he does nothing but watch as she begins to float off into the sky…
…and then she woke up, as she explains to her father, with whom she’s now sharing this dream, over breakfast. This is apparently the third time she’s had a dream that included Paul as a passive observer, and that passivity clearly disturbs him. The basic (absurd) premise of Dream Scenario is that Paul begins appearing (in the same role of passive observer) in the dreams of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom had never seen him before.
I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie for you, but I’d note just a couple of things. First, the reviews that I saw tended to cite Charlie Kaufman and Franz Kafka in roughly equal measure, which will give you some sense of the tone of the film. It is difficultly funny, in ways that were very much to my own taste, but may not be to everyone’s. Second, those same reviews will give away a big chunk of the movie’s subtext, which is that the story functions as something of an allegory for social media, and particularly the way our culture seeks out, rewards, and often later punishes viral content. Michael Cera plays the CEO of a brand management firm (called “Thoughts?”), who breathlessly tells Paul at one point that “Anyone who’s dreaming, y’know, could be your audience…” You can almost hear the dollar signs as they try to pitch him on a partnership with Sprite.
Like I said, I don’t want to rehearse the entire story here. But I did want to reflect a little bit on it as an example of the kind of doubling that Klein discusses in Doppelganger. Perhaps it was seeing the movie so soon after having read the book, but I found myself drawn back to Klein repeatedly. There’s a limit to how much control we might exert over a personal brand, especially if/as we launch it over social media, given the range and variety of people who will interact with it. And that’s the scenario that the movie lays out for Paul. His “double” is appearing in countless other peoples’ dreams. Like Klein he has no real control over it, and he’s uneasy at the very outset about how it reflects upon him personally.
I think that Cage does a really fine job with the awkwardness of the situation that Paul finds himself in. From the outset (as mentioned above), the absolute unwillingness of dream-Paul to intervene—in what we gradually learn are a broad range of nightmares—is something that Paul himself finds personally shameful. In no small part, Paul’s general passivity is being mirrored back to him, and it makes him uncomfortable.
There’s a point early on in Klein’s book that has really stuck with me:
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described the process of thinking as a form of doubling, because it is a “dialogue between me and myself.” When each of us thinks and deliberates, we are in dialogue with the “two-in-one” that is our self, a self that, unlike a brand, is not a fixed, singular identity, or else what would there be to think about—or with? (65)
I’ve cited another part of that passage before, where Klein explains that “…the capacity to have an internal dialogue (or roundtable discussion) with the various parts of ourselves is healthy and human.” Whether or not Wolf herself would describe Klein’s treatment of her as fair, I think that one thing Klein does that’s “healthy” is that her book enters into genuine dialogue with Wolf’s circumstances and thinks through its implications. In one sense, then, Klein makes space within herself for her double.
Paul’s response is much different (and I suppose, by implication, less healthy). His dream double is an externalization of perhaps his greatest flaw1 (and there are other scenes in the movie that lend weight to this characterization). Even though this clearly makes him uncomfortable, he doesn’t take it as occasion to reflect upon (or change) his life. Instead, he begins to transfer his own psychic energy to the double, seduced by the sudden, viral attention that dream-Paul (and by extension Paul himself) is receiving. He leans into the notoriety, seeking out ways to capitalize on it, without pausing to recognize the parts of his life that he’s sacrificing in order to do so.
Where Klein takes her doppelganger as an entry point into a discussion about the deeper logics that we all contend with, that work is left to the broader story in Dream Scenario. Paul himself remains blisslessly ignorant, at least until the story turns, and by then it’s too late. The film itself teases this process out gradually, showing each wince- and cringeworthy step along the way.
You don’t need to read Klein’s book to watch the movie, or vice versa, but it really made for an interesting juxtaposition for me. I ended up appreciating each of them more for having encountered the other. I’ve also got another post to share, which I’d started working on before I saw Dream Scenario, that will feel quite coincidental. That’ll be coming soon. In the meantime, if you have a chance to catch Dream Scenario, and like a movie with Kaufman-level, high concept, dry humor, I recommend it.
Part of what made this clever to me is the critique of social media that we have the tendency to use it to only present our very best selves to the world. Dream Scenario inverts this.