My dream was surprisingly enjoyable.
Surprising, I say, because from most of my dreams I emerge cranky, dyspeptic, dissatisfied with the film’s outlook, aesthetics, or both. The same goes for actual movies. I’m a crabby critic, who revels in alliterative invective – a personality type I loathe, show-offs brandishing their pens like Zorro, perhaps because at the start of my career, as a theater critic for a swaggering urban weekly, I strove to be one. The role of a communicator, I’ve come to see, is to build up not to tear down; and if I sometimes savage my subjects – Trump, for example – it’s to destroy to rebuild on a better plan.
Today’s moral skies are black with buzzards: clever sneering garners armies of followers and lucrative endorsement deals – but that’s a lamentation for another hour. This morning’s puzzle is my satisfaction with last night’s dream-concoction – for who contrives our dreams but ourselves? An unserious frolic, my flick’s plot was clever, its production slick, I’d cast many pals in surprisingly apt roles (you didn’t know you were a movie star!). I sauntered into morning grinning, as after a sweet rom-com or vintage James Bond (before they devolved into non-stop techno-violence).
My movie was what’s called a heist film. Onstage characters have been fooling other onstage characters with feigned identities at least since Plautus, but the “heist film” is a relatively new genre, almost exactly my age (still young!), commencing, Wiki tells me, with The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. Since then, movies of this type have proliferated; most I’ve never heard of, but I recall with pleasure The Lavender Hill Mob, Topkapi, A Fish Called Wanda, Ocean’s Eleven, and, of course, that durable favorite, The Sting.
What puzzled me was why my dream production-company had elected to produce this kind of film. Am I such a winking sly-dog at heart? If drawn to filmmaking, wouldn’t I strive to produce something epochal, serious, a Citizen Kane or luminous trifle by Jean Renoir?
And then I realized (the motive for this missive) how thoroughly our imaginations are shaped by our moment, like it or not. We read the same headlines, share the same joys and dreads, marinate in each other’s moods, so come to resemble one another, as siblings do. None of us is all that original. We create to appeal to our contemporaries, so rearrange familiar elements in a fetching way. Venture too far from popular taste and a maker topples into oblivion. Tropes trap us.
The Weltanschauung (or “worldview”) is contagious, invading us through every pore. We ingest, embody, represent it, try as we might to migrate to another time. I, Pope Francis, Trump and his MAGgots are all kin, branches of the same root. Our despair insensibly infects one another. How did I get to be so glum, I wonder, about mankind’s prospects? So do I wonder where I “caught” a cold.
I can’t guess why the heist trope appealed to me last night, but I can report the confection was an adoption, no invention: a knock-off. I made my dream-movie following others’ examples. So with all thought. Perception is revision, not origination: a modification of previous glimpses. I can no more disown my era than I can my parents.