Dream Scenario

An average family man finds his average family life turned upside down when strangers all around the world suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. But when his dreamland appearances begin to take a nightmarish turn, he's forced to deal with the real world consequences of his newfound fame.

A examination of both the dizzying heights, and the long fall, that comes with viral fame, Gen X’s greatest living actor Nicolas Cage plays Paul Matthews, a professor in a small college, and a man who in most realities would be the living embodiment of Thoreau’s quote "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

In most realities…

Right from the start, Paul Matthews is a pretty unlikable person, consumed by his jealousies and entitlements. He’s detestable, really, weasally and weak, and only ever reveals his resentments through his wheedling whining voice, his stuttering nervous laughter, and his hunching passive aggressive posture. He believes himself to be good, and to be fair, he isn’t outwardly bad, he’s just… off-putting. Most people find him to be boring at worst, unremarkable at best. Paul is aware of this, that awareness is part of what drives his resentments, but more than anything he wants people to like him, to find him interesting. He wants to be praised and acknowledged.

Then his daughter starts having dreams that Paul appears in, weird dreams where unsettling things happen, and through it all, Dream-Paul ignores it all, ignores her, ignores her dream-peril, and just goes about his business. That’s definitely odd, but no big deal. When he’s out, he starts noticing a few strangers who are staring at him like they’re trying to figure out how they know him. This is also kind of odd, and a little bit disconcerting, but whatever. Then, he randomly runs into an old girlfriend, and she mentions that she’s been having dreams where he appears as well, strange and disquieting dreams, all while he just ignores her, refusing to help her.

After that, it’s like a dam breaks. Friends are having dreams where he shows up. So are friends of friends. Soon strangers are talking about it online. He is inundated with Facebook messages, and requests for TV interviews.

Paul embraces the fame and the attention, because he loves it.

He wants to hear all about people’s experiences with him in their dreams. But he’s also bothered by what these dreams seem to be saying about him. He starts getting prickly over how they’re all the same, how, in each one, he’s unconcerned about the strange, disquieting, and sometimes terrifying events the dreamers are experiencing. Each dream portrays him as not just unbothered, but ineffectual. The idea of failing to take action, of being seen as helpless, of being perceived as weak… it rankles him.

But fame, especially in the age of the Internet, has a dark side.

There’s the stalkers and the crazies, of course, not to mention the obsessive fans, but still, for a time, while everyone wants him, it’s fun and validating. He finds himself on the cusp of achieving everything he’s ever wanted. This is the Rise.

But then the dreams start to take a turn, becoming violent, becoming aggressively sexual. As this goes on, the complaints start to roll in, at his job, at his kids’ school, in their social circles. Soon enough, the world gets tired of him, and they reject him. His whole life falls apart, and he becomes a pariah. This is the Fall.

Dream Scenario is the story of a Milkshake Duck.

A Milkshake Duck is a meme, based off the above tweet, and it’s what you call a person who gains sudden notoriety on social media for something cute and positive, or charming, or endearing, or funny, and it spreads like a wildfire, suddenly they’re everywhere, and the internet loves them… But soon enough, they’re revealed to be a huge jerk, usually due to some sort of distasteful history, or offensive behavior they regularly engage in. Y’know… like they’re a Nazi, or a bigot, or an Anti-vaxxer, or a January 6th Insurrectionist, a sexual assaulter, or who knows, maybe a Flat Earther. Basically, pick any one of the myriad things that Trump, the GOP leadership, their Talking Head Pundits, and their voting base are regularly guilty of.

I bring this up, because as it turns out, Dream Scenario is actually nothing but a hysterical Cancel Culture fable about an unjustly labeled Milkshake Duck.

The entire idea of Cancel Culture is a bunch of fucking nonsense made up by privileged assholes, as the Dixie Chicks are the only people who have ever actually been cancelled for their views and then stayed “cancelled,” and it was done to them by the very same privileged assholes who now whine incessantly about what they refer to as “Cancel Culture” but everyone else simply calls: “facing the consequences of their own actions.”

Which is what happens to Paul… he gets cancelled, but it’s because of the actions of his dream-self, and that is so unfair, which is what the back half of the film is about.

I did like how, once Paul has truly become an unloved pariah, and his once rosy commercialization options are all gone, all he has left is either Joe Rogen or Tucker Carlson. That was great, because where else does an unrepentant piece of shit go, if not the sewer? I also liked how, once Paul had been cancelled, he puts all his efforts into capitalizing on his ostracism, becoming the exact kind of trash we now have no end of, the ones who turns their infamy, their “cancellation,” into a lucrative and full-blown career.

The problem with this film is that it becomes clear that there’s a reason why the students who first turn on Paul, the beginning of his downfall, are portrayed as an unreasonable and unforgiving multi-color-haired mob of strident assholes, and that, while Paul is definitely a creepy creep, he is also portrayed as an unjustly punished innocent. And to be fair, at least in the context of the narrative, he is. He is innocent. In the film, Paul Matthews has done nothing wrong. He certainly didn’t put himself into other people’s dreams, and the actions of his dream-self have nothing to do with him at all, he has no control over it.

He is completely innocent.

And this is very, very important to the film. It’s very important that Paul is completely, 100% innocent of the “crimes” for which he is cancelled.

This is important because, the most telling part of this film is how it is completely uninterested in the obvious question of why this is happening. Why is Paul appearing in all these dreams? There’s no answer. There aren’t even any theories. The why is shrugged off, and this is because the film simply isn’t interested in the reality of what’s happening in the story, because it’s not that kind of film.

Dream Scenario is only interested in the metaphor.

It doesn’t matter what actually happens, or doesn’t happen, to Paul Matthews in this story, all that matters is that he is innocent, because Paul Matthews is a nothing but a metaphor for the “victims of Cancel Culture” and how these poor men must suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at the hands of a mob of brutes wielding an unjust power they do not deserve, and all despite the fact that these men are all… simply, irrefutably… innocent.

And that makes this whole film pretty fucking shitty.

(Extended fart noise)