Dream Scenario
What the fuck did I just watch? We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Tár, produced by A24? It’s just plain weird.
Boring McBoringest face protagonist is an overall wet blanket in his most milquetoast white bread middle aged academic life ever. He has it all: no personality, no charisma, no nothing. He lives his boring life with his boring wife and their two teenage daughters, just lying there, on the ground. Just lying there.
For some unexplained reason, people all over the world start dreaming about him in particular, but even worse, he’s just lying there, doing nothing, being anodyne. This is so weird, it gets internet attention, then legacy media comes in, and suddenly he’s a goddamn Hawk Tuah girl, an instant celebrity with his 15 minutes of fame.
After years(?) being snubbed for dinner parties, even mocked by peers and students, he is sudden the talk of the town. Her daughters say he’s cool, he drives her to school, strangers want selfies with him, his wife is promoted at work. He wants to leverage this to get a book deal for his academic brilliance, mostly to one-up some random schoolmate he met recently.
At the peak of his fame, he gets to New York for a meeting with some advertising exec and his underlings. This doesn’t work the way he thinks, they want him to do soda commercials, but he just wants a publisher for the book he doesn’t have yet. The intern is a very young girl who dreamt about him, but in a sexual way.
For bizarre reasons, they get drunk, then get back to her house. After recreating her dream, she wants to please him but it does not go well, since he farts (multiple times), then creams his pants as soon as the girl touches his belt buckle. The worst part after the first fart is that he talks about being a natural thing, how it’s good for your health. A pathetic attempt at cheating his wife.
This depresses our protagonist very much, which means now everybody’s dreams turn dark, where our dude murders everyone. These dreams start affecting his life, his students do not show up, he is kicked off restaurants. He is literally cancelled, his wife loses her job, he is barred from his daughter school play. He calls the ad guys, and they suggest the alt right circuit: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, the works.
This gets extremely bad, so he follows his wife’s advice and apologises in a cringe YouTube video where he sobs and rants about being the real victim, it backfires spectacularly. His wife just divorces him after that.
As a coda to this whole shaggy dog story, the whole thing dies down after a while, he buys a new house, and meets his wife again. He imagines an Hollywood finale where he sweeps off her feet and they get together again after a big kiss, but they actually just stand there, just lying there, with marred eyes, and bid farewell.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.