Dream Scenario: Cage’s film explained
I can clearly see 2 paths of interpretation, an easy one and a hard one:
The basic one: This is a film about cancel culture in a dream plot. If this were the only goal of the director, it would be a terrible movie.
However, and I enjoy this viewpoint more, this film is about Cage’s character acquiring self-knowledge as he is going through a divorce — the dreams here are an hallucinatory view of Cage’s character’s mind.
Let’s think about it: Cage was a solitary man with a good family (fiancée, children, and friends) and a career (he is a PhD, as mentioned numerous times). There was no reason for wanting more, right? Well, we are talking about humans here.
Cage’s character sees himself as empty. He studied a lot, and his classes are not attracting much attention. How could anyone not pay attention to the zebra theory? In parallel, an old friend returns and is being published in Nature. That’s the real success — at least, that’s what he thinks.
From this moment, you can see there is a desire to be noticed by the people around him. For example: he tries hard to convince his fiancée that Obama is the kind of person Michael Cera can bring to the table.
These desires begin to materialize as distorted views of his subconscious mind in other people’s dreams.
In the dreams, he is passive — and he doesn’t want to be like that. Perhaps he is in therapy or just writing his dreams in his diary. It’s like going to therapy and starting to know yourself better, but it’s only the beginning of the process.
Then you have the nightmares.
It’s important to mention that nightmares are not always a bad thing; they can also point out desires. He wanted to have more sex; he wanted to hurt some of the bad students.
The essential point is that those nightmares can only be resolved when the hallucinatory desire turns into reality, which is when he unintentionally wounds his daughter’s teacher.
In the end, he is dreaming (and daydreaming!) with his fiancée. This time, will he succeed in his desire, or will he feel compelled to sell his dreams?
