Cinema and psychoanalysis, born together, explore the unconscious. The dream, at the heart of films, acts as a powerful narrative engine, blending reality and fiction, and deeply touching the viewer. Exploration of mysterious narrative techniques…
Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Two Contemporary Births
The relationship between the screenplay and the dream, between a film and a dream, is profound and fascinating. Cinema emerged around the same time as psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis asserts that humans possess an unconscious mind, and that their actions are driven more by the unconscious than by the conscious. This view of psychological functioning is now almost universally accepted.
As a therapeutic practice, psychoanalysis works on the system of projection, known as transference. We project figures from our past onto the analyst and relive experiences from a different perspective, allowing us to become aware of our neuroses. The goal is not to eliminate them but to learn to live freely in relation to them. Psychoanalysis also focuses heavily on dream interpretation, viewing dreams as a space from which one can elaborate, set the psyche in motion, and transition from being an object to becoming a subject: acting, desiring, as they say in psychoanalytic jargon.
A cinema screening, on the other hand, takes place in the dark, with images projected onto a screen. Cinema creates a form of waking dream. We witness, as in a dream, situations that seem real but are not. Through our interpretations and experiences of these imaginary situations, we can undergo cathartic experiences that benefit us by freely and consciously engaging our psyche.
I believe it is important to recognize that the cinematic apparatus is closely related to the psychoanalytic apparatus in its foundations, design, and implementation. When a dream is staged in a film, it becomes a form of mise en abyme of cinema itself. The confusion between dream and reality, which we often feel in our lives, is expressed with particular power and effectiveness in films.
Dream Sequences
Using dream sequences in a screenplay is a narrative tool of immense power, but it can also be double-edged, as it may destabilize the viewer. *Warning, danger, explosive material.* An explosive can destroy, but it can also carve paths through rock and reveal incredible perspectives.
Sometimes, in fact, it is more powerful for a character to recount a dream rather than to show the dream itself. We know that a film is fiction: if we see a dream, we project onto it. But if a character narrates a dream, we can believe that the dream was truly experienced. It thus gains a strong sense of truth.
We can also draw inspiration from our own dreams to write screenplays. In this case, the narrative includes inexplicable elements, allowing us to incorporate the inexplicable into our story. In this way, dreams are a highly useful source of inspiration, as they enable us to move beyond Cartesian logic, the logic of the conscious mind. They offer sequences of events rooted in the unconscious, which can deeply resonate with viewers at the level of their own unconscious.
The Unconscious as a Connective Force
The unconscious is both personal and collective. Human connections are made up of a conscious dimension, a non-verbal dimension, and an unconscious dimension, which we still understand very poorly and which has been explained by various traditions found in ethnographic studies for a long time.
The filmmaker David Lynch, who recently passed away, drew heavily on his own dreams to write his screenplays and also staged the dreams of his characters. In his films, these moments seem, at times, to touch us in an almost supernatural way. This is linked to the dimension of dreams, which he masterfully handled. Here is an example: in the film Mulholland Drive (2001), at 11 minutes and 40 seconds, in a café, a character recounts a dream to another character. He says that, in his dream, his interlocutor was standing by the cash register, staring at him strangely, and that he felt immense anguish. He then decided to leave the restaurant, only to encounter a terrifying face that he never wants to see again. At that moment, his interlocutor gets up to pay. Suddenly, we see him by the cash register, staring at us strangely… We thus witness the realization of the dream, something impossible in real life but which unfolds in this film. We enter a completely supernatural dimension, as we see the dream come true. This dream ends badly: the character leaves the café, encounters a monstrous being, faints, and likely dies. This scene is incredibly powerful, and David Lynch uses all the dimensions of dreams in his screenplay with great finesse.
