screening dream

Before I start free-associating about the movie and Messiaen, I should mention a dream I had this morning (it's 6:30 Thursday morning in Berlin) about a festival screening in an unknown theater.

I'm watching the movie and notice several things wrong in the slo-mo closing credit sequence that's set to the Celestial Banquet. I've had to add all this back matter and now the images are out of synch! Also the last credit, pointing people to apparitionfilm.com, goes by too fast--I resolve to fix that. Meanwhile people are getting up and leaving the theater during the credits, terribly disappointing since in some ways it's my favorite part of the movie, and then when the movie's finally over I join my mother and her cousin Lynn in the lobby. Lynn complains about all the material about the moon that I cut since the last time she saw it. I explain that there was a whole thread previously about space that I finally decided was too tangential to the core themes and had to be cut, though I love some of those clips and miss them too. She presses her point: she really misses the material about the moon (in reality, there are a lot of clips about space but none about the moon specifically). Finally I promise her that if I can find someone who can tie together the themes of space and the religious sublime, then I'll put all those clips back.

I wake up from the dream thinking, yes, that's all I need to do to restore all that great material and make it relevant, actually shore up the movie's exploration of religious sublimity, but then remembered that, in fact, John Cameron Mitchell and Sarah Sanford have a quick exchange about the space age and the gothic that already does the trick rather (perhaps too) efficiently.

But before I wake there's this scene in which I've accidentally wandered into the women's bathroom to overhear a conversation Karen Hartman is having in the stalls with another audience member. "I really think," says Karen, "he ought to go to film school to do porn."