Dream Scenario 2023 is about Richard Stallman?

Blender Dumbass
October 23, 2025

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#DreamScenario #NicolasCage #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #RichardStallman #RMS

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Kristoffer Borgli's 2023 film Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage is a movie about a man, who is being dreamed about by a lot of people. At first his family have weird dreams about him. Then people related to them. Then the whole world. At first the dreams make him famous. But then they take a turn for the worst. At first he is just doing nothing in those dreams. Then he is being a creep. And then he literally murders people in those dreams. Which makes the public, in the real life, react to him with greater and greater rivalry. Apart from, for some reason, people in France.

I don't believe that my reading of the film is the intended reading of it. But because I do weird stupid film theories in these reviews anyway, let's read it the way I read it when I watched it. Also it is probable that my reading came out of the whole "psycho-sexual analysis" thing I was doing for my reviews lately.

First of all, the legendary Nicolas Cage ( who, by the way, kills it in this movie, with a totally fucking amazing performance ) in 2021 acted in Michael Sarnoski's film Pig which started his return to greatness. Actually no... the return to greatness started with 2018's Mandy by Panos Cosmatos. Which was then followed by Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space ( a ballsy movie, due it being an adaptation of an un-filmable H. P. Lovecraft story about an alien color that doesn't exist on earth. The filmmakers decided that it is pink / purple. ). Then it was followed by Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent ( where Nick plays himself ) and finally Dream Scenario and Longlegs. But Pig is an interesting film. In Pig Nicolas Cage looks almost identically to Richard Stallman.

Here is a brief history of Richard Stallman: He was a computer nerd, who later studied computer science in MIT. And was a part of the "hackers" there. They used the word "hackers" a bit differently back there. Basically there were playing around with computers to see what's possible. Back in those days he was one of the first people to ever write an EMACS program. A first WYSIWYG text editor that also was the first program with plugins. Then when in the 80s the software industry was infected with the copyright virus, making freedom on computers less and less possible with each year, Stallman decided to create an opposition. He started the project GNU. Which was a project to rewrite every single program in the UNIX operating system. And release the source code of those rewrites as Free / Libre Software. This project attracted a lot of people, including Linus Torvalds, who in the 90s added the last remaining piece of the puzzle: a functioning Libre kernel called "Linux". Thus was born the GNU / Linux operating system, which is used in the majority of server infrastructure today. And an offshoot of this project "Android" is used in a majority of mobile phones on the planet. Richard Stallman is still committed to promoting digital human rights and human rights in general. He is one of the main people in the Free Software Foundation, an organization tasked with spreading the ideals of digital freedoms.

Now, Richard Stallman, having a very logical brain ( because he is a programmer and programmers are trained to see bugs ) noticed multiple "bugs" in the legal system, which he tried doing something against. In the 80s he published a software license that revolutionized libre works all around the world, introducing a concept of "copyleft". But not everything he had argued about was met with applause. Most notably he found illogicality in vilification of pedophilia. This slowly started causing a lot of turmoil around him. Which lead to people be really upset with his presence in the Libre Community in general. To the point that simply talking about the man in a positive light, can cause accusations of child-abuse. For the record, as of now, there were no allegations against Stallman, that he is a child-molester of any kind. All the negativity is based solely on his statements on the matter. And public outrage towards the subject matter. Also Richard Stallman kind of looks like Nicolas Cage in the movie Pig. And Richard Stallman is known to be socially awkward.

Back to Dream Scenario. So Nicolas Cage is playing this professor guy with a PHD and everything. He is super smart, but is socially awkward. Somehow people start seeing him in their dreams. At first he is passive. Which makes him popular. Then he is a bit creepy. Which results in him having a strange psycho-sexual encounter with a woman much younger than him. And then the dreams turn into total nightmares. Where he kills people and does all kind of nasty shit. This creates public outrage against the man, while the man, technically did nothing what so ever.

Before I go into the theory a bit further, let's talk a bit about the quality of the movie. The film reminded me a sort of Stanley Kubrick style. It is not too Kubrickian. More like, if you take Kubrick, Ari Aster ( who was a producer on the movie ) and Lars Von Trier and mix them together. Which is good. The film is shot very well.

I do think that the film is more cringe, than scary. Most of the "horror" moments ( where you can tell the director wants to build tension towards something frightening ) are more kind of, Von Tririan awkward moments of cringe-tension. Which is kind of funny in a way. Some of the dream sequences are brutal. Especially towards the end. And some of those "nightmares" are kind of nightmare-comedies, because it is Nick Cage going bad shit crazy.

Besides Cage, we have other actors that are worth paying attention to. First of all Julianne Nicholson who plays his wife. I don't know if it is strange or not, but this 50 something year old woman made me have a crush on her. She is amazing. And she doesn't even do anything sexual in the film.

Then we have the prettiest man alive Michael Cera as the agent. He kind of tries to make a PR campaign for Cage's character. I love Michael Cera. Anything he is in is automatically amazing. And he is one of the prettiest people on the planet. I definitely have a massive crush on Michael Cera.

Then we have Dylan Gelula who is this super-sexy young girl, who dreams about Nick Cage fucking her. And so she invites him over, to try to recreate the dream in real life. Why is everybody in the film so fucking hot? What the fuck is this movie?

Anyway, why France? Why France is not freaking out? Actually, we get to see France in the film, and the film is not showing France as super enthusiastic towards the main character's nightmarish persona. Yet there are the few that really dig it. They really understand it. Somehow it made me think about Luc Besson and other Ari Aster movies and the stuff that happened to me on Lemmy the other day... Let me explain.

So I wrote a review about Besson's The Fifth Element where I argued that it is "the most tragic film in his career" because the movie is about love. And he literally dumped his wife ( at the time ) Maïwenn Le Besco for Milla Jovovich during filming. I posted it to a movies related lemmy community and got banned for being "pedophilia apologist". Yep... Arguing that argument, meant claiming that the relationship between Besson and Maïwenn was in fact real love. And she was a minor when they married. So... ah... yeah...

There was another group, on piefed side of things, which didn't ban me. But which had a nearly automatic response from one person constantly reminding everybody that that I wrote the review to The Fifth Element. And that also later found out that I say good things about Richard Stallman too. Oh boy... You could probably see why I found Dream Scenario to be so relatable.

I didn't do shit. Richard Stallman didn't do shit. The main character in Dream Scenario didn't do shit. But each and every one of us inserted a sort of bad dream into people's consciousness that make them believe that we are bad people. And France is okay with it because Luc Besson is French and he didn't need to fly out of the country like Roman Polanski. Also Roman Polanski escaped into France. So France is more okay to this sort of thing. Kind of... In an underground sort of way.

If you think about it, I have not seen any other Kristoffer Borgli films, but I did see a few Ari Aster films. And Ari Aster is the producer on this movie. In his films a sort of pedophilia theme seems to creep into each and every one of them. In Eddington we get a cult leader that uses the "trauma" aspect of it, to lure his victims in. Basically, in a strange way, the film argues that having a trauma from something like this makes you vulnerable to cults. In Midsommar you have a cult that raises kids without a family structure. And where sex is free. And in Beau Is Afraid a mother has lied to her son that if he cums he will die, so he will not think of girls when he hits puberty. Which is undeniably child-abuse. And results in him growing into a completely fucked up man. Which is like if the film is arguing, that to not have trauma, we should let our kids cum more often. So I suppose I should do a psycho-sexual analysis of Ari Aster.

Now here is another thing. I was actually wanting to see Dream Scenario because it has Amber Midthunder from Prey. But I was kind of disappointed because she is there only for like 2 and half shots. But those 2 and a half shots are actually important. Those shots come in the end of the film as the film is showing a fake commercial of a new high-tech device that lets dream-fluencers sell you stuff in your dreams. Nick Cage character is seen visibly annoyed by it. He is trying to punch one of those dream-fluencers in one of his dreams. Which is reflective of how Richard Stallman thinks about most big-tech today. In a way the movie makes a sort of agreement with Stallman on the stupidity of big tech.

But because those apps are running on GNU / Linux servers and are presented on Android devices ( which were indirectly a product of Richard Stallman's work ) the dream devices in the film are a product of research inspired by the phenomenon of the main character. Basically if people didn't start dreaming about him all of a sudden, that tech would not have existed in the first place.

If you think about the film from the rhetoric perspective, the film is rather successful. As I argued in my review of 2018 remake of Death Wish, the film was rated low because it made the critics angry instead agreeing. Which has nothing to do with the political side of the film, but rather with how well it is structured to not trip their defense mechanisms. Basically the film was too straight with the message and basically repeated the political talking points that everybody already knows, making the audience automatically understand what the movie is trying to do. And therefore making them create a sort of mental shield against the ideas.

On the other hand something like Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is a much better example, of a similar sort of rhetoric done right. He does some very good structuring of the film to argue some rather conservative ideas with such grace and such mastery, that even Leonardo DiCaprio didn't catch it, and signed up for the project. In my review of that movie, I argued how the film also touches on the theme, I'm trying to argue, Dreaming Scenario is touching. He uses Julia Butters and Dakota Fanning to great effect to make his points, without ever saying the word "pedophilia" out loud. Because he knows, saying that word will be bad for the rhetoric. Saying that word will flip the movie all of a sudden. It will make people too aware of what the point is about. But walking up to the point and around the point with grace, without even touching it. Observing it from the distance, so to speak. Makes for a far greater rhetoric. For a far more successful message.

On that note, the fact that the subject matter in Dream Scenario is entirely changed, is kind of showing a similar understanding of film rhetoric. There is a scene ( where Nick Cage is making out ( and cumming ) with a 20 something year old girl who had sexual dreams about him ) which is nudging the viewers into the subject matter. There is a very apparent age gap between the two. But the movie keeps it consensual, while kind of still a bit creepy. Like in Once Upon a Time... the subject matter is never directly explored. Only kind of related to. Which makes it safer, for the rhetoric's sake.

The film shows a reality of a person, who slowly gets his life torn apart because of an idea. Because of something that this person represents. Yet something that has almost nothing to do with the person. Nick Cage's character is a victim of something he has no control over. If we going to say that in plain English, the film kind of portrays a pedophile. Not one that goes around and rapes everybody he sees. Somebody that just simply has that "attraction" in him. Somebody who needs to live a life knowing that he can never reveal to anybody anything about his sexual preferences. And even the smallest possible suspicion of being such a person can lead to the very experience the movie is showing.

There are rapists in the world. There are killers in the world of Dream Scenario. Nick Cage in the movie is not a killer. As there are a lot of people that aren't rapists. Yet Nick Cage is seen as a killer, because a lot of people imagined him as such. There are pedophiles that never do anything illegal. That are respectful to kids. And that never will do anything terrible. Yet people still have this "dream"... this idea, that they might. They imagine things. And that freaks them out. And so those people suffer like the character of Nicolas Cage in the movie Dream Scenario. Or like Richard Stallman is suffering in the real world.

And on that note...

Happy Hacking!!!