The Gondry Moment

I don't want to mix my current work with my blog, but in this case I'll make an exception. I recently wrote the production notes for Michel Gondry's "The Science of Sleep," which opens soon.

If you're reading this, you either know who Gondry is or have seen his work, including his film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and his rock videos for Bjork, The White Stripes, and others.

I met with Gondry for an hour. Since then, I haven't been able to stop thinking about our conversation.

It's no surprise that the main topic of our discussion was dreams. "The Science of Sleep" is about a boyish man (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) who yo-yos between dreams and reality. And Gondry has often said that he gets his ideas from his dreams.

But I was fascinated to learn more about Gondry's idiosyncratic approach to interpreting dreams.

When you wake up from a dream, you can write it down and look it up in a dream interpretation book. (Who writes these books?) If you are a Freudian you can use his symbolic language; if you're a religious person, you can make connections to the Bible or the Koran, etc.; you can also search for connections in Greek mythology, world literature, or "Lost." But you're always interpreting your dreams according to some kind of belief system that's outside yourself.

Gondry doesn't see why everyone can't have their own mythology. He believes you can find the secrets of your dream life by exploring your memory. For example, if you have a dream about a snake, why is the only interpretation the obvious Freudian interpretation? In this case, he suggests you search for the answer in all your memories of snakes, not in communal symbols. More to the point, by probing your mental landscape, he believes you can find out who you are. (You can see Bernal's character explore his head all through "The Science of Sleep.")

One dream that regularly turns up in Gondry's work is some kind of "misplacement": the bed on the beach in "Eternal Sunshine...," the bathtub in the office in "The Science of Sleep." He did a whole Beck video, "Deadweight," based entirely on this concept--things turning up in places where they don't belong.

Gondry thinks our brains are normally in a passive state, where everything makes sense. But when we see something that's incongruous, we have to work to reconstruct it. As it isn't something normally see, you question your reality. And he call this "a very creative moment."

Hallucinatory images like this are familiar from surrealist paintings, David Lynch movies, etc., but I've always thought of them in terms of the artist's creativity-not our creativity. The notion intrigued me and got me thinking--and not just about dreamlike images.

I remember when I started listening to post-folkie Dylan songs: "Your dancing child with his Chinese Suit...He spoke to me I took his flute..." The unexpected clang of that kind of language woke me up;. it wasn't the kind of lyric I was used to hearing. I had to confront it somehow. In Gondry's words, it was "a very creative moment" for me.

We are all familiar with the notion that certain kinds of films or art demand more of an audience, but all too often there's snobbism mixed in with that. You can experience The Gondry Moment in the last part of Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry," but it can also happen for you in "Oldboy," or "Little Miss Sunshine." It just has to be abruptly dissonant--not necessarily "difficult."

This splash of ice-water can happen in art, advertising, and in our daily lives. It's a "creative moment" for all of us, when our synapses misfire. Perhaps that's one of the things we hope for when we go to the movies: something mysterious that eludes our everyday perceptions.