Between Love & Dreaming

I'm not the first to notice the gap between expectations and reality in love and marriage.  Many years into married life, I undertook this major project to deconstruct the contours of this gap and the way it is perpetuated by pernicious advertising myths, core beliefs and a relentless Hollywood narrative of 'happily ever after'.

I wrote the script for Love& Dreaming in a philosphical film essay style, which is divided into 'chapters', with musical 'meditations' at the end of each rather philosophically intense section. I worked with many layers of overlaid film, and multiple screen edits of Hollywood imagery, as well as multiple overlaid soundtracks from films, disconnected from their source material. 

It is too easy to be seduced, distracted, and ‘programmed’ by the glamour and beauty of film, augmented as it is by lush soundtracks, gorgeous actors, and exciting fast editing. The central thesis of all my work lies in the recognition that media ideas, stories, imagery, and beliefs actually have the power to create psychological reality for all of us who consume it unselfconsciously as our ethereal daily bread.

After a year of reading everything I could get my hands on, from philosophy to psychology, to history, sociology and anthropology, with poetry and religion thrown in, and after watching literally thousands of films, TV shows, adverts, pop videos, and documentaries, I came to the conclusion that it was not so much that we are struggling with each other, but that we are suffering from a toxic dose of love poisoning, coming as we do from a culture that glorifies and undermines love in the very same cinematic breath.

Our inherited and contradictory cultures of the 50s and 60s clash. With their emphasis on the one hand of the nuclear family, fidelity, self restraint, consumerism and an ingrained respect for society, and on the other, free love, promiscuity, experimentation, hedonism, and an inherent disrespect for authority. These contrary belief systems are utterly embedded even in films now, in the 21st century, torn between hyper sexualisation and romance. 

We are ‘programmed’ to desire ‘one true love’, but expected to do so in a media drenched environment that is rapaciously stimulating our sexual drives and fantasies more than has ever happened in history. Surrounded by temptation, distracted by the joys and stresses of rampant consumerism, and deeply instilled with romantic values that are inherently flawed, relationships are grounding like a fleet of Titanics that almost seem designed to seek out leviathan icebergs.

With religion and society increasingly usurped by pop culture, the eternal ‘now’ of social media, and life pulled along at a breakneck pace for working people caught in the endless cycle between earning and spending, and with television and movies the predominant culture worldwide, is it any wonder that we are confused, full of romantic dreams and visions, fairytale happy endings that can never manifest in reality? Is it any wonder that the divorce rate is skyrocketing, that relationships scatter like seeds on the wind, with children sown wildly across ‘blended’ families, like wildflowers with hybrid vigor growing in the cracks in the pavement?

My technical direction of the film is symbolic of the ephemeral layering of meaning that occurs in our minds via our media consumption, and in our hearts full of longing for some great, all consuming, all enveloping love, but bingeing on Hollywood fast food.