Dreams About Film Critics

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I have this dream about Anthony Lane. It begins in an empty movie theater, the whir of the projector audible over the film. It’s a film I know but can never remember, the edges of its title lying just past where my fingertips can reach. The film is stuck in a loop, playing the same scene, over and over again.

I stand. "Can someone fix the projector?"

"Shh!"

Anthony Lane is wearing a dapper seersucker suit. He cradles a notebook in his lap. He speaks with a fine British accent. "Sit down, love. This is the best part."

And it’s weird, because in the dream, I know that it’s Anthony Lane, but this isn’t what I thought he looked like. I thought Anthony Lane was an old, queeny gay man from Brooklyn, not this slim and handsome Savile Row dandy.

"Sit beside me, love." I love that he calls me love. It makes me want to fuck him.

And so I do. I fuck him right there in the movie theater. The frame slips off the screen, which glows like the full moon. The finished reel flaps in the distance as Anthony Lane’s finger pokes up underneath the soft, tattered seam of my cotton underwear. And as I feel his weight on top of me, as I feel him hard against my thigh, he whispers in my ear, "I bet Pauline Kael never did this."

How do I tell him? How do I tell him that, funny enough, she did?

I have this dream that Michael Medved is riding me. My head is thrown back, my hands are in his beard, or

his goatee, or his mustache, I can’t really see that part. And that’s when all his teeth fall out. They start hitting me in the face, and they keep falling, it’s like rain pelting me, stinging my face, hitting me with velocity, and as he is coming, he is yelling, "Four stars! Four stars!" only now all his teeth are gone so it sounds like "forshars! forshars!" That is a dream, but it is also a nightmare.

I have this dream where I am kissing a black man with long, beautiful dreads. The dreads are gorgeous — I can’t stop stroking them and squishing them in my hands. The black man uses words that are too big, that baffle and intrigue me. I want to tell him his words could be smaller. Still, I like his tongue in my mouth. And that’s where it is, it’s in my mouth, when I open my eyes and suddenly this black man has turned into a white woman, a beautiful, soft white woman with foxy auburn hair and powder-white skin. I like the way she kisses even better. Soft at first, the kind that almost feels like torture, then she has me begging for it. Her lips are stained red, makeup is smeared across her ivory cheek, and I say her name, which I somehow already know. It feels good to say it. "Manohla," I moan. "Manoooooohlaah."

Suddenly, there is a man behind me.

"Do you know Francois Truffaut?" he asks, kissing my back, teeth nibbling at my shoulders.

"I don’t!" I cry. "I don’t know Francois Truffaut!" And this is shameful for me, because I am the kind of person who should know Francois Truffaut, and in fact, who has pretended to know (and like) Francois Truffaut on various occasions.

"Do you know Antonioni?" The man slides his hand over my bare ass, cups it in his palm.

"Fuck, I don’t know him either." And it’s hard to talk now, because Manohla, the little minx, is still doing her work on my mouth, moving my hands all over her round, hard little breasts, so anyway, the words come out like, "fugahnomenezz."

That’s when he spanks me. He spanks me hard.

"That’s right, Tony," says Manohla. "She’s been a bad, bad girl." Manohla’s voice is a deep, throaty purr.

Tony turns me around, pushes me to the floor. "You saw Sweet Home Alabama, and you liked it!" he barks at me. His cock is hard, and I take it in my mouth, let my tongue roam around the tip. "You own Crossroads, that shitty Britney Spears movie, on DVD, don’t you?" he asks.

I nod shamefully. I say, with my mouth full, "It was a gift."

"You can’t even watch Citizen Kane the whole way through without falling asleep."

"Ask her about Bergman," says Manohla. "She only read about him on Wikipedia."

And then there’s a knock on the door. "Hey Manohla! Tony! It’s Stephen Holden. What are you guys doing in there?"

"Shit," whispers Tony, covering my mouth with his hand. "Nothing! We’ll be out in just a second!"

I have this dream where I am alone in a dark bar alone, swirling the olives in my martini.

A chubby, graying man in glasses sits beside me. "Have you seen the new George Clooney movie?"

I haven’t. I haven’t seen anything in ages. What am I doing in this bar? Who is this man? And why am I so attracted to his sweater vest?

He orders two fingers of Scotch. He tells me about the George Clooney movie. I don’t really care. But he keeps talking, and talking, he is talking forever, and it is making me remember all the things that I know and forgot, all the movies lying around the corners of my memory like trash, only now the trash seems interesting again. Lethal Weapon, Short Circuit, Spies Like Us. I saw Spies Like Us. Maybe even twice! He is saying these names, and all I want to do is rip off his sweater vest, just shred its luxurious thread count in my hands. Die Hard 2, Doc Hollywood, Joe vs. the Volcano. I reach out and I grab him. I fumble with his belt, rip it from the loops of his Dockers and let it clatter to the floor. I push my body against him, and I rip open the sweater vest, which is a plush cashmere. But when I rip it, another sweater vest appears, and when I rip that, another one, and so on. It’s an endless, furious tunnel I am digging, ripping off these sweater vests as he whispers these movies I had forgotten I knew, whispers them softly in my ear. Weekend at Bernie’s, Two of a Kind, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

I have this dream in which Pauline Kael is a beautiful unicorn. She sits beside me in the forest, and in the forest there is a movie screen, and in this dream we are in love. We stare longingly into each other’s eyes, knowing that we need each other, that we want each other badly. But then the lights dim in the forest, the projector starts to hum, and then always, always, that is when I wake up.  n°

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.