dreams, nightmares, and the irresistible middle ground

warning: this post is unrepentently verbose. you may think of it as an attempt to make up for lost time, but really i just didn't care to stop myself. read some of it, read none of it, read the whole thing twice; i ask only that you, as i always do, follow your bliss.



when i was not quite four, my parents surprised me with my first real bed, a floral-print twin mattress and boxspring. up until then i had been sleeping happily, insistently, and, as a tall-for-her-age not-quite-four-year-old, rather snugly in the crib i had started out in as an infant, and the new bed was not a welcome surprise. i loved my crib; it was high and enclosed and safe, like a cotton-lined aerie. i did not want a big-girl bed. i wanted my bed, where i had cooed and dreamt and preened like a downy wee bird, but my parents, like, i understand now, all good parents must, were tumbling me out of it. i found it all inexplicably and unnecessarily cruel, and so began one of the first arguments i had ever had with my parents.

the new bed was, in truth, less a gift or rite of passage than a necessity: my mother was pregnant with my sister, and the new baby was going to need a place to sleep. so they persisted, and after much cajoling and some outright pleading they convinced me to lie down, just once, just to see. i did, and immediately began to cry. the bed was HUGE! it was mammoth, endless, i felt as if i were floating in the middle of the ocean. i was terrified, and the terror itself was terrifying, because i had never really been afraid before. making matters worse was the fact that i was extremely aware that my parents were not only failing to save me from this horror but were, in a way, inflicting it. it was a brutal disillusionment; my trust in my parents was shattered, and in that moment, as i wailed and struggled to sit up and they held me back against the pillow, smiling and sweet-talking and—were they? they couldn't be, but, yes, they were; how could they?—now and then laughing, insisting that i give it one more minute, i hated them.

but it was to be the bed, things being the way they were and me so small and powerless and not yet prone to disobedience. it was a difficult transition, though, and i began, for the first time, to have nightmares. i would run into my parents room, wide-eyed and shuddering, and they would steer me back toward my own room, bleary-eyed and muttering, and after enough nights of this routine in a row bedtime became a dreaded punishment that began weighing on everyone's hearts the moment the sun started to set. then they started in with the pep talks.

the gist of the motivational speech was that i was going to be a Big Sister, and Big Sisters have to look out for their little sisters, and that meant i had to be Brave, because sometimes taking care of someone means protecting that person from things that are Scary, even things that we're afraid of ourselves. my sister and i were going to share a room eventually; what if she had a bad dream and woke up scared? how could i tell her that everything was o.k. if i was scared too? didn't i want to be a Good Big Sister?

had my parents realized how solemnly and seriously i would don my new role as Fearless Protector of Innocents, they might have foregone the speech and simply purchased a nighlight or two. but they had no way of knowing; as the eldest children in their respective families, it's likely they heard similar speeches themselves, and no lasting damage was done. but i was not them, and the events leading up to the situation converged in my peculiar child's mind in a very, very strange way.

here is what i knew: my parents, who i had been certain would rescue me from any and all dangers, had turned on me and chosen to force me into a known and massive danger night after night. they could not be trusted or counted on, not in the least, and therefore my baby sister was going to need all the help she could get. i, according to all reports, had been designated her guardian, and i was not about to leave her stranded in this unpredictable place. i began training.

every night, after my parents had performed the prescribed bedtime rituals, turned out my light, and left me to the shadows, i would scan the room for an eye-catching shape—a bathrobe hanging from the back of the rocking chair in the far corner, say, or a mound of toys spilling out from behind the closet door. the shape didn't have to be threatening outright, only potentially threatening; it had to suggest, at least obliquely, some other shape that would inspire dread. i would fix on the chosen object and stare, and stare and stare and stare, until the suggestion became the reality—the bathrobe was suddenly a hunched witch in a black cloak, eyeing me in salivatory anticipation, the jumble of playthings by the closet a skulking troll. once these monsters appeared i would seize on them, expand the ghoulish details of them until my heart was racing and my little jaws clenched tight against a shriek, and then i would close my eyes and will myself to fall asleep. when the inevitable nightmare woke me sweating and gasping, i resisted the desire to run to my parents, my heartless, treacherous parents, and instead rolled over to face my bête noire. the witch, by now, had rolling yellow eyes and toadlike skin, and her long, ragged fingernails rasped against one another as she lurched toward me, cackling under her breath. i stared at her, stared and stared and stared, shaking and panting and fighting tears, and whispered,

"you can't eat me. you're a bathrobe."

and so she was. slowly and not always so surely, i walked myself back from the brink of hysteria, reminding myself that the world was the world, and maybe it was packed to the gills with trolls and hags and hideous things, but this was my room, and that was my chair; all of these monsters, at least, were things that i knew and could explain to myself. i named them, one by one, night after night, and by the time my sister was born i was afraid of nothing. i was proud of my accomplishment, but also alone within it. i felt like a superhero, invincible and isolated, my great strength a secret i could never fully share.

i think that, in a way, this process is similar to the one christian bale undertakes when selecting and playing a role. having, to put it tactfully, studied (*ahem*) bale as he's inhabited various personas over the past fifteen or so years, and after watching some of his films enough times to commit entire scenes to memory verbatim, i feel qualified to argue that the connecting thread between almost all of his characters and certainly all of the recent ones, the thing that draws him to them, is terror—of the character, of the character's situation, and of the knowledge that, with some relatively minor shifts in circumstance, he, or any of us, could find himself in that terrifying place. undoubtedly this allows him to stretch and perfect and prove himself as an actor, but that can be accomplished, for most, via all kinds of characters. bale consistently opts to embody harrowed, haunted, desperate men, and specifically those whose desperation stems from an awareness that they are plummeting toward a state of being something not quite human, something callously, unrepentently animalistic, and knowing that they don't want it, and having no means of stopping it. talk about inviting a nightmare. did his early work in empire of the sun have a damaging psychological effect? or was he drawn to the work even then, as a twelve-year-old boy? could it be innate and inescapable? after all, his name is christian bale, a not-uplifting moniker better suited to a james joyce novel than modern hollywood. whatever the cause, the trend is undeniable.

bale's latest foray into tortured misery is rescue dawn, directed by the mad and exalted werner herzog, whose film sets are historically nightmarish regardless of plot. the story is based on true events and builds on an earlier work by herzog, little dieter needs to fly, released in 1997. in the current film, bale plays dieter dengler, a u.s. navy flyboy about to embark on his first official mission: the secret bombing of guerilla targets in laos in 1965, when the american involvement in vietnam and the far east was just beginning to reveal itself as engagement in war. dengler's plane is shot down early on in the mission, and, after successfully outrunning them at first, he is taken prisoner by a band of militiamen, some viet cong, some local tagalong thugs. presumably, for bale, since he hurls himself toward it time and again with such unflagging, all-in commitment, this is where the real fun begins. naturally, by "real fun" i mean endless days and sleepless nights of starvation, gruesome physical abuse, and sadistic psychological torture. and this is before he reaches the p.o.w. camp. you see where this is going.

oh, christian, how i fear and fear for you and your unemotional, single-minded, seemingly joyless devotion to these romps. as for the machinist, bale dropped close to sixty pounds over the course of the shoot—about thirty more than he'd initially planned to lose—whittling himself down to a shaggy, rag-clad scarecrow; in a later scene, bale wades into a river and his pant leg lifts up as he hoists his knobby knee over a rock, revealing a taut calf the circumference of the average teenage girl's forearm and a shark-finned ankle bone you could lose an eye on. yet i am hopeful that bale may finally have put himself through this enough times to have exorcised whatever demon was at the root of the compulsion: unlike his other wraiths, who plod and seethe through their sentences like enraged automatons, not wanting to go on but unable to stop, dengler is an optimist who believes he is the maker of his own fate and whose faith in his ability to propel himself to salvation never winks out. he is perhaps the most embraceable of bale's characters so far: a suffering man surrounded by evil and the muffled voices of the defeated, yet insistent upon the ultimate triumph of the human mind and heart. in the camp, he says that he is still hoping his fiancée will wait for him. he bolsters his fellow-prisoners, distracting them from the hopelessness of their surroundings and comforting them in their lowest moments. he is the kind of friend everyone wants to face death by disease and/or starvation and/or random, unprovoked execution alongside. there comes a moment, of course, where dengler finds himself up against something even he can't stare down, and in the aftermath of it it is clear how perilously close he is to losing, if not actively discarding, the humanity he has fought so consistently to retain. but up until then he is generally upbeat; remarkably stable; and, when he is not eating live insects, the warmest, most endearing character bale has portrayed since newsies. this, of course, makes the break all the more devastating, but i have convinced myself that it suggests that bale is ready to submerge himself in some slightly less icy and turbid waters. of course, he has said that he wanted this role largely because he was crazy about the idea of working in the jungle with herzog, so only time will tell.

to be fair, herzog suffers through most everything his cast and crew suffer through, and as traumatic as those goings-through may be, no one could accuse him of not knowing what he's doing. rescue dawn is visually flawless, filmed in a color range and with a hint of graininess suggestive of 1970s nature documentaries. the work is hypnotically devastating from its opening scenes, a protracted montage of warheads being dropped in pairs on bamboo huts in a rice field, the shells blossoming in slow motion into smoldering anemones that dissolve into gaping rosettes of orange flame. and it doesn't let up: nearly every shot is framed to evoke not only the mood of the central character or characters but also the ambient mood of the surrounding environment, and, if such a thing can be captured on film, the environment's feelings toward the characters—typically indifference at best and active, immolating resentment at worst. the latter is ever present in the second half of the film, but most strikingly so when dengler, after hacking through dense shrubs and tangled, snarling undergrowth for days, comes across a clearing containing the remnants of a small village. the huts have been almost completely reclaimed by the jungle: from a distance, their shapes are barely discernible, their exteriors a seamless, faintly contoured mat of interwoven vines. it is an image capable of inspiring either comfort or panic, depending on the perspective of the viewer: the earth, in the end, will always win out, try as we might to force ourselves on it, and all the work we undertake with the belief that it is of such great importance will be swallowed and digested in instants by that earth if we aren't there to stand guard over it. only we believe in ourselves; the rest of the world is scratching at us like a rash, waiting for the blasted infection to heal.

earlier on, though, herzog presents the relationship more gently, with the jungle regarding its human trespassers as merely nonentities rather than enemies. dengler, in an attempt to signal an overhead plane, climbs a hill and then scales a rock outcropping rising above the drop-off. standard hollywood form would be to shoot tight and close on dengler as he fights his way up the rock, his boots slipping against the crags, his fingers stirring up dust and sprays of pebbles as they scrabble for a grip, the sweat beading up on his creased brow and tracing clear swaths in the caked dirt on his grimacing face. *yawn* but herzog, because he is better than this and because he believes that we, the audience, are better than this, widens the shot to take in the entire rock, the hillside, the stony cliff beyond it, and the jungle unfurling endless and claustrophobically thick below. the camera is pulled back so that dengler is a speck on the skin of all this immensity. the sound is natural and unamplified; we hear dengler's small grunts of effort from a distance, and the clattering of gravel pushed over the edge of the rock by his foot is piffling and devoid of moment, like the tapping of chalk on a sidewalk heard from inside a building. this is, of course, the accurate, in-the-instant relationship. dengler is not the center of anything on an honest, real-world scale; he is just one man, tiny, without allies, standing on a rock, holding an inches-wide flat of mirrored glass up toward the infinite sky, too minuscule to attract anything's notice. the plane flies by and doesn't circle back.

these are nightmare outtakes, the scenes and sensations that send us shooting up in bed drenched in sweat, that bring on panic attacks in crowded trains and elevators or in wide-open parks. all at once we realize that we are one of many in so much space, points in a field that extends forever, and we know nothing of that space, because that is what we are. we are human in the way that we conceive of being human because we insist upon it; no law makes it so, and if our discipline wavers, nothing will save us. the life we trust, in the order we trust it to keep to, can—is probably trying to—unravel. and are you strong enough to force it to cohere? if your plane went down, would you stand up and follow the river?

the scene cuts, production closes, the lights come up, you wake in a familiar place and inhale, the dream falls away. you can let go of the question then, if you need to, if the darkness at the edge of the room is too dark, if the world is too large, if you can decide there's nothing worth confronting today. but some people need an answer; fortunately for them, there is no shortage of nightmares with which to test their mettle. but for bale's sake, i hope that it is equally true that on some night each of them wakes up assuredly in control and tells the bathrobe to shut the hell up, it's just a bathrobe, and falls into a far more peaceful sleep, and that the knowledge that this can be done is enough.