The Fourth Man (1983)

After all, a dream is just a dream. Probably the simplest sentence Lacan ever wrote, and it precedes, from what I remember, an incredibly hilarious deconstruction of that smoked Salmon dream of Freud’s–about the balance of wish-fulfillment vs. what is had, about how one person can possibly want to feed several people, but know something else inherently (one is enough). The details escape me, but it’s about a woman’s dream – she has several men all vying for the same piece of salmon. You can probably paint Freud’s picture in your own mind. Suitors vying for her meat. Their desires are reduced to their demands, and the meat on the table is read squarely thus (put it into her mouth!). I’ve never liked dream sequences in fiction. It’s always too flat–you can scan Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and jokily toss in signifiers like nobody’s business (I had a dream about buying baseball bats at Target with my boyfriend this morning; you figure it out). Admittedly, Paul Verhoeven uses dream sequences as kind of a cheap tactic that relies on viewer recognition to propel the plot forward. It’s kind of like constructed deja vu, in the sense that when Gerard Reve dreams about going into the hotel at the beginning, we experience a kind of phony deja vu when we see the hotel through the window at the book reading. Of course, then, the hotel is revealed with spectacular drama later by Christine with a horrorendous music queue for those that didn’t catch it the first time. Whether or not a movie uses the first reveal is probably indicitive of its genre – horror, shlock, drama, etc. I don’t really remember which The Fourth Man is. But for an example of another, you can see Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime, which relies on a similar amalgamation of perceived reality vis-a-vis dream-state. It has a better pay off, too…

Which isn’t to say I didn’t like The Fourth Man. It was pretty decent, and had some pretty amusing sight gags that played with our perceptions of what was going on–the apple halo, the bleeding photograph, the peephole eyeball, etc. And there’s an incredible scene that mounts tension and absurdity in almost perfect harmony. The main character becomes increasingly drunk watching home videos, which makes him miss what we see. He’s more preoccupied with saying hello to the fish.

But the home videos, ultimately, are sort of a macguffin. We don’t ever see what happens after they cut out — we see what is perhaps a speculation on what happened, but we never really know what the the Christine character is capable of, or whether she is actually ensconsed in tragedy. Is the movie ultimately about her, or about the writer? Certainly it’s about his crack-up on the reveal of what her character, according to him, is capable of, but what does that have to do with what preceded it? If he lies the truth, as he suggests in his lecture, then I guess the truth is similar to his ‘truth’ involving the circus funeral. People die. w00t.