Where Is The Friend's House, Know Your Place, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and recurring dreams

I'm fascinated by recurring dreams - how they speak to patterns in our psyches and give us access to our own deeply internalized, subconscious personal narratives, often poorly understood during our waking lives. Robert Stone - the novelist who wrote A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers (probably most widely remembered for its film adaptation, Who'll Stop the Rain?) talked about a recurring dream he had where he is arriving at a border by some means of transportation or other, carrying contraband. He knows he will be arrested almost immediately upon arrival. Many people around him are aware of his guilt, as well, and are planning to do absolutely nothing to help him; he has nothing to do but sit there with his impending sense of doom, waiting for the hammer to fall. You can see a bit of this structure echoed in Dog Soldiers/ Who'll Stop the Rain?, where the character of Converse, played by Michael Moriarty in the film, has set in motion the smuggling of a kilo of heroin out of Viet Nam, not realizing that corrupt feds are waiting for it and him to arrive, having been in on the deal from the outset. "I've been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this," Converse remarks on learning just how screwed he is. (I have long found it very easy to identify with Converse: "I fear, therefore I am"). It was fascinating to learn - in the book Writers Dreaming, by the way - that the deeper structure of this section of the novel owes directly to Stone's dreams (he has a short story, too, in Bear and His Daughter, that also draws on this dream, but I forget which one; perhaps "Under the Pitons?").  

I've never yet tried to incorporate it into fiction, but my own recurring dream structure involves having someone for whom I am responsible fall into jeopardy in an unfamiliar town, which I must go to to "save" them. There are different particulars: sometimes the person is a child (perhaps mine'; someone once suggested that the child in fact is me), but sometimes it's a woman, and once it was my father, shortly before he died. I have travelled, alone and without help, to this town to try to find or save this person, but do not know where to look, and in trying to find leads or clues or allies or such, I find myself falling prey to distraction. Often the distraction involves people with problems of their own, who enlist my help - which I begrudgingly provide, feeling my own commitment pulling at me, then - as I get sucked deeper and deeper into their problems - feeling my ability to exercise my responsibilities fading, growing dimmer... but sometimes the distraction is more trivial, and involves finding a really good record or book or video store (or thrift store with records and books and movies in it), and I end up almost forgetting my quest as I fall to shopping... which generally leaves me feeling even shittier about my priorities when I wake up. It would make a very unpopular movie: a quest narrative where in the end the quest will never be completed, where there is nothing but failure and distraction and a lessening of purpose, replaced by a growing sense of futility and failure and moral mediocrity... a hero's journey that never arrives where it is supposed to, just in gradual diminishment.

I haven't had a dream with that structure in awhile, and really, I don't mind, because it's not a good dream, seems almost like a warning, a sign that things are going wrong in my life. It's always a bit troubling waking up from having had it. Still, I'm fascinated by the fact that my brain has put that story together, without my conscious involvement, and offers it back to me periodically. None of us really know where the stories we tell come from, no one who creates is truly in charge of what they create; ideas swim up of their own accord, often half-formed by the time we become aware of them, without our knowing what they really mean or why they've come to us; we give ourselves credit for things that ultimately are mysterious in origin, assembled not by our waking selves but rather given to us out of the blackness within. And it's really interesting when that inner author, the one that assembles the dreams and sends them to us, the deeper self we barely know, actually comes up with a story that is elegant and meaningful and personal to us, so much so that the structure bears repeating: as with Robert Stone, I've had several variants on my dream structure - this failed rescue quest dream - through dozens of dreams. 

I asked Zia Mohajerjasbi, the writer/ director of the film Know Your Place - one of my favourite films at this past VIFF, which I wrote about here - about whether the story behind the film perhaps came from a dream or folktale. It has that feeling of elegant simplicity, an inner structure that is basic and expressive and meaningful unto itself - one that in fact resonates against my own recurring dream structure, even though the ending is quite a bit happier: a young person is entrusted with delivering something important, but finds himself foiled in every way possible, distractions and obstacles placed in his way, until a simple task becomes an ordeal. There is definitely a relationship with your general heroes' journey narrative structure found in popular films and stories (one could argue that The Lord of the Rings is also about an obstacle-laden quest to deliver something somewhere), but the smaller scale of the journey makes it feel more intimate, more real, more profound. I could see someone having dreams like this - in fact, if you allow for the difference that I never actually get to complete my quest, and the young protagonists of Know Your Place do, it's basically my own dream structure (but one without shopping for records). It has that elegance of a very basic, very profound, very deep story, swimming up out of the blackness...

...except Mohajerjasbi didn't base the structure on dreams, but - he explains in the interview that I linked above - rather drew inspiration from an Abbas Kiarostami film, Where Is the Friend's House?, which, based on his recommendation, I have now seen (in fact, twice). It was distributed as the first volume of The Koker Trilogy by Criterion, is within our library system, is  accessible via Kanopy, and has screened on Mubi (though it is not currently available there). If you happened to see Know Your Place, watching Where Is the Friend's House? feels like having another instance of the same recurring dream structure, though how the young hero of the journey comes to the quest is a bit different: our protagonist, a young boy named Ahmad, watches his classmate get a stern lecture from a hard-assed teacher about having done his homework not in his notebook, but on a loose sheet of paper. The classmate has a habit of forgetting his notebook, it seems - the teacher has warned him twice before - and is told that if he forgets his notebook again, he will be expelled. Ahmad then discovers, on returning home and setting about to do his own homework, that he has accidentally taken his friend's notebook home with him; he knows what the consequences will be if his friend doesn't get the notebook back before class next day, but discovers that no one he explains the problem to takes him seriously or understands the importance of his quest; his mother just wants him to do errands and finish his own homework, and his grandfather is more concerned about instilling random discipline, sending Ahmad on a quest for cigarettes that the grandfather knows full well are in his pocket. Leaving his family behind in Koker, he sets out alone on foot to try to find his friend's home in a neighbouring district. Along the way, there are obstacles and distractions - and, just as Know Your Place has commentary on gentrification in Seattle, there is a level of commentary on life in rural Iran, not limited to how children are treated, but also taking in rural-urban migration and about the effects of slow modernization. For one thing, people are getting their wooden doors replaced with iron ones, which leaves the makers of the wooden doors feeling somewhat sidelined and sad; it transpires that the most helpful stranger Ahmad encounters is a wooden doormaker, who explains his plight, while - if I understood correctly - one of the least helpful he encounters is an iron doormaker - a fat man on a small donkey. You feel for the donkey. 

We'll leave it unsaid here whether the quest is completed, because the ending of the film is quietly very potent, but whether you saw Know Your Place or not, the film is a must see. Babak Ahmadpour, who plays Ahmad (and is pictured above, as he tries to demonstrate how similar he and his friend's notebook are) is particularly great, earnest and sincere and entirely believable in his role. And while the other films in the so-called Koker Trilogy were not really intended by Kiarostami to be viewed as part of a trilogy, they do connect with Where Is the Friend's House? on more levels than just being filmed in Koker; the second film in the trilogy, for example, And Life Goes On, is a quasi-documentary in which the filmmakers return to Koker to see if the two stars of the earlier film survived a 1990 earthquake. Koker also figures in Through the Olive Trees, the third film in the trilogy, and was apparently the location for A Taste of Cherry, which Kiarostami himself felt deserved grouping with these other films. There's also Kiarostami's documentary Homework, which is an extra on the Koker Trilogy set, and which also comes highly recommended. Finally, there is a documentary called The Tree of Life, which apparently deals with the impact of having becoming a famous child actor on Babak Amadpour (and his brother, actually named Ahmad). 

Great cinema leads to more great cinema... grateful to Zia Mohajerjasbi for setting me on this road!