Dreaming Footnote

Footnote, a lively, well-directed and splendidly acted film, is an astute depiction of interesting characters thrown into an unusual moral dilemma. It takes up directly the emotional issues in father-son relations (in two generations), depicting psychologically plausible responses to a relatively

extreme but not entirely fantastical situation. I was invited to write on the film due to my previous publication and teaching on the work of Hans Loewald, whose paper “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex” (1979) pertains to relevant developmental issues. After my first viewing, I felt I had little to say from a psychoanalytic perspective since the manifest content of the film already depicts and explores a father-son drama. I thought it would be reductive and not much of an interpretation of the film to translate it into a Loewaldian perspective. However, when viewed as dream material, interpretations abound naturally, as the film no longer depicts characters contending with external events, but a dreamer inventing a situation that reveals his conflicting wishes. The central conceit of this film — that an award is accidentally given to a father when it was meant for a son — poses the dramatic question, “What if this happened?” But the psychoanalytic question is, “What if you dreamed this happened when it hadn't?” This point of view allows me to approach the film from the perspective of dream analysis. Then, Loewaldian and other psychoanalytic interpretations seem fresh and apt.

The first question then arises: whose dream? The son's? The father's? The mother's? Ours? Now we have a Rashomon of dreamers' dreams to consider. For the sake of brevity, I will take up two of these dreamers — the father and us.1 However, if we take the same plot point and consider it as the dream of four different characters, one is immediately struck by how its meaning radically alters. If I tell you an aging father had a dream in which he finally received a major award — the professional recogniti