Dreamland REVIEW
Dreamland is an excellent tribute to the lack of development in the teenage boy brain, especially when it suffers from some sort of deprivation and distress. Eugene, the main character is a teenage boy abandoned by a biological father when he was five. He lives in Depression era Texas during a time of widespread bank foreclosures, drought, and dust storms. Fortunately, he has a best friend and pulp fiction to help him cope with all the bleakness. And then the best friend tells him that his family is about to pick up and move to California.
Enter Allison Wells, a recently wounded bank robber who has managed to find an abandoned barn on Eugen’s family farm. She looks like a character who just stepped out of one of Eugene’s beloved detective stories. Allison explains that her bank robbing ways were only a response to the same evil bank owners presently foreclosing on his own family and that she is not naturally violent. Eugene is a teenage boy longing to go find his biological father in Mexico. Allison is a fugitive on the run with a bounty on her head offering to pay twice the bounty for Eugene’s assistance in getting away.
The two of them combined have about half the good sense of a single reasonably intelligent person and so, off they go in Eugene’s step-father’s stolen car.
What could go wrong?
Poor Eugene hardly has a chance. Though Allison continually reminds him that he has choices – that he is free to do what he wants – to help her or turn her in – to help her to escape to Mexico or to let her drive herself – to get romantically involved or to protect himself - it is clear that Eugene is at the dog-end of the leash when it comes to his emotions, his insecurities, his boredom, his hormones, his jealousy, his longing to find his long-gone father, his economic hopelessness. Every choice he makes is made with his frontal cortex pinned to the floor.
The viewer is left only to watch him as he makes his quick and rapid decent into Bonnie’s Clyde.
Words from Solomon come to mind:
8 Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
9 They are a garland to grace your head
and a chain to adorn your neck.
10 My son, if sinful men entice you,
do not give in to them.
11 If they say, “Come along with us;
let’s lie in wait for innocent blood,
let’s ambush some harmless soul;
12 let’s swallow them alive, like the grave,
and whole, like those who go down to the pit;
13 we will get all sorts of valuable things
and fill our houses with plunder;
14 cast lots with us;
we will all share the loot”—
15 my son, do not go along with them,
do not set foot on their paths;
16 for their feet rush into evil,
they are swift to shed blood.
17 How useless to spread a net
where every bird can see it!
18 These men lie in wait for their own blood;
they ambush only themselves!
19 Such are the paths of all who go after ill-gotten gain;
it takes away the life of those who get it.
Question for Comment: How long did it take for your frontal cortex to get smart? Or has it?
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