Dream Lover (1993), or, Probably the Single Most Misogynist Film I’ve Ever Seen

Before we launch, let me be clear: I don’t recommend this film. The acting is good, the directing is good, the script is good. But it serves such a foul, putrid, and prurient end, I just cannot even.

But I do think it’s worth knowing about, so let’s get into it.

Dream Lover stars a gorgeous Mädchen Amick (remember Shelley from Twin Peaks? Yeah, me, too.) and James Spader (terrifying in every role). The plot is that Ray (Spader) has gotten divorced, and is fumbling to restart his romantic life. He’s very rich, though, which may help him. He meets a woman named Lena (Amick) and falls in love with her immediately. They wed very quickly, have a child very quickly, and the rest of the film is a thriller about his gradual discovery that she has played him for “a fool,” as he says, throughout. To wit:

1. She adopted a fake identity when she met him. Nothing about her is “real”: not her name, not her backstory, not her college education, nothing.

2. She checked him out from afar beforehand, aiming to seduce him, marry him, and get pregnant, all for his money. She entrapped him.

3. She cheated on him brazenly for ten years of their marriage, charging her hotel stays for her nooners—amusingly (as I’ll get back to) at the Hotel Chaunticleer—on her husband’s credit card. He trusted her so much during most of that ten-year span that he never checked the bills.

4. When he confronts her about this, finally, she admits to it. He asks if their two children are even biologically his own. She claims provocatively that, although she knows the paternity of their two children, she won’t reveal it to him. She scoffs at him. She needles him. Eventually, he slaps her in the face, hard. She looks pleased.

5. After he leaves to cool down, she trashes the apartment and beats herself up, inflicting tons of bruises on herself—black eye, battered lip, bruises on her thighs—and calls her psychiatrist, who shows up to the apartment with the police. They arrest Ray immediately upon his return, and institutionalize him against his will, because he’s acting erratic and because…

6. Lena has been telling her psychiatrist for years that Ray was beating her, and she showed her psychiatrist bruising all over her body during that time—bruising that she already told Ray had resulted from her extramarital affair with her unknown lover.

7. Ray goes to trial, thinking there’s no way he’ll lose. Lena lies her face off the entire time, accusing Ray of chronic battery. The judge, facing loads of photographs and corroborating testimony from the psychiatrist as well as from friends whom Ray suspects Lena has “hired” to pose as her friends from a temp agency, can only convict him to stay at the asylum.

8. While Ray rots in the asylum, Lena is out spending his money, raising his children, having her affair, and getting rafts of sympathy from everyone around her.

This plotline is the most insane, pernicious, misogynist trash I’ve ever heard. Because it is a perfect enactment of the delusional fantasies that domestic abusers routinely have about their wives and partners: the partners are cheating; they’re hiding their past; the children aren’t really those of the abuser; the victims are scheming against them for their money; the victims are rallying a host of imaginary opponents against them, to make them look bad. This is exactly the kind of fantasy that entrenched domestic abusers entertain. (Read Lundy Bancroft’s amazing book Why Does He Do That? to learn more.)

But it’s never true. Never. I mean, like, literally never true. There is no demographic evidence to suggest that women behave in these ways, employing people to help them take abusers to trial and convict them falsely for no real reason. These are fantasies that abusers have to justify their deep-seated controlling impulses. Indeed, it’s worth noting that even in the logic of the film, way prior to his slapping Lena, Ray enacts a number of other crazy behaviors: he stalks her; he goes to her hometown to research her past; he follows her around; he rifles through her purse and pulls out her diaphragm case, to make sure the diaphragm is really in there, and not in her vagina, when she comes back from what he assumes is a noon-time tryst with a lover. He stares at her like he’s going to rape her or kill her. And all the while, like for almost the entire film, he also insists that he loves her. This is domestic abuse 101: I love you so much, you make me crazy, so everything I do to hurt you is your fault.

But the film is told from his perspective, and everything about it is geared to make us feel sympathy for him, and to assume he is sane, and right, and truthful, and not delusional. Even though, at the margins, there are signs that he may be, in fact, totally off his rocker all the while. Chiefly, he has recurring waking dreams or hallucinations about being at a carnival, and being mocked by a clown. Ray never knows what to do with these dreams. He can’t quite tell if they’re real, can’t tell how seriously to take them, can’t quite discern what they mean.

So, ok, the plot encourages us to think he’s sane and a “victim,” while she is, as he calls her at one point, “a psychopath.” But the margins of the film—particularly the recurring “dream” sequences—make that reading really uncomfortable. Or at least highly unsatisfying. Ray definitely does appear to have a screw loose.

Now, what really makes the film insane and insanely misogynistic is the ending. Ray tricks Lena into visiting him at the asylum, where he’s “sane” but pretending now to be in a kind of semi-somnolent state. While they are out wandering along the lawn, he coldly, calmly informs her that she made a mistake in her plan. She’s curious. He says he’ll tell her if she kisses him first, one last time. Then he grabs her, and kisses her forcefully, viciously. It’s very assaultive, and hard to watch. Then he reveals that, now that she’s had him declared insane, he can murder her in cold blood, and he’ll be “out in a year” and back to his life, because he’ll be found “not guilty by reason of insanity.” With that, he closes his hands around her throat, and with the camera super close-up on her face, he chokes her to death.

Truly, it’s one of the more fucked up scenes I’ve ever seen. Mostly because the film wants us to approve of what he’s doing. She hits him ineffectively while he drives the breath from her body. She chokes and writhes, while he gazes down at her unblinking. The camera lovingly dwells on her beautiful face, trembling in fear. The background music during the murder is eerie, but when she’s dead, and Ray lays her on the ground, he’s so gentle and graceful about it, it almost appears that they’re dancing. Once she’s on the ground, the music turns to happy dance music, and in Ray’s mind, he envisions himself dancing around with his first wife (the one he divorced) and then with Lena. There’s zero hint that he’ll have some comeuppance for having murdered her. Zero sense that what he did was morally wrong. Scary? Yes, maybe. But not wrong.

At this point, my mouth was hanging open, my eyes were wide, and my brows were knit together so tight that my forehead was hurting. Because the whole movie, I saw this coming, but I kept saying to myself, There’s no way they’ll tee up a murder justification narrative here. That’s too crazy, even for 1993. Wrong, Eleanor, so wrong. That’s exactly what they did.

Lena’s insane behavior justified her murder. That’s the notion. Moreover, as Ray explicitly says, she dies because of a mistake she made in her scheme. He blames her for her own death—another classic, horrific move of femicidal domestic abusers. She made me do it.

Gross, horrid, vile, upsetting. Bilious, choleric, melancholic, all the bad humors.

But there is something worth pausing over here. But to see it, you’re going to have to come with me on a quick journey to the 1390s.

Sometime in the 1390s, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Wife of Bath’s Tale. It’s probably the single best and most-loved of all the stories in his Canterbury Tales, which is, itself, probably the single most influential piece of English literature written before Shakespeare.

So the question is, why does everyone love the Wife of Bath so much? The answer is this: she embodies and revels in all sorts of misogynist tropes when she tells the people she’s traveling around England with her backstory. She says that she seduced her first three husbands because they were all rich. Then, once they were married, she disrespected them, took and spent their money, denied them sex, and—it’s implied—bumped them off, or at least waited impatiently for them to die, so she could take richer or younger lovers. But she’s also a completely dysregulated sexpot—she says. She had two younger lovers, two, both of whom she also married and bent to her will over time. The final mechanism by which she tames her youngest husband—the husband she claims she loves the most—is that she provokes him by tearing apart a book, so that he hits her. When she falls to the ground, she cries out that he’s trying to murder her, and that she’s dying. He feels remorseful, and promises to cede all control over their lives into her hands, if only she will live and forgive him. And this is the Middle Ages, my friends, so that was a big concession, because married women didn’t have any independent legal rights.

The Wife of Bath boasts about this to all of her listeners, even going so far as to quote misogynist texts from the Middle Ages about how bad wives are. And then, at the end of her long story about herself, and about the five husbands she’s had—now all dead, by the way—she says, “Welcome the sixth, whenever he comes!” This, to a large group of mostly male pilgrims, en route to a shrine in Canterbury. She’s using the pilgrimage, in effect, for speed-dating.

Perhaps understandably, no one warms to her offer. Except, just maybe, Chaucer himself, who is described as being among the pilgrims. He really, really seems to like her. Can’t stop talking about her, in fact. And the reason may be that Chaucer himself could see that she was actually a master of storytelling, and that’s something we should respect.

Moreover, after the Wife of Bath tells this long story about herself, she moves on to tell a “fictional” story about a knight who rapes an innocent young maiden. His punishment for this crime (rape was made a felony in England in the 1370s, FYI), is that he must learn what it is that women “most desire.” He travels around for a long time in search of an answer, and eventually he gets it: women desire “maistrye,” or mastery. They want to be in control.

Now, if you read the Wife of Bath’s story about herself on its own, she sounds quite a lot like Lena. But if you read her story about herself along with the rape “fiction,” it starts to sound like the Wife of Bath has learned coping mechanisms for dealing with and living in a world in which sexual assault is rampant, in which women have very little bodiliy autonomy or safety, and in which what women most desire—mastery, autonomy, control—is forever out of reach.

Now, if we flip the Ray/Lena story, and decide that Ray really is insane, which the film only barely leaves us room to do, even as a thought exercise, we get a Lena who looks a whole lot like the Wife of Bath with her self-narration+fictional story. That is, Lena is someone who’s learned to lean into misogynist tropes in order to spare herself the kinds of privation and dehumanization to which women are routinely subjected simply by dint of the fact that the live under patriarchy.

This, by the way, is classic Chaucer: he offers up a crazy moral disaster, and then destabilizes it further by introducing the possibility that it may not work the way we thought it worked in the first place. It may not mean what we thought it meant. The Wife of Bath may not be a Master Manipulator, but a Chronic Victim of Patriarchy, who just wants some autonomy, somehow. Fascinating. 1390s.

Oh, Eleanor, you silly. You just want to see Chaucer everywhere. This really is a reach.

And it probably is a reach. Like, I would be pretty surprised if the screenwriters of this film had their Riverside Chaucer open next to them while they were drafting.

But, then again…remember how I said the hotel Lena supposedly had her nooners in was called the Hotel Chaunticleer? You know where that name comes from?

The mother fucking Canterbury Tales.

Specifically, it comes from a tale called The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which focuses on the marital woes of a hen and a rooster (the rooster is called Chaunticleer). It turns out that the rooster’s main problems are that he lacks judgment, mistrusts his wife, and is altogether too susceptible to flattery and deception. Also, the rooster’s main problem is—I kid you not—that he doesn’t know whether his dreams are real or not, nor how much stock to put into them.

Hmm…golly, sounds kind of a lot like Ray.

Now, as I said above, my overall read on this movie is that it’s misogynist as all Hades. However, I am genuinely captivated by the way I see a kind of anti-misogynist subconscious bubbling up through the surface of the movie. Yes, I think we’re supposed to greenlight Ray’s murder of Lena. GROSS. But the movie really does leave just enough room for doubt about Ray’s sanity, and just enough room to have compassion for Lena, to make decisively shutting the door on Ray’s being a morally culpable murderer pretty hard.

Final note. Chaucer has another tale in which Apollo (god of light) brutally murders his wife for suspected infidelity. I find it interesting that Ray’s name invokes light. So, did the writers of this film write it with Chaucer in their laps? Probably not. But did they read some Chaucer in college, so that it crept into their brains just enough to make this brutal film not quite worth watching, but definitely worth talking about? Your guess is as good as mine.

But I will say this: go ahead and mine the past for your horror plotlines. There are some good ones buried back there. Just use them wisely, not like these femicide-fetishizing yahoos who made this film.