Stop bitching! + My attempt at analyzing this challenging film
This board is full of whiners.
This isn't a typical movie, and if you couldn't stand it, well that's too bad. It was incredibly bizarre, and certainly challenging, but it wasn't thrown together, and I think Hopkins knew exactly what he was doing. Have you people never heard of David Lynch, or experimental film making? This is more Lynchian than Lynch, and quite experimental. It's not made for people that like popcorn blockbusters that they can watch and drool over, nor is it straight forward by any means, but if you've seen any of the trailers for it or read anything about it, you might have been able to figure out it's not going to be your typical movie that feeds you all the answers. It's less about plot than it is about concept. That is, the concept of film making and imagination.
One of the interesting things in the film is the way Felix seems to see his story as if it was real. Of course, when someone watches a movie, reads a book, or especially writes one or the other, he becomes immersed in the material. Hopkins is asking with this film, what if we couldn't tell the difference, and what exactly is the difference anyway? As someone states in the movie, it's all just moving pictures. I'm a writer, and this movie spoke to me in a way. We're put in the shoes of someone who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, his own imagination and the real world, so the film never exactly tells us what's real and what's fantasy. We understand some basic things: Felix is a writer, he's aging, he lives with his wife, and he hallucinates. To me, what the entire movie is about is how someone deals with all the stress of writing a complicated screenplay or novel. Screenwriting is especially stressful with so much pressure from producers and production companies, so it's no surprise that Felix feels like he's losing his mind.
One of the even more interesting aspects of the film, is the way that Felix doesn't only recognize that he's writing a movie, and not only hallucinates that the movie has come to life, but at times he may even recognize that he's an actor IN a movie. Technically, we could say that he realizes he's Anthony Hopkins. I believe this happens when he sees the camera coming at him and his wife tells him to be still. So, he recognizes, in a sense, that he's a fictional character working on a fictional screenplay, but the word "recognizes" doesn't really work here, because he not only recognizes these facts, but they become truths. In other words, his screenplay becomes reality, the fact that he's a character becomes reality, and yet, his character must still complete the film he's in: Slipstream. One of the things I loved was when the woman he supposedly hit with his car haunts him and asks him, "Why did you kill me off? You've lost the continuity!" This is actually talking about Hopkins' film, not Felix's. When Felix hits her, it has nothing to do with the overall plot, and he loses continuity when she comes back to confront him. At the same time, the car from the scene at the desert cafe flashes, and the car continuously changes color-- another clear example of losing continuity, but in Felix's film, not Hopkins'. Maybe this is Felix writing the car with a different color in certain scenes, or a fear that he might end up doing so.
When Felix writes his screenplay, it becomes his reality, and it has to be perfect. It keeps fast forwarding and rewinding, pausing, and repeating parts, most likely because this is what it does in Felix's head as he writes, erases, rewrites, and continues his writing process obsessively.
The only real problem or confusion arises when Felix has visions of getting hit by the car. There are clues to it throughout: for example, that Felix fears he's dead, that there's been some kind of tragedy in traffic, and certainly when he hits the woman with his own car in the same way he is hit. Something to note is that, in the beginning of the film, the word "Dream" flashes very quickly in bright white letters. To me this implies that the whole movie is a dream, and maybe Felix is actually trying to write his movie WHILE he's dreaming, which would certainly explain a great deal of the character switches, mix-ups, and continuity problems. After the end credits roll, there's a scene when the doctor asks him if he's ready to go home, implying that he didn't die from getting hit by the car. It would make sense that the majority of the movie is him trying to write a script while dreaming, so that his dream is the movie we watch, but in that movie he's wondering what it's like to be in a movie, and having trouble trying to figure out what is fictional and what is real. In a dream, nothing is real, but if he believes it while he dreams it, then everything is real, even fiction. What I initially thought at the end of the film was the he had been in some type of coma, or perhaps he was dead, and the dream he was having would eventually result in his recognition of what happened that lead to his coma or death. I still believe that. Throughout the film, his dream is giving him clues, or snippets of reality to show him what happened. By the end, he finally sees the truth, and it had to do with the fact that he was overstressed from writing. He had a heart attack or some kind of panic attack while he was in his chair, just as his wife says. She takes him to the hospital where he has the entirety of the dream, perhaps even getting hit by the car is a dream as well, since the doctor may be asking if he's ready to leave (after the credits) for the first time, rather than after he's hit by the supposed car. Still, I like to think that he was hit by the car because of all the clues leading up to it, and that a resulting coma is the cause for the in depth, trippy dream. He's finally waking up at the end, and the doctor asks if he's ready to go home. However, he may actually be crazy.
Anyway, this is just a relatively quick, on the spot analysis after my first viewing. I'm not surprised, but am appalled at the amount of negative comments on this board. If this was a Lynch film the board would be swamped with theories and discussions, but since people expected Hannibal Lector to eat a couple people, nobody cares to have patience with this very challenging, very bizarre film.