This is the movie scenario I dreamt last night: a fitting end to 2005

The title:
"Cinema as Metaphor."

The action:
1. We're at a fashion shoot in the desert. Some Beduins and camels, and lots of half-naked models in all sorts of racy ensembles. Lots of powder to cover the sweat.
2. On two opposing sanddunes, two armies gather. There's a crew filming them.
3. Far away, a knight in armor, with a pisspot on his head, approaches on a donkey, followed by another man on a donkey, a peasant, followed by another donkey loaded with romance novels. Don Quixote and Sancho Pancha. Behind them is a cameraman in a jeep, filming them.
4. This is intercut with newspaper headlines of the buildup to the war in Iraq.
5. Also intercut with two men on a bus in Manhattan, arguing. One man keeps saying, "Bush is a fucking liar," and the other man keeps saying, "This is no time to call the President a liar," and the other people on the bus join in, until the whole bus is yelling at each other, and the driver stops the bus in the middle of the street and tells everyone to get the fuck off.
6. Then the Don Quixote character stumbles into the scene where the armies are gathering. Excited, he gallops up to the commander of one army, takes off a glove and slaps the commander in the face. They decide to settle things with a boxing match, so they start boxing bare-fisted in the desert, watched by the two armies.
7. The cameraman in the jeep who filmed Don Quixote and the crew covering the two armies start fighting with each other, too. A third camera crew is filming the fighting camera people. A soldier offers his gun to one of the cameramen, but the cameraman is too busy fighting to notice.
8. The fight between Don Quixote and the commander goes on forever, because they're very evenly matched. Many bets are laid by the watching soldiers. The two combatants get very tired. Finally Don Quixote hits the commander so hard he falls down and sits flat on his ass, and Quixote himself falls down from the blow and sits down beside the commander. They look at each other and laugh.
9. One of the fighting cinematographers asks Don Quixote to punch his camera, which he does. The film ends with the camera's POV, as Don Quixote's fist slams into it and the film goes to black because the camera is punched out.

The meaning:
Very meta, I must say. "Cinema as metaphor" indeed. It means something, for sure, but it came to me in a dream, so I don't know what. Yet it seems to wear whatever meaning it has, boldly on its sleeve. A metaphor that neither hides nor teases, but sits there with the irritating obviousness of a red bulb on a clown's nose. Nothing to decode, I'm afraid. All I know is this: politics has invaded my dream world. Ugh. I hate when that happens. Damn. Fuck me with a long lens.

The end:
Happy 2006, y'all.