Murnau was filming in a democracy, albeit a fledgling one, and his vision of inequality and cavalier authority — of the vast contrast between the individual, with his vast dreams and fragile dignity, and the overwhelming, impersonal, implacable force of a society burdened with unquestioned traditions and ruthless habits — virtually shrieks with warnings of impending disaster.
That's just the opposite of Fitzgerald's interest, which was in social life and its poetic implications — its poetic failings — and in the contrast between the imperatives of the world and the vast dreams and inner visions that reality can never rival, despite mad and desperate attempts to realize them.
Bulgakov's novel is like a vast, labyrinthine dream.
It's an enchanting panorama which you can view at your leisure if you take a car along Highway 4, part of a vast boondoggle dream of conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker way back in the 1950s to route hoped-for resources via his home province of Saskatchewan.
Government efficiency used to work through a monopoly on information: census-takers and secret police, lies in the newspapers and rumours in the streets, all making sure that the people in power knew absolutely everything there was to know, while all their underlings could only see tiny, tattered scraps of the vast plans dreamed up in the cloisters of authority.
– a bookable, sit-down restaurant, its quirky 50s furnishing given a Lynchian air by the light from a vast neon sign reading Dream Baby Dream.
"The vast majority of dreams and reveries don't solve major problems in the history of science," he said.
There's a vast, Dalí-esque, dream-like space around the couple, but they themselves are encircled by the wings of an enormous swan.
The vast majority of dreams we experience will -- for most of us -- never be remembered.
The vast majority would never dream of pushing the exit button.
