Jerry's dreams in The Chocolate War (1988)

Kid has some freaky dreams!!! This is gonna be a pretty picture-heavy post by the way.

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So, in the movie Jerry has three separate dreams and then sees some dream-like stuff at the end. That is what we'll be discussing today. This is mostly movie specific because in the book, if I recall correctly, Jerry's dreams are only mentioned twice briefly in passing. Once, in chapter 28 where "he'd been dreaming of a fire, flames eating unknown walls, and the siren sounded" and then he woke up and the telephone was ringing. Then again in 32 where "the phone rang in his dreams all night long." Apart from those two times, his dreams aren't really explored (unless I'm forgetting something but whatever). I'm still gonna use some passages from the book to explain some of the themes a bit better though. Let's get into his dreams now.

Dream One:

Okay, I'm not sure if this is technically a dream or just Jerry remembering some stuff, but it's strange and dream-like so I'm counting it.

To set the scene: Yaz's "Only You" is playing in the background while Jerry is staring at himself in the mirror. It then transitions into a memory of him as a younger child playing a game of catch with his mother and father. He makes a pretty good throw that his mother catches, while his dad cheers behind her. She runs up to Jerry and hugs him, super proud.

I like how the kid looks nothing like older Jerry

Next, we see an image of a lone coffin on a football field in front of a goal post with a forest of dead trees in the background.

After that is an uncomfortably long shot of Jerry's mom as she lies pale and sick in bed, so deathly still that if she hadn't blinked I'd have thought it was a photo.

We go back to seeing Jerry staring into the mirror as the camera closes in on his face. His eyes are glassy, his jaw tense, mouth tight, and he is slightly shaking. The picture below doesn't really do it justice but the dude looks distressed. I'm going to come back to this in a bit.

What fifteen year old has a jawline that chiseled?

Then we're back at the football field. The coffin, goal post, and dead forest are still there but this time Jerry is standing in front of the coffin with his back turned to the camera and he is joined by three other men bowed over the coffin as well. These men are, in order: a doctor, a priest, and his father. It's this specific part that leads me to believe this isn't just a straightforward memory because that would be a pretty weird funeral.

There's a slight worm's eye view close up of the doctor as he looks down and says "there's nothing anyone can do." The camera pans over to the priest where he says "it's God's will." Finally the camera continues panning to Jerry's father who says "it's just life." Remember these words because we'll be coming back to them. The dream/memory ends there because the next shot is of Jerry watching his dad sleep on the couch and then they talk about how his dad's day was at the pharmacy and Mrs. Hunter left a casserole yada yada yada. You know what happens, why else would you be reading this if you haven't seen the movie?

So now that we've gone over each part of this dream let's examine it. 

I don't think the part where he's playing with his parents needs much explaining. He had a loving mother and his parents were happily married. He is reminiscing about his childhood, how much he loved his mother, and how playing an athletic activity was one way that he spent time with her.

The shot of the coffin in the field is most likely a reference to chapter 2 where Obie is looking out at the football field and notices that the "shadows of the goal posts definitely resembled a network of crosses, empty crucifixes." Even though that passage is about Obie, the director still probably read that and thought that the symbolism could be used for the movie in a way that would get across to the viewer better. It would be awkward in the movie to just have Obie comment that the goal posts look like crosses, so it's smarter to show the big white goal post acting as an actual cross at the funeral. So now it's twice that Jerry's mother is associated with sports- she played catch with him and now she's buried in a football field. 

Again, I think the close up of his dying mother is also pretty self-explanatory. She's sick! She died! It's also eerie. Her eyes are glazed over, her skin is pallid and clammy, her expression is blank and miserable. The shot lasts about 8 seconds, which doesn't seem that long but it's actually pretty long and uncomfortably so. The audience is forced to watch her suffer just like Jerry had to. 

Jerry is also watching himself suffer while staring into the mirror. In the book, there's a passage in chapter 9 describing how Jerry felt when his mother died- "Jerry was over-come with rage" and that "he was angry at the way the disease had ravaged her. He was angry at his inability to do anything about saving her" and then despite his anger "he did nothing except lie awake in the dark, thinking of her body there in the funeral home". I feel that in this shot Jerry's actor did a good job of getting that rage across without any yelling or screaming, just his body language showing that he's angry but holding it in. Because that's what a man does. Right before describing his rage, the narration says that "Jerry wished he could be as strong as his father, always in control, masking his sorrow and grief." Later in this post and in another post I want to talk about the concept of masculinity a bit more, but for now we'll leave it at this: Jerry is bottling up his emotions, trying to be a strong man, trying to make the memory of his mother proud. Men don't cry, men don't let their emotions control them, men only use logic, men hide their feelings to be strong for others because men are leaders. Or at least that's what the patriarchy would have him believe. 

Finally, that strange funeral. The shot has an eerie, surreal quality because obviously nobody would bury a person in a football field and then have only four people show up to the funeral. Maybe if this was a murder or something but it wasn't and now I'm getting sidetracked. Along with the set up being strange, the way the camera closes in on each man as he's speaking is disorienting. It's like they're looking down on us both physically and metaphorically. Moreover, the camera pans slightly too fast from man to man and it's dizzying. To me, this reflects the idea that Jerry felt disoriented when his mother died, like his whole world is moving too fast for him, and the men looking down on him reflects him feeling like a small child.

Each man's words are things that would be told to a child experiencing death for the first time. They're trying to explain to Jerry why his mother died and why awful things happen for seemingly no reason. Of course none of them can give him a straight answer or at least an answer he can accept. The doctor tells him "there's nothing anyone could do" trying to explain that it's nobody's fault and that fighting against it was futile. He exemplifies the feelings of helplessness that Jerry experienced. The priest tells him "it's God's will" which, in my opinion, is one of the coldest things you could say to a person, much less a teenage boy, about someone's death. He's already angry that she died and now you tell him that God wanted it? This sets up his issues with God and religion that I'll talk more about later. Lastly, his poor father telling him "it's just life." He represents an acceptance of death, but Jerry can't handle it. He's not ready to accept it quite yet and he's disappointed in his father for being so quick to accept it. As shown by his whole rebellion against the school and the Vigils, Jerry doesn't want to be someone who just accepts things the way they are, even if it's something he can't change like death. He doesn't want to be like his father in this regard.

I also want to make a quick comment on the song playing over all this. It's Only You by Yaz (or Yazoo if you're British). The song is just a simple song about wanting the love of someone who is not near to them. I don't think the song is super important in analyzing the dream but it was chosen for a reason and fits the theme of Jerry missing his mother's love. It's also the second Yaz song in the movie so maybe they just had a lot of their songs licensed already and went with it for that reason. I don't know.

So that's dream one, let's move onto...

Dream Two:

This dream starts out with a shot of Jerry's mother smiling and waving in bed. Despite her happy expression, she is nearly pure white and looks ghostly. She mouths something but I can't make out what, maybe it was 'good bye'? I'm not at all sure so don't quote me on that.

It then cuts away to a view of the full room- it appears to be a painfully white hospital room, the only color coming from outside the window where there's a blue and purple sky. There's a pale nurse putting the blanket over Jerry's mother's face. Jerry himself is watching, wearing a blindingly white shirt, and the nurse turns her head to stare at him.

This is kind of a vibe though??

Next, there's a flashback to Brother Leon bringing Bailey to the front of the class and 'accidentally' hitting him with his stick pointer thing.

Following that is a close up of Lisa, the girl that Jerry likes, saying "you're missing a lot of things, Jerry" (if you read the homoeroticism post then these words should be familiar).

Then Jerry and Lisa start making out while Jerry has on a black leather jacket. They're outside and the camera is quickly circling around them and soon a hospital bed creeps into the background and ominously looms there.

It switches back to Brother Leon in the classroom, but this time Jerry has taken Bailey's place in the front. Brother Leon hits him with the stick, this time less accidental, and all the students start clapping. They clap for a strangely long amount of time, and though music is playing over it you can still hear the sound of their clapping.

Then Jerry wakes up.

We gotta acknowledge the events that precede this dream sequence; Jerry's ten days of refusing the chocolates were up but he continued to say no anyway, much to Brother Leon's anger, thus the true beginning of his rebellion. I'm going to say one thing here that might not make sense until I go over the next dream. Jerry rebelling against Brother Leon and the Vigils is Jerry rebelling against God for killing his mother. That's why this dream begins with her. She's smiling and waving but she's so pale that it's terrifying as opposed to happy. The insanely white hospital room and the nurse's insanely white dress and Jerry's insanely white shirt all play with our idea of the color white. Normally, white is considered pure- brides, baptized children, and angels wear white. Heaven is often depicted as a paradise on white clouds. As a Catholic, Jerry is no doubt familiar with associating white with these religious connotations of white. However, white is also sterile, medical, and deathly. Hospitals are white, doctors and nurses wear white, ghosts are white. Jerry's mother just died from cancer so he must've been at the hospital often and surrounded by whiteness. He knows that heaven is white but so is death. To hearken back to what the priest in his first dream said: "it's God's will."  God killed his mother and that's all he knows. I'll talk about how God = Brother Leon/Trinity in the next dream.

Moving onto more of this dream first. Jerry dreams about Bailey being interrogated in front of the class. That's simple enough, he's thinking about how Bailey was singled out and nobody stood up for him and how he could just as easily be singled out.

Next, he dreams of Lisa and kissing her. Normal enough, he's a red blooded teenage boy and she's a pretty girl that showed interest in him. What's interesting is he's got on a leather jacket like hers. I mentioned in a previous post that she represents freedom to him. She doesn't play by anyone's rules, she hangs out with her friends and is free to express herself as she wants. In her, Jerry sees all the things he's 'missing' while he's stuck in the world of Trinity. It's the empty hospital bed in the background that trips me up. His mother isn't in the bed but she doesn't need to be, Jerry is still thinking of her. Now that his mother is dead he lacks a female influence in his life. It's just him and his dad at home and all the teachers at Trinity are men. Lisa acts as a replacement female influence for him. I don't mean that he's got like an oedipal complex or anything but it's true for a lot of people that how your parents love you is how you learn to love romantic partners. Poet Eduardo C. Corral has a poem called "Ditat Deus" where he talks about how he "learned to make love to a man by touching [his] father" and describes taking off his father's work boots for him, tracing the veins of his neck when he slept, and help him shave in the morning. He was shown by the ultimate male figure in his life how to love another man and this affected his romantic relationships his whole life through. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the memory of Jerry's mother, the ultimate female figure in his life, guides him in learning to love a woman.

The final part of the dream is when he has taken Bailey's place in the classroom. Here, Jerry predicts the harassment he'll have to face for defying Brother Leon and the Vigils. The students all clap for Brother Leon and enjoy seeing Jerry put in his place. Jerry knows that he'll be alone in this venture.

Dream Three:

This is the last actual dream Jerry has and he has it right after being beat up by the kids that Janza hires and right before he's shunned at school after the rumor that he's gay spreads.

Speaking of being gay, the first image we see in the dream is Archie speaking with Lisa's voice. If you read my post on homoeroticism in the movie then you'll know what I've already said about this particular bit, but I'll go over it again in a bit.

The next thing we see is Goubert speaking in Brother Leon's voice. He says "only God is perfect, Jerry. Do you compare yourself to God?"

After him is Brother Leon in both the voice of Jerry's father and the voice of the priest from the first dream. He says "Mrs. Hunter left a casserole. It's God's will."

Then, it's Jerry's mother speaking with the voice of the boy that talked to him on the bus earlier. She says "boy, you've got guts, Renault. You know that?"

Jerry's father is the last one to speak in a mismatched voice. He talks in Goubert's voice and says "I'm quitting the team, Jerry. I was crying like a baby."

The dream moves on to show Jerry moving down his hallway (I say moving because it's not quite walking- it's almost like he's floating but we can't see his feet) and his father is on the phone at the end. He offers Jerry the phone and says "it's your mother, Jerry. She's proud of you."

Then we cut to an image of a blood red moon hanging above the school bleachers.

The last part of the dream and, in my opinion, the strangest is Jerry in uniform standing at the front of a classroom behind a podium and Archie dressed in a monk's robe is next to him. Jerry has the teacher's pointer stick thing and hits Archie with it. Archie remains calm and turns his face to the camera and smiles. It's hard to read Jerry's expression behind him, but he might be smiling?

He looks good with his hair pushed back!

Playing over all of this is pleasant classical music.

So, let's go over the people he knows speaking in mismatched voices. I discussed in a previous post how earlier in the movie Archie used sexuality to intimidate Jerry and how this moment in this dream has Jerry combining a girl he's sexually/romantically interested in with a boy who sexually intimidated him. The wires got crossed, or it's implying Jerry is bisexual/bicurious. Either way, it shows Jerry is sexually confused.

Goubert then has Brother Leon's voice, saying the words that Brother Leon said in the classroom when he was interrogating Bailey. Previously, Goubert encouraged Jerry to end his rebellion and just sell the chocolates. Here, it seems that Goubert is warning Jerry about how he's going to be persecuted like Bailey if he keeps up this fight.

Then we get to Brother Leon. I said earlier that God = Brother Leon/Trinity and this is where I'm getting my evidence from. The priest from the first dream tells Jerry that his mother's death is 'God's will' so Jerry learns that God killed his mother. Brother Leon is in charge of Trinity, a Catholic school, he gives lessons on God's perfection. Jerry views him and the first priest as spokesmen for God, so his rebellion isn't just against the school but against God himself for killing his mother. Brother Leon also speaks in Jerry's father's voice too, though. Brother Leon is a male authority figure like his father but a far more sinister version. When his father said it, he was resigned and gentle. When Brother Leon said it, it's insulting Jerry's father's resignation to the will of God. I don't know, maybe that's a stretch. Whatever.

Anyway, we then see Jerry's mother talking in the voice of the boy that praised Jerry for standing up to the Vigils. She's smiling and her words are full of praise, but it feels mocking. Like she's not actually praising him but laughing at him.

Finally, Jerry's father says Goubert's words. Jerry's father gave up on his dream of becoming a doctor, or at least never reached for it, and reflects giving up on life like how Goubert gave up the football team once the going got rough. And not only did his father give up on being a doctor, he also in a way gave up on being angry at his wife's death. As I mentioned earlier, he accepted her death as being just how things are in contrast to Jerry's anger. Jerry is disappointed in his father for not being more upset just like how he's disappointed in Goubert for not standing up against the Vigils.

Going back to Jerry's mother, he dreams that he has a call from her telling him how proud she is. Again, this would normally be great. He wants to make his mother proud, that's part of why he's doing all this in the first place. But it still feels mocking. His father is smiling as he hands him the phone, but he's speaking slow in a dimly lit hallway in front of Jerry's shadowy figure. Moreover, the only phone calls Jerry had been getting lately in the waking world were ones of boys laughing at him with no words. We never see Jerry answer the phone since the scene cuts to the red moon, further adding to the eerie atmosphere. Is what he's doing really making her proud? If it is, is it worth it? All this harassment, the beatings, the negative attention- is standing up to the Vigils and the school really worth making a dead woman proud?

The last part has the roles in the classroom switched around. In the previous dream, Jerry was being hit by Brother Leon. Here, Jerry is doing the hitting but he's not attacking Brother Leon- he's attacking Archie dressed as Leon. He knows the two are in on it together, but he can't touch Brother Leon because he's not only a teacher but a monk too. However, Archie is just another student and though an extremely powerful one there's at least somewhat of a chance Jerry could take him on. However, despite Jerry striking him, Archie just smiles at the camera. A slow, sinister smile aimed at the audience. Jerry can hit him all he likes but he can't take him down.

That's it for the dreams themselves, but let me talk real quickly about what Jerry sees after he wins his big fight.

He has just won against Archie, beat him unconscious and took him personally down but still played into the hands of the Vigils. One of the strange things he sees after winning is Brother Leon standing next to Janza with a hand on his shoulder. I can't quite tell if this is meant to be in his imagination or actually happening. It would be kind of strange if it was actually happening. In the book, Brother Leon does show up at the final fight but he only comes to interfere with another monk trying to punish Archie. Here, Archie is beaten and no monks come out to break things up but Brother Leon still shows up and looks proud that Jerry won. He also has his arm around Janza, a student we've never seen him interacting with before. Leon is the one that enlisted Archie's help and the sale was a success, why would he be happy if Archie got beaten in the end? That's what leads me to think that this small bit was all in Jerry's mind to show that the true villain is still out there and can make other boys his pawns in whatever games he plays.

Then Jerry looks out to the bleachers and in the middle of all the cheering boys he sees his mother sitting there, a tear rolling down her stony face. This is the opposite of Jerry's previous dream. There, she was proud of him but it felt fake. Here, she's disappointed in him and it feels real. Jerry gave in to violence, gave into the games of the Vigils, let the school win and knows that his mother would be disappointed. He won, but he lost.

And that's all I have to say about the dreams. At the moment, I only have one more post I want to write about The Chocolate War, specifically about the role of sports and masculinity. Join me next time, sunglasses emoji.