ppf and the mystery of the haunted ghost

Top Secret!, by the creators of Airplane!, is a parody of WWII movies and "Elvis" movies, in which the Elvis-like American protagonist, Nick Rivers, stumbles into being a hero that helps the resistance against East German fascist regime.

(Feel free to go watch Top Secret! and then return to this post.)

One of my and ebaths's favorite scenes in Top Secret! is one in which Nick is captured and tortured by the regime. In the middle of his torture, Nick passes out and has a nightmare that he's "back in (high) school" and missed all of his finals. Then he wakes up to the real life torture, realizes it was a dream, and says, "Thank god!"

This great little sequence clocks in at under a minute in length!

It's funny because of the delivery (I love the out-of-it performance of the dream classmate), the familiarity of the dream (I couldn't find any statistics on how many people have this dream, but it's incredibly common even after graduation, and there are multiple articles on the subject; here's one I found just now), and the absurdity of Nick preferring getting beaten over the mundane and relatively harmless scenario in which he missed his exams.

I think part of the humor also comes from how true it rings. It's absurd that Nick would prefer getting beaten, but in some way also very real. To me the scene, though comedic, is a fantastic illustration of how human experiences are all determined by how we see them. This is often brought up in the context of how we can change our views, and I think less often in the context of how aging changes our world and therefore the way we perceive events-- the latter of which is particularly relevant to Nick Rivers's high school nightmare.

It's easy to forget how little you know as a child; for example, kids often need to have concepts like death explicitly laid out for them since it's not something they'd pick up on their own, whereas as an adult the existence of death (at least in its most abstract form) is second nature. With knowledge so limited, your world is easily defined by the adults around you. They might introduce you to religious concepts or the idea of something like Santa Claus, and though later you may reconsider your beliefs, as a kid typically these concepts are easily absorbed into your idea of reality.

Ideas around school fall into this category. If you're given the sense that you "must" get certain grades, or complete certain milestones (like taking final exams) or else your life is over, then that'll become your reality. Later on, after graduation, you'll likely realize that failing or missing exams don't end your life, even if they cause a lot of stress and extra headaches. In retrospect, the stress of needing to pass your chemistry final may seem almost trivial. Even if the event of "missing your chemistry final" doesn't change, your experience of the event (in terms of your emotions leading up to and following the event) can change if your perception of the world changes.

In the movie, Nick Rivers is a suave, unnaturally "chill" guy, ready to roll with it as he suddenly has to start risking his life. You can imagine that he's seen enough at this point to realize that whatever happens, he can probably make it work, and if not... he's enjoyed his life enough to not freak out too much over the end of it all. But as a teenager, he wouldn't have had acquired this life experience; it seems he was likely relatively sheltered (also funny) and like so many of us, had his brain trapped in the world (perhaps unintentionally) constructed by his parents and teachers-- a world where he had no way of seeing beyond the apparent horizon of doom that was missing his final exams.

So while being imprisoned and physically tortured is definitely worse than missing your final exams, it makes sense for Nick to find torture more tolerable than the dream-- because in the dream, he's not only living out the scenario of missing the exams, he's also re-living the mental state of being in high school. He's been reverted to the him that has no way of knowing that school isn't life or death, and has no sense of how much control he really has over his own life or how many opportunities still lay ahead.

Put another way, the high school nightmare represents not a single situation (such as being in school or missing exams) but a different world (mentally living in a reality in which you have no agency and you perceive that any misstep will be catastrophic). Though the "torture" situation of reality is less desirable than the "missed exam" situation of the nightmare, perception is what defines experience, and Nick naturally welcomes back the world of reality (in which he is an adult that sees near-infinite options for his future) compared to the world of the nightmare (previously described).