The Dream, 3_______________________________________

Faced with Jud in the dream,
Laurey's double tries to escape,
apparently into the ghostlike church seen earlier,
but it leads to Jud's smokehouse shack.

Next she runs into a surrealistic
version of a saloon or burlesque house,
not unlike the one Will visited in Kansas City,
where they went about as far as they could go.

But, in this one, Jud reigns
as proprietor and Prince of Darkness.

As Laurey's double confronts the scene above,
at first the music sounds like
it should accompany a silent film,
adding to the sense of anomalousness,
although it is oddly appropriate since no words
are spoken in the dream.

Now Jud's dancers perform in a way that is
anomalous, licentious, masculine,

and depersonalized,
with large, crude, movements
in which they kick up their legs like cancan dancers.
Much of the dancing emphasizes their rear ends.

Against the background of a Hellish red sky
the dancers shake the hems of their dresses
in a mechanical manner, offering
a perfunctory imitation of lasciviousness.

It is clear from all the similarities
that what we are looking at, here,
are demonic re-creations of earlier parts of the movie,
which have been transposed into the dream.

Whereas ducks and geese were
symbols of a rural paradise earlier in the movie,
they have now become strange zombie-like men. 

Laurey's thoughts of love and marriage
and her desire to give in to her love for Curly,
have also been transformed into a demonic wedding
and an effort to get her double to submit
to a form of love imbued with degradation
and emotional deadness.

Even the setting (as noted)
is a reenactment of Will Parker's
liberating experience in the burlesque house.
But it is another demonic re-creation
that offers, not the freeing up of sexual desire,
but a trap of sexual coercion for Laurey's double.

The dream replays music from earlier parts of the movie,
as well, and gives it disturbing new meanings.
For example, the music to the song
"I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No"
was originally sung by Annie
a young and innocent girl we will meet later,
who has trouble saying no to men.
But, in the dream, it accompanies the cancan dancers
who stopped saying no a long time ago
and who expect Laurey's double
to not say no to going over to the dark side.

Laurey entered this dream
because she wanted to see the truth
about love and her heart's desire.
And she does indeed see the truth.
First, she experiences her desire to let her
defenses melt away in the arms of love.
Then, she discovers that her fears of love
have caused her to be haunted
by the demonic side of sexuality and man.

Earlier, in the farmhouse,
she pretended she could go
from lover to lover without regret.
But it was just a form of denial.
The dream takes this defensive fantasy
to its ultimate point, and it becomes a haunting nightmare
of characters who embody degrading sexuality without feeling.

Now, Laurey is caught between the two sides of man.
On one side is love imbued with life,
which will carry her with Curly into adulthood.
On the other, is love associated with
Jud's flight from life, which is connected to
the bodily zone of waste and death -- the anus --
and with the Hellish and dehumanizing underworld
of the dream.