I was watching David Lynch's Mulholland Drive in a cinema in which the seats were at right angles to the screen, which meant that everyone was facing the room's right wall. I had a good enough view, but the people sitting a few rows in front of me would have had to look back over their shoulders to see the screen. Why had they chosen to sit in such terrible seats?
In the film, a man had just let a mysterious stranger into his house. The man faced the camera, talking to the stranger, who was out of shot. Their conversation became more and more agitated until the man walked out of the frame and we saw that, all along, a terrifying white-faced smiling man had been sitting on the settee behind him. He shouted a question over and over (something meaningless like, "Where are the biscuits?") as he leaned backwards and forced himself between the cushions of the settee, which seemed to slowly suck him in until he disappeared, still smiling and shouting.
Notes for Freudian interpretation
I know that I'm in the minority on this and that people think I'm unreasonable, but I believe strongly that there is a right place to sit in the cinema and that that is in the front few rows, as close to the centre of the screen as possible. Some people like to sit at the back or off to one side or the other but that's absolutely wrong. The screen is supposed to be an overwhelmingly large image; it's not supposed to feel like you're just watching television. The screen is longer than it is high because because you're meant to take in the edges of the image with your peripheral vision -- that's how directors frame the picture. Occasionally, I look at someone who has deliberately chosen to sit at the very edge of the front row or far, far away from the screen at the back of a large cinema and ask just what I asked in the dream: Why have they chosen to sit in such terrible seats?
One of the great things about going to the cinema on my own is getting to sit closer to the front than I do when I'm with people who are not as refined or sophisticated as I am. The day I had the dream, I'd gone on my own to see the first two parts of Heimat 3 in the smallest Filmhouse screen, and had therefore decided to sit in the second row, which was great. However, I felt a little ashamed at the pleasure that I took in sitting in my ideal seat, which I knew was pretty pathetic. Freud might suggest that that shame resulted in my creation of a dream cinema in which it was incontrovertibly true that some seats were simply the wrong ones to sit in.
I haven't seen Mulholland Drive for a while, but the last time I saw it was in the same screen in which I saw Heimat 3. However, the terrifying white-faced smiling man was in Lost Highway, not Mulholland Drive.