How Much of ‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion’ Is Really a Dream Sequence?

There are certain movies that just define your high school experience. They’re the movies you watched with friends, the ones with obscure dialogue that became inside jokes and shorthand with your nerdy little clique. For me (class of ’02), one of those movies was unquestionably Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

The 1997 comedy wasn’t a breakout at the box office, but it was a smash hit in another way: me and every single one of my friends quoted random lines (“I cut my foot before and my shoe is filling up with blood”), did elaborate interpretive dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” and constantly imitated Janeane Garofalo’s drink-dribbling eye roll moment (usually without a drink, which admittedly is pretty essential to the gag’s mood). We even said “Watch out Tucson, here we come!” every time one of us started a car. But every time I’ve rewatched the movie as an adult, I’ve been struck by two things: how LOL hilarious it still is and how much of the movie doesn’t actually happen at all.

Dream sequences and flashbacks aren’t the exclusive domain of Romy and Michele. They’re a super common storytelling device that allows for all sorts of narrative shortcuts and wild feats of fancy. You wanna do a gruesome slasher story but you’re writing for Family Matters? Make it a dream! What’s different about Romy and Michele’s use of these stock devices? They take up a significant chunk of the movie! How much? I’ve always wondered that and with Romy and Michele now streaming on Hulu, I have the opportunity to really solve this riddle.

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion isn’t a long movie to begin with. It has a running time of 91:55, and 5:08 of that is taken up by the opening and closing credits. So the movie’s actual running time is 86:47, from the first action (Romy and Michele heckling Pretty Woman on TV) to the last (Romy and Michele folding clothes at their boutique).

There are two flashbacks that take place from minutes 12 to 25, which is totally understandable since this is a movie about a high school reunion. If you’re doing a reunion movie and you don’t take the opportunity to put your cast in ’80s fishnets and pastels, you’re committing a heinous movie crime. You have Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino, you crimp that hair and give them a righteous ponytail! The two flashbacks take up 11:41.

And then there’s the dream sequence.

At around the 45 minute mark, Romy and Michele get into a knockdown drag-out over who is the Mary and who is the Rhoda in their friendship (lordy am I nostalgic for the 1990s’ nostalgia for the 1970s). When they pull up to the reunion at 47:43, we’re totally in dream sequence territory although first-time viewers won’t realize it yet (sorry for the spoilers, randos reading this far into an article about a movie they’ve never seen!).

You can totally tell it’s a dream sequence, though, because the clues are right there from the beginning. Just look at that totally dreamy oner as the camera follows Michele from the car, into the hotel and all the way into the reunion, before zooming past her over to Romy. And then weird things start happening, as characters literally float, Michele loses her shirt, and our heroes get their individual comeuppance while still drifting dangerously apart. Cut to 70 years later and we see two 98-year-old women still feuding over which ’70s sitcom star they are.

And then BAM–reset button! At 60:22, Michele is startled awake by the sound of horns honking. The last 12:39 have been a dream! Twelve and a half minutes of the movie is a dream! Here’s how that breaks down:

The movie isn’t even that long to begin with, and almost 13 minutes of it is a dream sequence! That’s 14.57% of the whole movie! Another 13.46% of the movie is spent in flashback. That means that the actual length of linear and canonical story in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion adds up to 62:27–which is about the length of most Netflix TV episodes.

Does any of this matter? I dunno! I do know that two of the hands-down best jokes in the entire movie occur during the dream sequence. The first when Michele schools all the cool girls on how to make post-it glue:

The other is when Michele gets hit by Sandy Frank’s stretch limo outta nowhere and goes flying.

Look at the height on that! Tens across the board from the judges, and Michele gets the gold!

So yeah, a lot of time in Romy and Michele is spent in a dream sequence–a dream sequence so long that it makes you think, “Holy cow that was a long dream sequence” when it finally wraps up. But this isn’t a Marvel movie where questions of canon really matter. It’s a ’90s comedy meant to deliver jokes–and maybe the biggest, most meta joke of all is that the movie spends a huge chunk of time indulging in what’s usually considered a fleeting narrative tool.

Or you know, maybe the joke’s on a weirdo like me that spent all this time calculating all this instead of just watching the movie again.

Stream Romy and Michele's High School Reunion on Hulu