David: My dreams are a cruel joke. They taunt me. Even in my dreams I'm an idiot... who knows he's about to wake up to reality. If I could only avoid sleep. But I can't. I try to tell myself what to dream. I try to dream that I am flying. Something free. It never works...
I consider Vanilla Sky to be one of my favorite movies. In the beginning we are flying over various parts of New York City like a spirit from another world. Then we zero in on the flat of David Aames asleep. ‘Sabrina’ with Audrey Hepburn plays on his disappearing television symbolizing the dream of romance. His alarm clock is a recording of Sophia saying ‘Open Your Eyes’. The cover of Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ is seen in the background. The point is that we are beginning to see his world, what makes him who he is. He plucks a couple gray hairs, another symbol for the desire to live forever. David is off to work. Yet something is not right. There is not a soul in the busiest part of the busiest city in the world. As he gets out of his car, and he is running furiously through Time Square, every advertisement that flashes before his eyes seeks to be a cure for his loneliness. They are all band-aid solutions that don’t really solve the problem of the human condition in the long run.
But alas it is all a dream. We are disoriented. We now know that this movie is meant to disorient us, so we don’t know what is real and what is a dream. We now know that a dream about being in the most populated city in the world alone is a dream that perhaps a lonely person would have. This is the point where we realize that this isn’t going to be a simple, linear story. The structure of the movie is a flashback from a dialogue between a masked David and court psychologist Dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell) in a holding cell (almost a symbol for the inside of a trapped mind) trying to get to the bottom of why David was sentenced to a mental institution and why he was accused of murdering the love of his life. But it is also David telling Dr. McCabe his autobiography, the story of his life, how he became the man that he is, and how Dr. McCabe becomes the father figure he never had. We can even view glimpses of scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird (in which the motif of fatherhood is on view) in the room where the security guard is on post.
We discover Julie Gianne (Cameron Diaz) with whom he has casual sex, even though she secretly is in love with him. David is a man who has it all and yet is missing something. They are pretending to be in love. Jason Lee plays Brian Shelby, David’s best friend, who has a love for Julie, Radiohead, and has little pearls about life, the bitter and the sweet. He is a loyal friend and a talented writer, which David willingly funds and supports. I sense a nod toward similarities between Brian and Cameron Crowe himself. As David arrives to work at a Manhattan high-rise, we learn that he has 51% control of the company, while 49% belongs to the envious ‘Seven Dwarves’. David believes he was set up by the Dwarves for the murder of Sophia in order to gain control of the company. David’s father was a lover of adventure, but David feels like he let his father down, since he had do deal with petty issues like a fear of heights. Now he is at the reigns of an empire the Dwarves don’t feel he has the courage to lead. He is in the shadow of a father he never really knew and from whom he never got approval or love. David fears the heights that he has by chance reached.
“There are five basic emotions in life, David. Tell me, what emotion gripped him before he entered that cell?”, asks Dr. McCabe. “Was it guilt? Hate? Shame? Revenge?” Pause. Music. “Love?” I must say the editing in the movie was excellent, and I have a newfound respect for movie editors. With my recent fascination with the art of the movie montage, and my own thoughts about how I’d construct one of my own, I’ve paid more attention to the art of editing. Usually, I pay attention to cinematography. The photographic quality of an image, including the actors, background, angles, and lighting, are all fascinating to me. But editing is what juggles all of this artistry around, and weaves all the threads together into an organic whole. For instance, when Dr. McCabe mentions love as the possible reason for David’s descent into madness, there is a gradual close-up, a blurry transition, and then a past scene of David’s birthday party in his penthouse. It is one thing to write this; it is quite another to feel and experience the way the music, images, and dialogue are edited together to create a sinuous emotional element in the viewer. There are many mini-montages like this in the film, giving it more depth, poetry, and power: when David tells Dr. McCabe about his father, during David’s emergence from a coma, his resurrection from a Howard Hughes-like isolation (compared in the movie to the Normandy Invasion), the quick succession of images with a voice-over of all the things in David’s life he found meaningful as he plummets off a skyscraper in a Kierkegaardian leap of faith to awaken from what he now realizes is a lucid dream gone awry, because of his choice to prefer reality to fiction. All of these scenes gather power from the editing.
There are many cries from critics that the movie is a jumbled mess, that Crowe is out of his league and has wondered into unfamiliar, cinematic territory. But based on my own experience of seeing the movie, upon repeated viewings, the movie makes perfect sense. And even if it didn’t, what is wrong with admitting a few irregularities in a movie that admits to being science-fiction and fantasy? All seem to agree about the structure of the movie: the present timeline of David and Dr. McCabe in the holding cell and the past flashbacks. But the confusion begins after Julie crashes her car, sending David into a coma. There is a dream of a reunion with Sophia, but it isn’t yet the lucid dream manufactured by the program “Life Extension”, designed to put people into cryogenic sleep in order to give them a lucid dream in which past pains are erased and the preferred fantasy that the recipient desired comes to pass. But if there are problems, glitches in the program, ‘Tech-support’ is sent into the mind in the form of a person who helps the recipient escape the dream turned nightmare. All of this is the science-fiction portion of the movie, a part I think plays out very well. However, if you follow the sequence of events after he awakens from the coma, when he awakens on the sidewalk to Sophia’s ‘Open Your Eyes’ after he had passed out, the lucid dream sequence has begun, as evidenced by the sky which purposely resembles a Monet painting, since that same Monet painting was an integral part of David’s life and memory. The rest of the irregularities are explained by the glitches within the lucid dream. It’s as simple as that. In reality, when he awakened on the sidewalk, Sophia didn’t help him up, he attempted suicide (as the film explains), fails, and decides to undergo cryonic sleep to erase past hurt and renew a painless fantasy. In the end, though, the fantasy turns into a nightmare and he chooses reality, with the bitter and the sweet, and makes the leap of faith into reality. I would love for someone to explain to me what is so illogical about this plot.
I came away from this movie knowing more about myself, love, and life. The movie is an allegory of the human condition. We are all spiritually asleep and trapped by egoism and hedonism in our own ways. Once or twice in our lives we meet true love and our desire to unite with it is the beginning of our awakening to something real. The movie explored despair in a real and harrowing way. The facial disfigurement added a layer of horror. I especially enjoyed Diaz’s performance as Julie, the saddest girl to ever hold a martini. She is 27, an age where you start to have enough wisdom to know that you’ve blew a few opportunities, that you are passing your prime. There is a despair just beneath the surface of her eyes, especially as their color matches the car she was driving when she drove off the bridge. She is a spurned lover, and though people are quick to attribute her off color remarks about ‘swallowing David’s cum’ to a mental imbalance, I’d ask people to really notice that these aren’t the cries of a confused mind, but a mind thinking very clearly in response to her despairing situation. People are way too quick to attribute, for example, suicide to temporary insanity. I think that is too simple, and doesn’t pay tribute to the complexities of the human psyche as it relates to true despair. Those who say it is because of temporary insanity, I surmise, haven’t gone deep enough into their own despair to know exactly what they’re talking about.
