There is something almost unfair about writing about Vanilla Sky as though it were merely a film. Cameron Crowe’s 2001 adaptation of the 1997 Spanish film Abre los Ojos is so thoroughly dimensionalized by music, image, memory, and recurrence that criticism begins to feel like an attempt to flatten what the film has already made more engrossing. This is particularly true of the film’s principal women characters. Sofia (her name means knowledge) and Julie (youthful)are more than alternatives in David’s romantic imagination; they become figures through which the film asks what happens when desire (of eros) attempts to make another person legible, beautiful, permanent and one’s own. This film feels like a big conversation that I want to be a part of. Its repetitions seem already to be speaking to one another, and the viewer is invited into that conversation rather than positioned outside it. Perhaps this is why the film feels so difficult to write about as merely a film.
Hélène Cixous advocates, in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” that women must “write her self,” returning to the body and to language that have historically been confiscated from them. Such writing cannot be enclosed within a fixed system because its movement “will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.” The film and Cixous’s feminism work in a register of quicksilver tonal shifts that deepen each other. For example, Julie’s iconic, almost all-knowing statement has already made a claim that David’s vocabulary of casual sex and “no promises” tries to erase, even as we see them adopting the polyphonic register and language of parody as a married couple. What’s more, she later yells at David in the car, “You fucked me four times the other night, David! You’ve been inside me! I swallowed your cum! That means something!” Cixous’s feminine is an inexhaustible multiplicity. The interwoven timelines stage, fundamentally, a feminist storyline. The women do not remain securely within the places David’s chronology assigns them. At one point, Julie becomes Sofia; Sofia becomes Julie; memory rearranges the past; the future appears nested inside the present. The film’s feminine storyline consequently cannot be separated from its fractured form: the women remain difficult to stabilize because the narrative itself refuses what we expect narrative sequence to be.
The line, like the image, can resist being made singular. As Philip Metres argues, enjambment can create meanings that run against or remain in tension with the sentence itself. The line therefore holds competing meanings in a delayed state. There is, certainly, a male gaze in Vanilla Sky, but the film also mediates that gaze. Men yell directions at David, best-friend Brian longs for the face David has, while David himself is eventually forced to confront his own face in a moment of reprieve at the latrine before the bathroom mirror. The minor sympathy he does receive is from the bartender, who offers him a shot on the house, calls him “bitch.” Even there, drunk and high on medication, he cannot escape being looked at. In the nightclub bathroom, the singer of Red House Painters jeers, “Fix your fucking face!” The gaze that David directs outward eventually turns back toward him. “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” (Mulvey).
Gillian Conoley’s poems from Notes from the Passenger offers us a poetic analogue to this level of self-awareness and emotional candor brim forth through the film’s hyper-focus on detail, even as that detail resists conventional narrative stability. While these animating qualities are not just Conoley’s literary antics, they are embodied both within and outside her formalized verses: “How do we separate / the next night from its screwed-in / light,” she asks, refusing the clean boundary between one thing and another. The poems in this collection proceed through contradiction, qualification, periphrasis, and indirection. It is precisely this difficulty of capturing the right image that the film makes visible. The ventriloquism inherent in the film’s repeated phrases, such as “sweet and sour”, “opinions are expected,” “cats,” and “dreams,” to name a few, suggests that language seems to speak through the speaker as much as the speaker speaks through it. The phrases seem almost incidental when they first arrive, only to acquire another weight when they return. Even “my dreams are a cruel joke, they taunt me” belongs to this architecture, as the same musical world follows David from his encounters with Sofia into the elevator and the park. The film keeps telling us what it is doing, but rarely in the place or moment in which we expect to understand it.
Consider the kitchen. Before David, whose nickname, volleyed onto him in secret by his father’s board members (The Seven Dwarves), is “Citizen Dildo,” his reality begins its final disintegration. His world is already one of surfaces, publications, images, and expectations: the publication he oversees is Rise, and on his first morning at work, even the receptionist Beatrice belongs to the strange machinery of allusion to other art mediums and of his return. This unraveling is ushered in by the Red House Painters’ “Have You Forgotten” carrying its melancholic (melan—black; kole—bile) question through the domestic space as it describes a childlike memory of scenes of nature, friends, and family. If you don’t listen for it, you’ll miss it. The song’s repeated refrain poses a question to the listener about whether one has forgotten how to love oneself, foreshadowing what the film will do to Julie and Sofia, and especially the moment when David’s perception collapses Sofia into Julie. The song appears early in the film, and its placement is part of Crowe’s extraordinarily intelligent musical architecture.
In both feminist poetry and Vanilla Sky, periphrasis and indirection convey the essence of meaning rather than logical formulas or universal propositions. Later, R.E.M.’s “Sweetness Follows” accompanies David after the party, when he imagines Sofia and Brian together. This might be a controversial point, but I’m taking it anyway: music, and the musical language of formal poetry, anticipates and reorganizes imagination. Conoley chooses to rhyme within her own poetry’s themes: “[t]hese fits and starts get chalked” as the speaker links her recurrent events. Brian tells David, “You can do whatever you want with your life.” The sentence sounds like encouragement, but in the film’s accumulating architecture it becomes something stranger: an invitation David spends the rest of the film trying to interpret, while the soundtrack to the filmanticipates what he is capable of imagining.
I am grateful for the way David imagines his incarceration. From earlier, David has already been given the vocabulary with which to misunderstand himself: “pleasure delayer.” The language sounds clinical, almost reassuring, as though desire could be diagnosed and managed. McCabe, the psychologist, later tells us that there are five basic human emotions: guilt, hate, shame, revenge, and love, the last one. “The subconscious is a powerful thing”, then he asks David what his heart and soul will not allow him to forget. “[...] this is also about language, about that insistent and melancholic communicativeness that talks nonstop over its own impoverished imagination,” as Anahid Nersessian might say. David’s incarceration is strangely comfortable precisely because it gives that communicativeness a structure: rational, plenty of space, a father-like figure with whom to talk things through, the time keeping track for them to say what it is that matters.
Sofia insists upon possession of her own life: David: I like your life. Sofía: Well, it’s mine and you can’t have it!
Between the two statements by Sofia and Brian, much of the film’s problem navigates desire. Like all good men, and even when he has everything he wants, David manages a way to ruin itby imagining the worst. “At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (Mulvey). His desire does not stop at proximity, and he continues to want certainty of what proximity means, what another person’s body means, what another person’s silence means. The pleasure must be delayed until it can be made secure.
Julie, Sofia, Mrs. Dearborn, even the fleetingly constructed Ellie (the phonetic correlative of L.E., Life Extension) consequently become less a gallery of “types” than figures who expose the limits of David’s ability to stabilize feminine otherness. Whenever he succeeds in making one of them legible, he mistakes recognition for possession, and that mistake becomes violent. Pardon my aphorisms, but pillows never come with manuals, and all dreaming can do is to patch over the rough spots of our interactions by directing the user’s fulfillment of the complex process of memory; whereas, what poetry can sustain as multiplicity, David tries to resolve as possession. If feminine subjectivity is multiple, excessive, and resistant to the fixed categories through which the phallocentric imagination makes the world intelligible, as Cixous claims, then David’s “liking” of her life is a desire to stabilize her. He wants the woman he loves to remain beautiful, knowable, available, and his. The film’s doubling of Sofia and Julie literalizes the violence of that desire: when David can no longer tolerate the instability of the women before him, his imagination begins to collapse them into images he can possess.
In a motionless and unchanging moment, David and Edmund Ventura of the Oasis Project ascend towards the Heavens. Ventura quips in the Elevator Scene, and it is through this elevator’s glass windows we can appreciate both Y2K editing and the beauty of Monet’s clouds: “You sculpted your Lucid Dream out of the iconography of your youth.” Now stoic, now melancholic (Nancy Wilson’s instrumental beat perfectly fits), now amazed to ponder his folly: David listens. Ventura’s counsel elsewhere in their conversation is almost brutally simple: regain control, calm down. But David’s problem is precisely that control has become indistinguishable from love. It’s obvious to state, but I’ll do so anyway: Ventura can explain the machinery, McCabe can name the emotions, Brian can physically push David, and David can reconstruct the memory, but none of them can make Sofia his.
To return to this review’s walk-in, daydreaming about philology, permanence, I’d like to add that one can make an image permanent, though one cannot make a person permanent. Sofia’s insistence that her life is hers therefore becomes more than a declaration of romantic independence: a refusal of the epistemological fantasy that knowing another person means being able to possess her. Being young means that you’ll be alive forever. David’s fantasy begins there, in the secret conviction that mortality belongs to other people. The film’s technological promise therefore arrives as something almost absurdly domestic: mortality can be made into home entertainment. Benny the dog can live a normal life again. A person can be stored, preserved, deferred, but what your heart and soul will not allow you to forget is not the same thing as what technology can preserve.
The next morning, David symbolically puts his faith in another’s life, out of guilt, and this decision manifests a catastrophic image he will later be unable to stop writing. Cixous warns against precisely this phallocentric impulse toward mastery, the desire to know how something works in order to “make it work.” Taken as the sum of its parts, the film finally makes that impulse literal: the man, under these particular circumstances, cannot tolerate another person remaining irreducibly other to him and therefore constructs a world in which the instability of love can be made permanent. And yet the future rings especially true at the end of the film. “Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.” David has spent the film trying to turn the past into something permanent, so it’s no wonder why his last words are Sofia’s: “I’ll see you again in another life when we’re both cats.” The promise is not possession. It is recurrence without control, intimacy without certainty. Sofia will remain outside him, somewhere he cannot make permanent and will not entirely lose.
This last point is why the film is so difficult to write about. Poetry, for me, is an art form with hazy boundaries that inevitably produces fuzzy definitions, reaching toward such dimensionality and rarely catching it. Poems are more like dreams that enact vast and surprising thought patterns than they are like essays or letters. We get somewhere that feels familiar in the way that dream landscapes feel familiar, but produce emotion that is, in the end, strange and temporary. Music, dialogue, formal verse are cumulative, overlapping waves: they spawn a boom, then become incorporated into the next wave. Vanilla Sky, improbably, does arrive, for me, at a fulfilled dimensionality: its images, characters, songs, memories, and contradictions keep moving after interpretation has tried to stop them. We’ve always thought that what was said is different from how it was said. Perhaps this is why the film feels like a big conversation that I want to be a part of. Its signposts teach viewers how to listen for what returns. This artful cantilevering of a film cuts through the “crust of convention” (John Dewey) and offers a useful barometer when gauging what constitutes an art experience.