“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs ... when I waked, I cried to dream again.” — The Tempest, William Shakespeare
“Looking back all I did was look away / Next time is the best we all know / But if there is no next time where to go?” — “Re-Make/Re-Model,” Roxy Music
Open your eyes.
Critics thought Crowe had lost his touch. He was supposed to make crowd-pleasing favorites like Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, films with an earnest emotional core that were easy to love, and which won the favor of critics and audiences alike. But Vanilla Sky, released in December of 2001, seemed to break this pattern, befuddling viewers and criticized by reviewers as a vehicle for star Tom Cruise which failed to connect on the emotional level of Crowe’s previous hits. The director’s cultural cachet — not to mention critical acclaim — never quite recovered from this perceived misstep.
Yet two decades onward, it is Vanilla Sky that holds up as both the most challenging and rewarding of Crowe’s major movies. Equal parts beguiling and prescient, the film at once critiqued its time, ushered in the twenty-first century, and speaks still to the anxieties of the present age.
On its surface, Vanilla Sky is the story of David Aames (Tom Cruise), a magazine mogul and executive maneuvering for control of his company from a hostile board of directors. He treats others without regard or consideration, whether they be lovers like Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz) or friends like Brian Shelby (Jason Lee). One fateful night, however, he meets Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz), with whom he falls in love — before he’s involved in a horrific car crash, after which his face is disfigured and he gradually loses his grip on reality. Eventually, much of the events of the film are revealed to have been the result of a sleep-induced alternate reality by the mysterious company “Life Extension” — at least ostensibly.
The plot, however, is one of the least important parts of a film that functions most effectively through association and allusion. When David recounts his biography for the benefit of Sofia, for example, his tone is self-deprecatingly grandiose as he evokes narrative tropes — recounting larger-than-life story beats — distancing himself with an edge of irony. While critics, primed by Crowe’s previous films to expect earnest displays of emotion, found Cruise’s portrayal of David unsympathetic and his romance with Sofia unconvincing, Vanilla Sky never quite allows the audience to feel the comfort of emotions like love.
The film’s true emotional register is instead of fear, dread, and paranoia, portrayed most powerfully through association and allusion rather than through overt displays — appropriate for a modern society where human connection is mediated through a screen, but darker feelings of unease are both omnipresent and often unnamed.
(Writing in early 2002, Cameron Crowe stated that the film had been inspired by Elvis reflecting upon the alienation he felt as the constant center of attention: “I feel lonely, even in a crowded room.” Appropriately, the director also admitted in the same piece that the phrase “vanilla sky” was chosen more because it seemed evocative than because of any specific meaning.)
In his previous film, Almost Famous (both a chronicle and a critique of myth-making), Crowe succeeds in recreating the world of 1970s rock. In contrast, Vanilla Sky is more of a simulacrum than a recreation — a false copy that is, in reality, an entirely new creation, like an AI program producing new works of classic art styles. In the wake of the film’s release, one critique was that it didn’t hold up to Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (“Open your eyes”), upon which it is based.
But Vanilla Sky is more of a remodel — or a remix — than it is a remake. Creating something entirely new out of what has come before is a hallmark of the modern age, and just like the allusions explicitly recalled in the film as grist for David Aames’ dreams (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Jules et Jim, To Kill a Mockingbird) as well as those which go unnamed (the mask David wears is straight out of French horror classic Les yeux sans visage), Amenábar’s film just adds one more layer of allusion. (In the aforementioned 2002 piece by Crowe, the director compared Abre los ojos to a “song” that his “band” was covering).
For those looking for a traditional film plot, Vanilla Sky, though it has the structure of a thriller or a “whodunnit,” doesn’t quite satisfy. The explanation offered by the ending is that David has been in a dream of his own making, ultimately choosing to wake up. On the film’s commentary track, Crowe identified at least five possible interpretations of the ending, but more are possible. Why would David have been in his dream state for 150 years? Is the plot of the film playing on an endless loop in David’s mind?
Both opening and closing with the words “open your eyes,” Vanilla Sky itself plays out on a loop, yet changing each time through the context of repeated viewings and the associations the audience brings to the film. If you reject the “whodunnit” structure the film presents on its surface, “objective” reality (what actually happened? who’s lying and who’s right?) matters less than the subjectivity of David’s experience. The film has more of the logic of dreams, a choose-your-own-adventure book, or of a video game than of a traditional film narrative.
Some critics who had warmed to Crowe’s direction of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire here criticized the star’s performance as unconvincing. Parts of the film are uncomfortable to watch because of the sheer narcissism and disconnectedness of David Aames — yet this is precisely the point (and Crowe has elsewhere made pointed critiques of wealth, fame, and celebrity). Cruise’s thousand-watt smile often betrays a chilling lack of real warmth. Viewed today, it’s easy to read his part in the context of the narcissism of the social media age.
David, it is ultimately revealed, scarcely even knew Sofia, falling in love more with the idea of her than the person — a familiar tale today given the flattening effect of social media, where many of us have stalked an acquaintance on Facebook, or fallen in love with celebrities through the illusion of a parasocial connection, writing a private narrative that exists only in our head
Crowe’s soundtracks are one of his trademarks, and while Vanilla Sky’s music might seem disjointed on an initial viewing — a combination of the 60s folk, rock, and psychedelia the director is known for, and early 2000s “alternative,” zeitgeist-y tracks — the music of the film supplies yet another layer of allusion and context which reinforces its themes. Spiritualized’s “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” incorporates bits of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and “Fourth Time Around” (a wonderfully evocative title) is, as historian Sean Wilentz described, “Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Bob Dylan” — waves and waves of allusive resonance.
Meanwhile, “Good Vibrations,” which appears in a climactic scene, was the result of a collage technique of remixing hundreds of individual recordings into a cohesive song, and Radiohead’s Kid A, whose “Everything in Its Right Place” opens the film, used a similar process, as did Nancy Wilson’s instrumental score. (On set, Crowe repeatedly played Kid A, with its themes of alienation and dystopia and its tracks containing variations on the phrase “this is/isn’t happening.”)
Challenging films are often said to reward repeat viewings. More than this, Vanilla Sky recontextualizes itself with each watch. The film was made in the wake of Y2K and evokes that era’s technological uncertainty. For many contemporary viewers, the opening scene of David running and screaming alone in Times Square, as well as its final scene where he leaps from atop a skyscraper, evoked the horrors of 9/11 — which took place just one month before release and seemed to instantly unsettle any preconceived notions of world order.
Viewing Vanilla Sky today, meanwhile, when the promise of social media has curdled into the dangers of hyper-polarization, and on the cusp of the coming of the “Metaverse,” presents a wholly different experience. (Second Life, a precursor to the Metaverse, was released a year and a half after Vanilla Sky and in some ways seemed a fulfillment of the promise of the fictitious “Life Extension”). The film seems utterly of the current age, fully twenty years after its release.
Vanilla Sky is a tragedy, not because David wasn’t loved by his father as a child or because he doesn’t end up with Sofia, but to the extent that modern life is a tragedy, one where allusion and irony are substitutes for romance and emotion. Through MySpace, Facebook, and whatever comes next, we’ve grown accustomed to thinking, like David, that all of us can be the hero of our story, curating our own private worlds. Isn’t this what modern life promises? Our lives as a star vehicle for ourselves — just press play and repeat. Yet with the fulfillment of that promise comes a loss of emotion and connection, and of an ability to even name that loss.
Vanilla Sky’s greatness lies in the fact that it allows each viewer to bring their own associations to each viewing. The suggestiveness of its individual parts, from the film it “remakes,” to its stars, to its soundtrack, results in a film whose ultimate meaning is endlessly expansive. Though dismissed by most critics, the true power of the film has been before us all along. All you had to do to see it? Open your eyes.
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If you want to learn more about Tom Cruise's filmography and acting style, order the book Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor.