Tom Cruise and the seven dwarves: cinematic postmodernisms in Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky.

Scholarly discussions of cinematic postmodernism frequently posit an implicit opposition between two categories of film-making: big-budget, profit-oriented motion pictures and the so-called "art house" cinema of European auteur productions and independent American films. While the films assigned to the first category (especially those made in Hollywood) are often scorned as "bland, formulaic entertainment, contrived by committee and aimed at the widest, least demanding audiences" (Andrew 38), those assigned to the second are at least equally as often privileged as sites of postmodern and other non-traditional cinema aesthetics; R. Barton Palmer foregrounds this aspect of many American independent films when he describes them as "'difficult', with narratives that are hard to follow or even bewildering, stylizations pushed to excess, and nearly impenetrable themes" (28). Such assumptions, however, ignore the persistent and very real presence of at least some of postmodernism's salient features in a significant number of widely-released European and American feature films of recent years, motion pictures made with every intention of attracting large audiences. Indeed, Palmer argues that Hollywood's output since the 1980s has consistently included the work of filmmakers who aim at a hybrid form that he terms "commercial/independent film, a particular form of postmodern cinema that complexly intersects and deconstructs the contrast between high culture and mass culture" (30). Such filmmakers draw freely on modernist and postmodern devices, but "only those that can be accommodated to the tastes of a broader, more commercial audience" (31); Palmer offers the examples of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee (35), but we might also include the works of Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adap- tation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). In this study we will examine certain postmodern elements of two popular motion pictures of the last decade: Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 film Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) and its 2001 Hollywood remake, Vanilla Sky, directed by Cameron Crowe. In so doing, we will both demonstrate how postmodernism can manifest itself in commercially-oriented motion pictures and compare the aspects of postmodernism most prominent in these two film versions--one European and one made in Hollywood--of the same story. Tempting though it might be to assume that the American film will dilute its source's postmodernism, we will see that this is not necessarily the case.

One irony inherent in casual dismissals of film audiences' receptivity to postmodernism is that cinema, as perhaps the most mimetic of all representational arts, has an equally great potential to problematize and to interrogate its own representational techniques. This potential is the very essence of postmodernism, of course, for one of the primary tenets of postmodern thought is the relative and slippery nature of truth, which cannot help but radically complicate any process of representation, much less one as complex as film. Linda Hutcheon writes that postmodernism's "entire formal and thematic energy is founded in its philosophical problematizing of the nature of reference, of the relation of word to thing" (19). Similarly, in his postmodern analysis of mimesis, Jean Baudrillard outlines a continuum with four phases of increasingly uncertain connection between representation and reality: 1) "reflection of a profound reality, 2) mask{ing} and denatur{ing} a profound reality, 3) mask{ing} the absence of a profound reality," and 4) representation with "no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum" (Simulacra 6). Baudrillard also notes that where conventional pretense "leaves the principle of reality intact," simulation undermines the possibility for a clear distinction between real and imaginary. As we will see, Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky both incorporate a postmodern stance toward filmic representation as they revision the genre of the psychological thriller in order to question the possibility of certain knowledge.

Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky focus on the efforts of the films' respective protagonists, accused of committing murders neither remembers, to reconstruct their pasts and the circumstances surrounding the murders. Each protagonist, Cesar in Abre los ojos and David Ames in Vanilla Sky, was formerly a young man supremely content with the good fortune of being both wealthy and handsome (Cesar is played by Spanish heartthrob Eduardo Noriega, David by the iconic Tom Cruise). Each, however, misjudged the sanity of a woman with whom he had a casual sexual relationship, and in each film the woman cajoles the protagonist into her car, then deliberately crashes it at high speed, killing herself and leaving him with grotesque facial disfigurement. These tragedies radically alter the protagonists' lives and create the conditions in which the supposed murders might--or might not--have taken place. Both films then devote most of their remaining time to Cesar's and David's memories and to their lengthy interviews with the psychiatrists, Antonio and McCabe, who are trying to evaluate their mental states for the purposes of their criminal trials. Were any murders actually committed? If so, who were the victims? Who might Cesar and David have believed to be the victims? Most important, which--if any--of Cesar or David's memories are true, and which are hallucinations or protective delusions or even lies?

Not only does the subject matter of the two films lend itself to the postmodern subversion of traditional cinema's promise of omniscient storytelling, both employ a non-linear narrative which sets up a Baudrillardian continuum of realities. Each film opens (apparently) at the first level of profound, albeit mundane reality as we hear an alarm clock awaken the protagonist and see him go into the bathroom for his morning ablutions. These banal activities are contrasted with the decor and appointments of the protagonists' homes, which suggest a very comfortable standard of living; even their alarm clocks are luxurious, with recordings of female voices that purr, "Open your eyes." The very fact that they can rise casually in mid-morning on a weekday and play racquetball before attending business meetings reveals that neither holds a conventional job. This luxurious standard of living is further emphasized in Vanilla Sky, which initially uses exterior shots to reveal that David lives in an extremely expensive building on Manhattan's Upper West Side and soon makes it clear that he has in fact inherited controlling interest in a vast media empire employing countless workers, while Cesar merely lives the comfortable but hardly Trump-like life of an heir to a restaurant chain. As Cesar and David pull out of their respective parking garages and drive off, the camera presents the streets of Madrid and New York from realistic perspectives--but with the twist that there are no pedestrians or moving vehicles to be seen. It is supremely ironic that, at the point when the plot shifts from the realistic and prosaic to a different mode--the films flirt here with the generic possibilities of post-apocalyptic science fiction--the traumatic event is the absence of the nightmarish traffic typical of both cities. The films then suddenly cut back to a black screen, the alarm clocks once again intone "Open your eyes," and we again see the protagonists in their beds; the spectators now realize that these opening sequences, though presented as first level mimesis, the imitation of profound reality, are in fact dreams, or more precisely, nightmares. The initial scenes thus correspond instead to the second level of mimesis, where reality is masked or denatured. In addition, from the very opening sequences, the films highlight the difficulty in distinguishing between real life and dream, and between levels of mimesis--not only by presenting confused characters, but by causing viewers to experience their own confusion.

After the protagonists repeat the morning rituals seen in their nightmares, both films then move through some realistic scenes which demonstrate Cesar and David's successes with women, establish their relationships with their best (but nevertheless envious) friends Pelayo and Brian, and introduce the theme of their business conflicts: Cesar's difficulties with his partners in the restaurant chain left to him by his father and David's struggles with the directors, whom he mockingly calls "the seven dwarves," on the board of the media company he inherited. In both films the scene shifts suddenly to visitation rooms, in Abre los ojos a room in a "psychiatric penitentiary" and in Vanilla Sky a room in a prison. Here, Cesar wears the baggy clothes of a mental patient and David sports standard prison garb; both wear close-fitting rubber masks and speak to psychologists about the murders they swear they did not commit. At this point, the films veer suddenly into the genre of psychological thriller, with a familiar epistemological quandary: is the protagonist a criminal whose insanity caused him to commit murder but subsequently impedes his recollection of it, or is he the victim of malevolent others who seek to make him appear crazy in order to achieve their own nefarious ends? In addition to concrete reality and dream, the film now offers deception and derangement as aspects of third level reality. The standard thriller is of course the opposite of a postmodern narrative, for although film noir versions of this genre may produce an unjust ending in which the victim is punished or the true criminal does not pay, the traditional denouement does produce the decisive knowledge and closure characteristic of profound reality. Vanilla Sky and Abre los ojos present the epistemology of psychodrama in a more complex context, through the initial juxtapostion of reality and dream.

The non-linear plot development so common to postmodern film dominates the next several sequences, interspersing scenes at the prisons with those which provide a conventional narration of the events leading to the deliberate car crashes which damaged the protagonists' face so badly that they refuse to take off their rubber masks, even when asked to do so by the doctors. Indeed, prior to our first sight of David wearing his mask, Vanilla Sky briefly taunts viewers who have seen commercials for the film with a scene in which David barely escapes being mowed down by a huge tractor-trailer--we expect to see a horrendous crash because we have been waiting for an explanation of the mask shown in the commercials, but are left hanging. The scenes that then follow the actual car crash return to the exploration of dreams and reality. Presented in the splendid settings of Madrid's Parque del Retiro and New York's Central Park, Cesar and David meet the women with whom each thinks he might actually have fallen in love at his birthday party the previous evening. In both films this character is named Sofia (she is also played in both by Penelope Cruz, adding an odd note of postmodern intertextuality to the experience of watching Vanilla Sky after watching Abre los ojos). Cesar and David each tells his respective Sofia of a nightmare he had: the car crashes we have just witnessed. The surreal beauty of the settings incites wariness, as does the fact in Vanilla Sky that the car crash took place in spring or summer, while the scene we now see is in fall. For a second time, the viewers realize that they are watching the protagonists' dreams--or rather, their recollections of their dreams. Voice-overs silence the conversations with Sofia: we hear the unseen protagonists declare their loathing of their dreams, then the visual settings shift back to the prisons, where Cesar and David begin to confide in their psychologists Antonio and McCabe.

The possibility of psychological impairment begins to seem logical in the aftermath of the car accidents in both films, because of the difficulties any human being encounters in trying to accept drastic physical damage, much less those faced by an exceptionally attractive person who has now become repulsive. Vanilla Sky also clearly establishes that David suffers from blinding headaches caused by the surgical pins in his face, pains so severe that they impair his ability to think, which in turn increases the danger that his antagonistic board of directors, the "seven dwarves," will use his physical condition as a pretext for stripping him of control of his corporation. Cesar and David, who had both previously behaved in a nonchalant, easy-going manner in all situations, now react with excessive and almost violent anger toward their plastic surgeons, a bartender, strangers in a club, and even toward the two Sofias, Pelayo, and Brian. At this point, it becomes much more plausible that Cesar and David could commit murder, as they deal with lives that have become nightmares. However, their ongoing struggles with their respective business associates, present in Abre los ojos and emphasized in Vanilla Sky, make conspiracy theory a plausible alternate explanation. The films exploit the problematic nature of grasping reality through narratives that alternate between two different, but equally compelling, modes of epistemological confusion and also repeatedly blur the boundary between reality and dream.

In scenes with Cesar's and David's teams of plastic surgeons, the elusive nature of reality is explored from yet another postmodern angle, as doctors and patients discuss the customized rubber face-covering items that have been made for the two accident victims to ease their adjustment periods. The doctors describe the items in medical terms, as protective, aesthetic, or prosthetic devices. Cesar and David explode with all the wrath of wealthy young men confronted for the first time with problems their money cannot solve, both declaring the masks to be nothing more than masquerades or Halloween disguises. The lead doctors soothingly reply that this is a matter of the wearer's perspective, recalling the episode in Don Quixote where characters argue about whether an item is a magical helmet or a barber's basin. This scene initially exposes and ridicules philosophical relativism as a valid epistemological stance; however, when Cesar and David venture into a nightclub for the first time after their accident, they do indeed use the masks as the sort of psychological crutch the doctors had suggested, rather than as a costume. Thus, this sequence affirms the postmodern tenet that there is no direct access to an unmediated reality, and that reality is thereby constructed rather than perceived.

The next sequence of scenes returns to exploration of Baudrillard's second level, the border between reality and dreams. Sofia's unexpected acceptance of Cesar and David's disabilities begins in each film when she finds the protagonist passed out on the sidewalk and awakens him with the very words, "open your eyes," that had previously served to show spectators how difficult it is to distinguish an actual experience from a dream (in Vanilla Sky the first alarm clock voice appears to be Cruz's as well). Then, as the blissful couples snuggle in bed after new rounds of reconstructive surgery have restored Cesar and David to their former physical perfection, each Sofia wonders aloud if their happiness might in fact be only a dream. That very night, the protagonists have nightmares in which their new faces have reverted back to their disfigured states, then wake up and check their appearance in the bathroom mirror to be reassured. However, when they return to bed the women awaiting them now have the features of the psychotic lovers who killed themselves in the automobile accidents, Nuria and Julie, rather than those of Sofia, even though both claim to be the latter. The confusion is heightened, for the characters and the viewers alike, when visits to Sofia's apartment reveals that Nuria and Julie's faces appear in all the photos that had previously held Sofia's image. For both protagonists and spectators, certainty is an increasingly elusive state, as the film provides no clues as to whether Cesar and David are immersed in hallucinations or whether, instead, their corporate foes--Cesar's business partners and David's "seven dwarves"--have faked Nuria and Julie's deaths and are now using the women to make the protagonists appear delusional.

The "contamination of genres," including juxtapositions of elite and popular filmic genres, is a common aspect of postmodern film (Degli Esposti 8). As we have seen, these two films shift between a standard Hollywood mode, the thriller, and a more sophisticated exploration of the nature of reality and perception. In addition, in Vanilla Sky there are two scenes that appear to flirt with the generic norms of pornography. Early in the film, Julie rhapsodizes about the previous evening's sexual romp with David, emphasizing the importance that they made love "four times." Even though no actual activity was shown, and both characters are presented in the aftermath as semi-nude but with all significant body parts covered, this graphic conversation appears gratuitous, and thus pornographic. Julie repeats the reference to four orgasms, and also bluntly declares, "you came in my mouth." However, it becomes clear as Julie prepares to drive off the bridge that these lines are not Hollywood sensationalism, pushing the boundaries of the R-rated genre. She reveals that in her mind, these sexual acts are sacred rather than degraded, and constitute a promise that David's body has made to her. Thus, the film moves standard pornographic cliches into the psychological and even moral realms as Julie links crude sexual dialogue with commitment, betrayal, and eventually suicide and attempted murder.

Similarly, the post-coitus scene in which David explores a mole on Sofia's breast initially appears as a mere pretext to provide the viewer with a titillating view of the character's nipples. However, this mole eventually becomes an important conveyor of meaning. As David suffocates a woman during intercourse, he becomes confused because of the rapid shifting from one face and flesh tone to another. He had begun making love to Sofia; then when the face shifted, he placed a pillow over the face and upper body of Julie, but, at the last moment, the arms and hands that struggle against him change again to those of Sofia. In order to acertain whose corpse lies next to him, David does not move the pillow away from the face, but instead seeks--and reveals to the camera and spectators--the mole on the breast. Thus, this mole comes to play the role of recognition token common to theatrical anagnorisis. The generic presence of the snuff film is also evident in this death scene; however, it is greatly overshadowed by the epistemological confusion of the protagonist and the spectator. The differing interpellations of graphic sexual elements within scenes that feature "high brow" concepts are markedly postmodern, in that they lay bare the porous nature of the boundary between mere pornography and explicit but artistic eroticism.

The early flirtation with the genre of science fiction comes to the foreground in the final sequence of scenes in both films. When Cesar and David learned that the plastic surgeons have invented a new surgical technique that will allow for complete regeneration of damaged skin, they had in fact declared that such a medical break-through seemed like science fiction. Then, just as the psychiatrists give up and abandon Cesar and David to their fates, seemingly bringing the psychodramas to a close, each glimpses on a prison television a reference to a cryogenics company called Life Extension (LE). This is not the first time that LE has appeared in either film; in both cases their appearances on late-night television had previously been commented on by the characters, while in Vanilla Sky David and others who had seen the story of a dog resuscitated after being trapped for three months in a frozen lake had treated LE as a joke. This time, however, the authors of books about cryogenics appear on talk shows, claiming that the technique has been perfected for people as well, so that those with terminal illness can be frozen until cures are found for their diseases. When Cesar and David insist that their psychiatrists help them to visit the LE offices, the spectator has no clear idea of why this could be important. However, once at the offices, protagonists and spectators come to realize that Cesar and David allowed their bodies to be frozen until surgical technology could repair their faces. In addition, it is revealed that both chose an option that permitted them to live in the dream world of their choosing during stasis. The spectators are suddenly informed that the fantasy-like moments when Cesar and David were awakened on the sidewalk by their respective Sofias had been the beginnings of the "splices" joining the protagonists' actual lives with their dream lives.

These sequences approach the Baudrillardian simulacra, for both the protagonists and the spectators had believed virtual realities to be "the real thing." In addition, their postmodernism is heightened by the fact that they reveal the highly sentimental moments of both Sofias' surrenders to love, typical of cinematic happy endings, to be simulacra. The spectator is forced to re-evaluate significant portions of the films in order to re-categorize the events portrayed and to acknowledge once again that access to reality is not transparent. However, this development also appears to tame a significant epistemological issue, for it offers resolution of the protagonists' and the viewers' confusions concerning the "murders." In a dream state, illogical events are normal, and dreamed irrationality does not put in doubt the possibility of certainty concerning waking life. These sequences take postmodernism to its extreme by both confirming and undermining philosophical relativism.

The final scenes of the two films raise further postmodern confusions, for the psychiatrist and the LE representatives offer conflicting solutions to Cesar and David's problems. The representatives' answers are grounded in science fiction conventions, claiming that the protagonists are still in the dream state, but that new technology will allow them to wake up and live again in the 22nd century, in perfect health and physical form. The catch is that they can awaken only by "committing suicide" in their dream lives, jumping from atop skyscrapers. Antonio and McCabe reintroduce the thriller genre when they assert that the protagonists' corporate enemies have arranged these entire scenarios so that Cesar and David will kill themselves in reality. However, the Spanish and American films resolve this final quandary in very different ways. In Abre los ojos, Cesar is confronted only with this simple choice: to believe the LE representative's claim that he is currently living a dream that he can end by committing virtual suicide, or to believe Antonio's warning that he would actually be ending his corporeal existence once and for all. Faced with these two options, unable to verify either by any means, Cesar chooses to make a quite literal "leap of faith" from the skyscraper rooftop, in other words, he chooses to risk sacrificing the nightmarish life he currently must endure in the hope that he will awaken to a new and better one. In contrast, the LE technician in Vanilla Sky challenges McCabe's very reality: he demands that McCabe name the two daughters he has so often referred to when taking his leave of David. McCabe's inability to do so removes all doubt, confirming that the psychiatrist is indeed a creation of David's LE lucid dreams rather than a corporeal being. When David leaps from the rooftop, then, he does so secure in the belief that he will reawaken in the real world of his own future.

Thus, Vanilla Sky tames--or again, at least appears to tame--the Spanish film's deliberate ambiguity by presenting itself as ultimately belonging to a single genre, science fiction, and by giving the viewer a stronger sense of certainty and closure. However, the juxtaposition of multiple filmic genres simultaneously subverts that sense: it is highly unconventional for a film even to apparently resolve the reality quandary of a psychological thriller by offering a form of certainty that derives from a totally different filmic genre, science fiction. Also, for a film that has presented itself as a thriller, it is problematic to resolve the mystery by suddenly redefining its genre. This approach is dangerously close to a prohibited form of plot resolution in which the character or event that resolves a mystery is introduced at the very last moment. Finally, dependence upon the fleeting presentations of Life Extension earlier in the film as adequate preparation for the denouement may be seen as "cheating" cinematic convention and thus undermining still further the reliability of the closure.

Moreover, there is another important postmodern aspect to David's plunge from the skyscraper in Vanilla Sky: the LE technician who offered David a new life in the 22nd century informs him that in his Lucid Dream, David "sculpted" an existence that incorporated not only idealized moments of his own past, such as the brief encounter with Sofia, but also patterns of wish fulfillment that have their roots in film images and paintings--the visual modalities of popular culture. The technician here echoes the postmodern tenet that perceptions of reality are never transparent, that perception never achieves the unmediated connection marked by the first stage on Baudrillard's continuum. Thus, even as the film seems on at least one level to turn its back on one form of postmodernity, the open ending, it offers another that the Spanish film does not. Cesar's leap from the building shows only his plunge to the ground, but as David falls, the images that flash before his eyes include both black and white photos that appear to represent his childhood, juxtaposed with images from classic films and television shows like "Leave it to Beaver." This juxtaposition of a "real" life and media fantasies lays bare and problematizes the Hollywood convention of representing family life and gender relations in a highly idealized fashion, reinforcing the previous skeptical moment when David and Sofia's perfect relationship was revealed to be have been a lucid dream or simulacrum rather than a representation of profound reality.

Finally, in neither Abre los ojos nor Vanilla Sky does the protagonist's decision to reject his current reality as merely virtual and to leap from atop the skyscraper brings the film to a close or to closure. Instead, each concludes with one final moment of undecipherable ambiguity. At the moments when Cesar and David are about to hit the ground at high speed, both films suddenly cut to a black screen and total silence. After a few moments--still against a black screen--a female voice tells each protagonist to be calm and instructs him, "Open your eyes."

This conclusion, of course, could confirm that Cesar and David are awakening in a Life Extension medical facility after choosing within their dream state to end their cryogenic sleep, and that the voices are those of medical personnel gently rousing them. However, the voices speak in much the same intonation as the initially-unseen alarm clocks of the earlier opening scenes, which played voice recordings to wake the protagonists, thereby raising the possibility that Cesar and David are yet again awakening in their own beds and that some or perhaps all of the film's action was in fact only a dream. Furthermore, in both films an especially attentive viewer might notice that these final voices appear to be those of the psychotic ex-lovers, Nuria in Abre Los Ojos and Julie in Vanilla Sky, who had recorded wake-up greetings on the protagonists' alarm clocks. We cannot, as a result, dismiss the possibility that Cesar and David are awakening from their dreams in the presence of Nuria and Julie, nor even a scenario in which Nuria and Julie might have survived the auto accidents they caused and are at the protagonists' bedsides as they emerge from the post-crash comas specifically mentioned in both films. These possibilities seem particularly valid for Vanilla Sky, the final image of which shows a close-up shot (reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange) of one of David's eyes, opening in response to the voice awakening him. This extreme close-up cannot convey with certainty a specific emotion, but it is easy to read fear or panic into the abrupt widening of David's eye, as if unexpectedly seeing something that--or someone who--terrifies him. Both films, which show the viewer nothing of what Cesar and David awaken to, thus end without closure, leaving the audience unsure of whether or not any of the preceding action could be considered "real." It is quite possible, as we have noted, that the entire content of each film, including all its narrative and oneiric layers, might have been nothing more than one long dream encompassing everything the viewers have seen: a dreamer's dream of himself dreaming.

A close study of Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky thus undermines the validity of two common assumptions: that the complexities of postmodernism are anathema to commercially-oriented films starring popular actors, and that big-budget American remakes of European films automatically seek to "tame" elements that do not conform to Hollywood norms. Postmodernism is in fact absolutely essential to both films, providing the foundation for the epistemological and ontological questions they raise and refuse to resolve. Moreover, we might indeed be surprised that Vanilla Sky did not seek to simplify or at least resolve those questions; Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise, after all, were the director and star of the sentimental and crowd-pleasing Jerry Maguire, and one could easily imagine a Hollywood studio hoping to capitalize on the fact that enactments of physically or mentally "abnormal" characters have over the years garnered many actors Academy Award nominations and statuettes. However, as the preceding analysis demonstrates, Vanilla Sky defies expectations by expanding upon and supplementing, perhaps ultimately even exceeding, the postmodern strategies employed by Amenabar in Abre los ojos.

WORKS CITED

Abre los ojos. Screenplay by Alejandro Amenabar and Mateo Gil. Dir. Amenabar. Perf. Eduardo Noriega, Penelope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martinez, and Najwa Nimri. Artisan, 1997.

Andrew, Geoff. Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in Recent American Cinema. London: Prion, 1998.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

Degli Esposti, Cristina, ed. Postmodernism and the Cinema. New York: Berghahn, 1998.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism. New York, Routledge, 1988.

Palmer, R. Barton. Joel and Ethan Coen. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004.

Vanilla Sky. Screenplay and dir. Cameron Crowe. Perf. Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Jason Lee, Noah Taylor, and Cameron Diaz. Paramount, 2001.