infomercial for Scientology and/or an homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall. But fuck it—I’m not going to overcompensate and list a bunch of criticisms about a movie I honestly liked, and I did like Vanilla Sky. And what I liked was the way it presented the idea of objectivity vs. perception, which is ultimately what the “What is reality” quandary comes down to. In Vanilla Sky, Cruise plays a dashing magazine publisher. He likes to casually bang Cameron Diaz, but he falls in love with the less attainable Penelope Cruz (it is a credit to Cruz that she makes this situation seem plausible; Penelope is so cute in this film that I found myself siding with Cruise and thinking, “Why the hell would anyone want to have sex with a repulsive hosebag like Cameron Diaz?”). When Diaz figures out that Cruise has been unfaithful, she goes bonkers and tries to kill them both by driving a car off a bridge. She dies, but Cruise escapes—with a horribly disfigured face. Despite his grotesque appearance, he still pursues a satisfying relationship with Cruz and intends to repair his mangled grill through a series of plastic surgeries. Against all odds, his life (and his face) improves. But then it turns out that the diabolical Diaz is still alive…or maybe not…maybe she and Cruz are actually the same person…or maybe neither exists, because this is all a fantasy. Frankly, whatever answer Crowe wanted us to deduce is irrelevant. What matters is that Cruise ultimately has to decide between a fake world that feels real and a real world that feels like torture.
Cruise chooses the latter, although I’m not sure why. Keanu Reeves makes the same choice in The Matrix, electing to live in a realm that is dismal but genuine. Like Vanilla Sky, the plot of The Matrix hinges on the premise that everything we think we’re experiencing is a computer-generated illusion: In a postapocalyptic world, a band of kung fu terrorists wage war against a society of self-actualized machines who derive their power from human batteries, all of whom unknowingly exist in a virtual universe referred to as “the matrix.” The Matrix would suggest that everything you’re feeling and experiencing is just a collective dream the whole world is sharing; nobody is actually living, but nobody’s aware that they aren’t.
For Reeves’s character, Neo, choosing to live in the colorless light of hard reality is an easy decision, mostly because The Matrix makes the distinction between those two options very clear: reality may be a difficult brand of freedom, but unreality is nothing more than comfortable slavery. Cruise’s decision in Vanilla Sky is similar, although less sweeping; his choice has more to do with the “credibility” of his happiness (his fake life would be good, but not satisfying). Both men prefer unconditional reality. This is possibly due to the fact that both films are really just sci-fi stories, and science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people.[54] Every protagonist in a sci- fi story is ultimately a moral creature who does the right thing, often resulting in his own valiant destruction (think Spock in The Wrath of Khan). But what’s intriguing about Keanu and Cruise is that I’m not sure I agree that choosing hard reality is the “right thing.” The Matrix and Vanilla Sky both pose that question—which I appreciate—but their conclusions don’t necessarily make logical (or emotional) sense. And that doesn’t mean these are bad movies; it just forces us to see a different reflection than the director may have intended. It probably makes them more intriguing.
The reason I think Cruise and Reeves make flawed decisions is because they are not dealing with specific, case-by-case situations. They are dealing with the entire scope of their being, which changes the rules. I would never support the suggestion that ignorance is bliss, but that cliche takes on a totally different meaning when the definition of “ignorance” becomes the same as the definition for “existence.”
Look at it this way: Let’s assume you’re a married woman, and your husband is having an affair. If this is the only lie in your life, it’s something you need to know. As a singular deceit, it’s a problem, because it invalidates every other truth of your relationship. However, let’s say everyone is lying to you all the time—your husband, your family, your coworkers, total strangers, etc. Let’s assume that no one has ever been honest with you since the day you started kindergarten, and you’ve never suspected a thing. In this scenario, there is absolutely no value to learning the truth about anything; if everyone expresses the same construction of lies, those lies are the truth, or at least a kind of truth. But the operative word in this scenario is everyone. Objective reality is not situational; it doesn’t evolve along with you. If you were raised as a strict Mormon and converted into an acid- eating Wiccan during college, it would seem like your reality had completely evolved—but the only thing that would be different is your perception of a world that’s still exactly the same. That’s not the situation Cruise and Reeves face in these movies. They are not looking for the true answer to one important question; they are choosing between two unilateral truths that apply to absolutely everything. And all the things we want out of life—pleasure, love, enlightenment, self-actualization, whatever—can be attained within either realm. They both choose the “harder” reality, but only because the men who made The Matrix and Vanilla Sky assume that option is more optimistic. In truth, both options are exactly the same. Living as an immaterial cog in the matrix would be no better or worse than living as a fully-aware human; existing in a cryogenic dream world would be no less credible than existing in corporeal Manhattan.
The dream world in Richard Linklater’s staggering Waking Life illustrates this point beautifully, perhaps because that idea is central to its whole intention. Waking Life is an animated film about a guy (voiced by Wiley Wiggins) who finds himself inside a dream he cannot wake from. As the disjointed story progresses, both the character and the audience conclude that Wiggins is actually dead. And what’s cool about Waking Life is that this realization is not the least bit disturbing. Wiggins’s response is a virtual nonreaction, and that’s because he knows he is not merely in a weird situation; he is walking through an alternative reality. Instead of freaking out, he tries to understand how his new surroundings compare to his old ones.
There are lots of mind-expanding moments in Waking Life, and it’s able to get away with a lot of shit that would normally seem pretentious (it’s completely plotless, its characters lecture about oblique philosophical concepts at length, and much of the action is based on people and situations from Linklater’s 1991 debut film, Slacker). There are on-screen conversations in Waking Life that would be difficult to watch in a live-action picture. But Waking Life doesn’t feel self-indulgent or affected, and that’s because it’s a cartoon: Since we’re not seeing real people, we can handle the static image of an old man discussing the flaws of predestination. Moreover, we can accept the film’s most challenging dialogue exchange, which involves the reality of our own interiority.
The scene I’m referring to is where Wiggins’s character meets a girl and goes back to her apartment, and the girl begins explaining her idea for a surrealistic sitcom. She asks if Wiggins would like to be involved. He says he would, but then asks a much harder question in return: “What does it feel like to be a character in someone else’s dream?” Because that’s who Wiggins realizes this person is; he is having a lucid dream, and this woman is his own subconscious construction. But the paradox is that this woman is able to express thoughts and ideas that Wiggins himself could never create. Wiggins mentions that her idea for the TV show is great, and it’s the kind of thing he could never have come up with—but since this is his dream, he must have done exactly that. And this forces the question that lies behind “What is reality?”: “How do we know what we know?”
This second query in what brings us to Memento, probably the most practical reality study I’ve ever seen on film. The reason I say “practical” is because it poses these same abstract questions as the other films I’ve already mentioned, but it does so without relying on an imaginary universe. Usually, playing with the question of reality requires some kind of Through the Looking Glass trope: In Waking Life, Wiggins’s confusion derives from his sudden placement into a dream. Both The Matrix and Vanilla Sky take place in nonexistent realms. Being John Malkovich is founded on the ability to crawl into someone’s brain through a portal in an office building; Fight Club is ultimately about a man who isn’t real; eXistenZ is set inside a video game that could never actually exist. However, Memento takes place in a tangible place and merely requires an implausible—but still entirely possible—medical ailment.
Memento is about a fellow named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who suffers a whack to the head and can no longer create new memories; he still has the long-term memories from before his accident, but absolutely no short-term recall. He forgets everything that happens to him three minutes after the specific event occurs.[55] This makes life wildly complicated, especially since his singular
