Vanilla Sky blends the lines between which scenes are dreams and which are reality. Cameron Crowe’s 2001 science fiction thriller stars Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz and explores grief, trauma, and confronting fears. The timeline of Vanilla Sky begins with Cruise’s character, David Aames, enjoying life as a playboy bachelor before a spurned girlfriend (Diaz) kills herself and disfigures David in a car crash. A mutilated David slowly tries to regain his confidence and rekindle things with Sofia (Cruz). However, when she’s repulsed by his appearance, he drinks himself into a stupor.
The twist of Vanilla Sky and turns the movie from a drama into another sci-fi thriller for Tom Cruise. This twist leads David to realize that he has been lucid dreaming, trapped in cryonic suspension. Suddenly, the reality of events in the narrative gets thrown into question .Vanilla Sky makes both the audience and David question what is a dream and what is reality. There is no specific mention of which scenes occur during David’s suspension and which are actual memories of his life, but clues in the movie point to when the lucid dreaming starts.
Before the car crash in Vanilla Sky, David had just fallen in love with Sofia, but his disfigurement is too upsetting for her. After he passes out in the street, David wakes up, and everything is different. It’s from this moment that the events of Vanilla Sky are now all a dream. Tom Cruise’s David effectively kills himself using a service called Life Extension to put himself into suspended animation where he will lucid dream until there is a way to fix his disfigurement.
The turn of fortune for David is not just a coincidence; it’s what he imagines for himself, starting it right after one of the worst nights of his life. Having nothing to live for, David opts for this procedure, and the glitches that begin happening in his dreams are a signal that what he is experiencing isn’t real.
Interspersed throughout Vanilla Sky, before the night out drinking, are scenes of David in jail, telling his story to a psychologist, Dr. Curtis McCabe (Kurt Russell adding another sci-fi role to his filmography). These scenes are also part of his dreams. The lucid dreaming sequences stop at the very end of the movie, but between his passing out in the street and the final moment, everything the audience has been watching has only been going on in David’s head.
Due to a glitch in the Life Extension program, David’s subconscious begins filtering into his dreams, creating nightmare scenarios and leading him to learn he is in suspended animation. David elects to leave the “Vanilla Sky” and return to the real world. However, the only guarantee that he will live is coming from figures who still may only be his in his subconscious.
The world he will be returning to is 150 years in the future, and all the people he loved are gone. Even so, David jumps off a skyscraper to leave the paradise of Vanilla Sky’s afterlife and return to harsh reality with a literal leap of faith. The last line of Vanilla Sky is “relax David, open your eyes.” This is the line Julie says to him at the beginning of the movie, and it’s the line Sofia says to him after he wakes up in the street.
Every time someone tells David to “open his eyes” he switches from one perception to the other. First, he’s in a dream in Times Square, then he is in the real world with Julies, then he “awakens” in a lucid dream with Sofia. The next time David “opens his eyes” the lucid dream sequence has ended, and the audience can be sure David is back in reality.