As of this writing, I've watched Vanilla Sky three times. "Vanilla Sky" is the Hollywood version of the original Spanish work "Open Your Eyes". I haven't seen the original work, but it is said that the script copied "Open Your Eyes" as it is, and the heroine was also invited to the original work. Penelope helped out. The difference is that the crew is richer, and the opening scene was shot in Times Square, New York, and the actor was replaced by the handsome millionaire Tom Cruise. The director and production team have repeatedly emphasized the originality of the film, saying it is about "the coming-of-age story of every American man." (As will be mentioned later, as the American version of "Open Your Eyes", the logic of "Vanilla Sky" is really quite Hollywood, and it seems that it is indeed right to emphasize its originality in this sense.)
narrative
Vanilla Sky is an atypical Hollywood movie and an atypical Tomboy movie. I personally think this is Tom's best performance (probably because he wears a mask most of the time). Some people say that looks affect the way of acting, and actors who are too delicate in appearance are usually single-minded. So, Tom, who has always been handsome, challenged a character that is both disfigured and schizophrenic. How to say, as an audience, I think It was still very cool, and the curiosity was fully satisfied. At first, I opened this movie with great interest, probably with a bit of a bad intention of "Hey hey hey let's see Tommy disfigurement".
Its atypicality as a Hollywood movie is mainly reflected in the narrative. The narratives of Hollywood films have long since developed into timeless patterns, like mass-produced pop songs, that follow the mindset of the broadest audience that understands feature films. This is also the reason why the first time I watched Vanilla Sky, I thought it was a "goofy" movie, with a fragmented and nested narrative. According to Metz's theoretical analysis of the eight major combination segments, there are a large number of non-sequential combination segments, interspersed with a large number of included shots. When watching, it will cause a sense of confusion that cannot distinguish between reality and reality, as well as a sense of inversion of time and space. But the plot is actually not difficult to understand. If "Vanilla Sky" was re-narrated in a chronological way, it would be the following story:
David Aames is a well-deserved child of the sky: handsome, rich, owns three magazines and a publishing house in New York (it seems that paper media can still make money at that time), and is surrounded by beautiful women - although all this light Coming from his father who was killed in an accident, he is nothing more than a loafing rich second generation. Sexy and charming Julie is one of his countless women, but even though she loves him to the death, he doesn't even invite Julie to the birthday party.
At David's birthday party, he meets Sofia, a harmless brown-haired girl. The beautiful love story that should have unfolded ends with a hysterical Julie and David crashing into a car and committing suicide.
Julie was dead when Julie drove her car off the bridge and David suffered multiple broken bones and disfigured face. For a long time after that, he didn't dare to go to Sofia, and he was quietly recovering from the accident. Later, he plucked up the courage to date Sofia again, and the two met at a bar. David always felt rejected by Sofia, so he acted rather weird all night. After the two parted that night, he had a hangover on the street. Haven't seen Sofia since.
Leaving Sofia, he could not endure this extreme physical and mental pain. So he signed a contract for "Lucid Dream" with Life Extension. After he commits suicide by swallowing sleeping pills, his body will be handed over to LE, who will weave a beautiful dream for him according to his desires and thoughts. In the dream, he was supposed to live a happy life with his beloved Sofia, and his ruined appearance had returned to normal. But the fear, guilt and responsibility for Julie lurked in his subconscious, which made him to the end of the dream, and he couldn't tell Julie and Sofia at all.
The climax of the film is that David mistakenly thinks Julie is Sofia and kills her with his own hands—that is, killing his own hope and redemption. Finally, he met LE's technicians and volunteered to wake up from this dream. Even though he has been asleep for 150 years, when he wakes up, it is already another world outside.
At the end of the film is a close-up of an open eye, accompanied by a female voice throughout the film: "Open your eyes." At this point, the film ends. The audience also seems to have a dream and wake up with the protagonist. We can understand that this is the sound of David awakening his staff after waking up from a dream. However, it stops abruptly here, and no one can guarantee that this will be just another layer in the nested Lucid Dream?
dream Maker
Someone once called the film industry a "dream factory". In a sense, what movies sell is actually a dream that is difficult to achieve in reality. Mainstream commercial movie-selling dreams are usually pleasant—even when supposedly tragic.
Most of the audience who walk into the theater just want to have a dream—not a wild, chaotic, whisper-like dream, but a highly secondary processed "daydream." They don't need the lingering aftertaste of getting up in the morning after a long dream, they want something, a forgiving tear, some desire fulfillment, or even a tactful sermon.
But "Vanilla Sky" is a Hollywood movie, and it's hard to tell what it's selling at the end. Its shooting basically follows the logic of commercial movies, but many people still don't have the patience to watch it, or like me, after watching it for the first time, they say: "What is it, it's crazy." If Saying that the average commercial movie sells beautiful, reworked daydreams, Vanilla Sky sells more raw dreams - like you had a really good dream last night, you remember The color of the sky and the earth in the dream, you excitedly tell your friend: "Guess what I dreamed about last night?" When you want to continue talking, but you can't remember the plot and details, the dream is always like a dream, Can't see anything.
The way it creates a sense of dream, I personally summarize the following three points: scene, editing and camera position. As far as the scene is concerned, the movie uses a lot of horizontal pictures that do not affect the depth of the plot. Especially in David's Lucid Dream, the scenes with Sophia are basically presented in this form. Like drinking and laughing at the pub together (Sofia's laugh is taken from the typical action of the heroine in the movie "Jule and Jim"), and walking down the street leaning against each other.
In addition, the beginning of the film is a dream - the protagonist is running in an empty modern city. Some people say that this picture represents the nightmare of all modern people. "It's like a verse written by an Italian poet: the city is the greatest monument of civilization created by modern people, but I'm afraid this monument will survive longer than human beings. " This kind of picture conforms to the logic of ordinary people's dreams. In the long dream , and often the proportion of the part that really has a plot is not many.
Of course, there is no need to say much about the editing. (There are many time-space disordered cuts in the film. Every time the camera returns to David's conversation with the psychiatrist in prison, the change of the position of the two also makes people feel very jumpy and has a sense of rupture.) Talking about the camera position, if the whole movie It is a dream of David narrated by himself, and the narrative perspective must be limited - that is, you can't shoot things that the protagonist doesn't know. Take David's dream of plastic surgery as an example. Logically, he should have been in a coma at that time. But the camera has been placed in the position of God's perspective many times and seen the entire operation process. At the same time, this section is also the first time that LE's Tech Support appears in the camera, sitting like a god overlooking the entire operating room. Rather than interpreting it as a bug in the movie, I think this is a clever way to handle it. Because in the dream you can be from any angle, or the perspective of talking directly to the other party, or an eye hiding in the dark to peep. You are like a ghost.
Create a sense of dream so appropriate, Just like this beautiful, Monet-like Sky.
But after all, it is a Hollywood movie, and it will never betray the logic of commercial movies. At the end, Tech Support, who plays the role of God, made a gorgeous appearance, and made a very long-winded explanation, explaining the ins and outs of the whole movie to the male protagonist (actually the audience). Seeing this, I can see that the production team behind the camera is telling you bitterly: Oh, let me tell you what I have shot for so long, your ticket money is not wasted. It is as redundant as every fable ends with a sentence: "This story tells us a truth". In addition, this story, which was originally about dreams, also ended with a didactic ending, but it made the preaching more like an objective truth: don't worry, be sincere. Don't dream, accept the reality is the best.
Fine. minus one point at the end.
Dreams, Nightmares and Growth
In Freud's theory, the basic materials that make up a dream are bodily stimuli, day remnants, and dream thoughts. (that is, childhood memories, traumatic scenes and wishes in the form of "makeup") To analyze David Ames's lucid dream from this perspective, the basic materials of its composition can be basically decomposed into the following categories:
Childhood memory: Living in the shadow of my father, the lack of fatherly love.
Fear of Julie: disfigurement, physical trauma.
The fervent love for Sofia and the despair of being rejected by Sofia.
All three basic materials are presented in the dream of lucidity with their opposite good wishes.
To make up for the lack of fatherly love in childhood, David created the role of a psychiatrist. Some people say that the psychiatrist McCorber assumed the role of father in the dream, but after careful analysis, this role is actually just the projection of the missing part of the father image in David's heart. He is always a sympathizer and a listener, not a guide. In his dream, the disfigurement and physical trauma he suffered because of Julie also returned to normal, and he lived with Sofia as he wished.
What makes a good dream a nightmare?
The integrity of the human emotional mechanism makes it impossible for absolutely pure good or absolutely pure evil to exist purely. Even in your most intimate dreams, your subconscious still lurks in a dark window of your psyche. David calls out "Ellie" (actually the pronunciation of LE) in the nightmare. This so-called "Life Continuation Company" in the film actually symbolizes the majesty of the father in the traditional sense. the role of "father". It controls everything, sets the rules, and at the same time narrates the truth.
And David's appearance returned to hideous after killing Sofia with his own hands.
Lacan believes that male instinct is both longing for women and fearing women, and this complex emotion constitutes the inner tension and contradiction of patriarchal culture. Mainstream commercial films have found a good way to alleviate this anxiety, that is, to eliminate men's fears of women and save their desires. The most basic method is to divide women into good women and bad women, and to reward good women and punish bad women through the love and protection of men. In classic Hollywood movies, whenever the monsters come and the protagonists are in danger, behind the hero who is about to charge, you can see the beautiful and helpless face of the heroine. (There is also the most classic story of saving the princess. When I was a child, after seeing that the princess was kidnapped by the devil for the N+1st time, I really couldn't restrain the urge to smash the remote control on the screen and scold a fool. .)
In the movie, Sofia undoubtedly represents the good woman at IKEA, while Julie is sexy and evil. The reason Vanilla Sky is every man's nightmare is because by the end, David's subconscious has made him completely unable to distinguish Julie (the so-called bad woman) from Sofia (the good woman).
About Romance
Officially, Vanilla Sky is a Romance Thriller. The composition of Thriller has just been roughly analyzed. This film, which was expanded by the suspense master Hitchcock, uses the phrase "Open your eyes" as the metronome of the film. After opening your eyes at the end, the film brings anxiety and anxiety. The unease still hasn't dissipated. After all, there is no way around it, let’s talk about Romance.
I debated with my friends the question of whether Sofia is David's true love. I haven't read the original, but I heard that in the original, this issue is questionable. But Americans don't seem to like this kind of setting, and True Love is the theme that all Romance must revolve around. From a few detailed analysis, I am more inclined to think that David's love for Sofia is an infatuation (whether it is true love or not), and Sofia is cruel to David, but she probably doesn't love that much He, or not so unrepentantly in love with him.
On the night of David's disfigured bar date, Sofia called David's friend Brian too. She had a grudge against David - first of all, she was originally with Brian, and she must have felt that something was wrong somewhere in her heart when she fell in love with David in an instant. Again, David got into Julie's car right after their affectionate date, and I think she cared. She wasn't sure about their relationship, she had guilt about Brian, and maybe—or maybe, maybe even a little bit of fear about David now. She wasn't happy that night, and when David asked her why, she said, "We'll be cats for the rest of our lives and I'll tell you."
As a result, they never saw each other again after that night.
Sofia came to the funeral and shed tears. I think it's more regret than love. As the narrator says: "She, like you, can't forget that night when true love was almost at your fingertips." If David didn't choose to kill himself, but to live on, Sofia might be just one of his many women, but he chose to enter a dream inside. In the 150 years he's been frozen, Sofia has long since died - "To her David was just a sad episode in a long life, but to him she was all his fantasies."
I think this kind of regret and asymmetry is very beautiful. My friend said that you are not a little perverted. At the end of the movie, under a vanilla-colored sky, David jumps off the top of the LE building and falls into a vast and unfamiliar future city. This fall in the mise-en-scène symbolizes falling from a high place to a low place, and a little bit of falling from the cloud of dreams to the ground of reality. If he really wakes up, 150 years have passed, which is the next life. The night he and Sofia last met, the answers that he hadn't heard might be revealed.
(Most of the knowledge resources come from Mr. Dai Jinhua's "Film Criticism", and draw on the viewpoints of Laura Mulvey's paper "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film")
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