Explaining the ending of ‘Vanilla Sky’
Any movie that questions the very idea of reality itself is going to cause debate among audiences, especially if the film never makes it explicitly clear when and where the lines are being blurred between what’s real and what’s not. In the case of Vanilla Sky, writer and director Cameron Crowe only exacerbated the argument by confirming the ending is open to multiple different interpretations.
Tom Cruise’s publishing magnate falls for Penélope Cruz’s Sofia Serrano over the course of a single night, which naturally doesn’t go down too well with his current flame, Cameron Diaz’s Julie Gianni. After getting into a car accident, she ends up dead, and he’s left permanently disfigured, which is where the subtle shift in the viewer’s perception first begins to take hold.
Of course, it soon becomes clear that the bulk of Vanilla Sky‘s narrative is a product of Aames’ lucid dream, with the protagonist having placed himself into a state similar to suspended animation with the assistance of the company Life Extension until the technology has advanced to the point at which his handsome visage can be restored to its former glories.
However, at regular intervals throughout the story, Aames’ subconscious punctures the dreamlike reality he’s been living in. As much as masks of both a figurative and literal nature are fairly heavy-handed from a metaphorical perspective, they nonetheless inform the character’s increasing lapses that find the two distinctly separate elements of existence bleed into the other.
At the end of the movie, Noah Taylor’s Edmund Ventura leads Aames to the top of a skyscraper, where he’s informed that not only did he choose to experience his lucid dream state, he’s been living it for 150 years, and a software glitch was responsible for the repeated distortions. He’s given the option to either stay inside or leap from the top of the building, with the impact – again, both figurative and literal – waking him up from stasis and returning him to the real world.
Despite his fear of heights, Aames takes the leap of faith, and Vanilla Sky ends with the familiar refrain of “open your eyes,” both beginning and ending the movie with the exact same line of dialogue. On a surface level, it reads as though the matter is as straightforward as Aames returning to life in the real world, now a changed man armed with the ability and knowledge to impart the life lessons and experiences of the dream world into his second chance in a flesh-and-blood reality.
However, a great deal of the debate stems from Crowe admitting that from his perspective, there are five different methods of viewing the ending, and there are countless more theories to have emerged in the years since that don’t come stamped with the filmmaker’s own seal of approval, several of which were shot down by extension after he stated everything that happens from the morning after Aames’ nightclub visit is part of his internal manifestations.
The first is the most simple, with Tech Support telling the complete and unfiltered truth, with Aames having spent 150 years in the lucid dream after effectively euthanising himself. The second – as outlined by a sticker on his car spotted in the opening scene with the impossible date of February 30th – is that the whole of Vanilla Sky, from its first to very last frame, has been a 136-minute dream sequence.
The third is that everything to unfold following the car crash that disfigured Aames and killed Julie is happening inside of his mind while he lies comatose, with the fourth arguably the most intriguing. As suggested by Crowe, Vanilla Sky is neither set in the real world nor inside the subconscious of somebody trapped in suspended animation, but is instead the live-action realisation of the book being written by Jason Lee’s Brian Shelby. As Aames’ best friend – not to mention someone who was clearly jealous of his high-flying lifestyle – snatching his good looks away and forcing him to learn brand new life lessons in the hardest way possible makes a great deal of sense given the subtle prickliness displayed by the character.
That’s perhaps the most meta, too, as it would constitute Crowe, the director making a movie based on a book written by a character within the film he was shooting, with Shelby technically driving the narrative forward from the inside out. The fifth and final interpretation of Crowe’s is fairly similar to the third, though, with everything following the crash nothing more than a hallucination induced by the sheer volume of drugs pumped into Aames’ system during the reconstructive surgery that spares him from death.
That being said, even Crowe can’t decide on which one to settle on, with Vanilla Sky having taken on a different meaning each time he revisits it: “Sometimes I watch it, and I have a completely different take on what the story is, where the splice comes, and what it’s all about,” he explained to Vulture.
However, his comments on the importance of Shelby could indicate that he’s the key to what Vanilla Sky really means, if there’s even a definitive answer: “Over time, to me, the keyhole character, where you can just find a different perspective on the whole thing, is Jason Lee’s Brian Shelby,” he continued. “If I stay with Jason Lee in the Rubik’s Cube of Vanilla Sky, I always go to the best places.”