Vanilla Sky begins with a dream, or more accurately it begins with a dream being described by an ostensibly unhinged man, to a court-appointed psychologist sent to determine whether or not the man describing the dream is clinically unfit to stand trial for the murder of his girlfriend. Much of what you see in the film happens within the context of this framing device: the prisoner (David) tells his story to the psychologist (Dr McCabe), and what he describes then unfolds before the viewer. Consider, for the moment, that David really is insane, as is implied in the interrogation scenes between David and Dr McCabe ("Sometimes, the mind behaves as if it were a dream - faces change, people become other people"). If this is true, perhaps none of what you see outside of the interrogation room is real - after all, who would trust the account of a man for whom the diagnosis is "temporary derangement"? This scenario doesnt rule out that Vanilla Sky is, again, mostly fantasy (an inescapable fact in basically every possible scenario), but it does suggest that the movie is largely the invented tale of a murderer, one either seriously crazy, or sane and just looking to make that insanity plea. In this scenario, the scenes of reality are clearly telegraphed - they're limited to whenever David and Dr McCabe are in the interrogation room. The jarring scenes following McCabe's diagnosis, where he takes David to Life Extension despite having already signed him off, can be explained by this theory too: these scenes aren't real either, but the escapist fantasies of a man who's about to be confined to a cell for a very long time. In this scenario, reality ends as David is banging on the glass in the interrogation room.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
