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was
introducing
audiences to the new American reality: counterculture as the dominant culture.
    Unfortunately, that kind of introduction can’t happen in 2003. It can’t happen because reality is more transient and less concrete. It’s more difficult for a film to define and validate the current of popular culture, because that once linear current has been splintered; it’s become a cracked Volvo windshield, spider-webbing itself in a manner that’s generally predictable but specifically chaotic (in other words, we all
sort of
know where the national ethos is going, but never
exactly
how or
exactly
why or
exactly
when). Cinematically, this creates a problem. Traditional character models like “The Everyman” and “The Antihero” and “The Wrongly Accused” are no longer useful, because nobody can agree on what those designations are supposed to mean anymore (in Christopher Nolan’s
Memento,
all three of those labels could simultaneously be applied to the same person). Modern movies can no longer introduce impending realities; they can’t even explain the ones we currently have. Consequently, there’s only one important question a culturally significant film can still ask: What
is
reality?
    I’ll concede that
Vanilla Sky
poses that question a little too literally at times, inasmuch as I vaguely recall one scene where Tom Cruise is riding in an elevator and someone looks at him and literally asks, “What is reality?” The cryogenics subplot is also a tad silly, since it sometimes seems like an 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