I have watched Vanilla Sky; a film directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz, when I was sixteen. At that time, I hardly knew anything about movies as art, I only thought it was a kind of entertainment, which this film has done its best. I could tell that it was different from other Hollywood movies. To be specific, instead of huge screening experience and spectacular sound system, I was rather amused and bewildered by the puzzle solving in the course of the story. Although, Vanilla Sky is a remake of Abre Los Ojos (Open your eyes), a Spanish film written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar, and some say that the original one is much better, I have to thank Cameron Crow for expanding the range of spectators to be more international, or I would have had less chance of watching such a brilliant plot like this. I now know that Vanilla Sky is more than a simple entertainment; it is different. It gives rise to questions in viewers' minds, but does not reveal the answer ,allowing the audience to have their own answers ,which sometimes result in further questions. The question that arises in my mind is that "what is reality? Dose it really exist? Who can tell which is real, which is not?".

Similarly, Postmodernism also poses these kinds of questions to society by questioning what Modernism believes: the Enlightenment. In modern time, since Industrial Revolution, a new authority was established to center on the individual and his or her rational abilities to create a liberated social and intellectual framework, such as knowledge and science, for human endeavour. They set up a new rational foundation for universal truth; science would reveal a new truth. Postmodernism questions what modernism said about 'Reality'. Postmodern theorists argue that there is no reality, it was volatilized and spontaneously constructed by science, advanced technologies and power of leading institutes.

Personally, In the present digital age with extremely advanced technology, I sometime feel that I am confusingly lost in the universe of complicated layers of communication and what people call 'Reality'. There might be no reality or truth in this digital age', as Vanilla Sky and Postmodern people pose, what we believe it is true may not true, what we believe is real may not real. But why? Or life is just a dream as David has???

Michael Foucault and Jean Baudrillard pose their own answers to public under postmodernists label, although they keep refusing it. Their perspectives to 'truth' evoke people to doubt sets of statement, discourses, knowledge, information and universal truth that we normally accept without any question. Furthermore, I see some intersections between their theory, even sometime their believes are against each other. In this essay I would apply the way they see reality to Vanilla Sky and describe how they are related. Finally, I would pose my answer by another question toward reality: Why people desire reality? What is wrong with virtual reality?.

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Before The Lucid Dream, David Aames, the protagonist, is a rich playboy who extremely enjoys his perfect life style which every man wishes to have. He has a best friend, Brian, who always supports and delights him by the feeling of superiority; he has sexual relationship with the dream girl of every man, Julianna Gianni; he has a beautiful romantic relationship with a girl in his own dream, Sofia Serrano; in brief, he has everything. Yet, he is a spoiled child who takes all he has for granted. David lives in the very heart of the late capitalism, in the centre of modern life, where 'Enlightenment' has never been questioned. David is used to being warmly welcomed by the society around him, however, after a car crash everything turns upside down, Julianna dies and David has lost everything; his charming face, his lover, his best friend and his perfect life.

Why physical appearance is so important both for him and society? Why he becomes 'the other' and is kicked out off society? And who does that? David never questions these. He just escapes from this cruel world by committing suicide, continuing his life in the lucid dream. Deeply, he admits that this is how the world works. Similarly, in the boom of modernism era, we all believe in the universal truth created by science and technology. No one questions it, like David. However, postmodern people, like Foucault, question this absolute truth. For Foucault, all grand statements, truth, morality, meaning, information and science knowledge, or what he calls 'discourse', are constructed and perpetuated by those who have the power and means of communication. Modernism creates the liberal discourses of rights, equality, freedom and justice; however this rhetoric masked the substantive inequality and failed to account for differences.

"Modern people claim that among freedom there needs to some kind of central government, some social and legal constraints on what individuals may do; it is a necessary evil...Everyone agrees to give up some of their freedom, to submit to a central authority. The central authority will keep peace, make laws to regulate relations between individuals and administer justice.The benefit of this is that the central authority will protect individuals from interference by other individuals. So on the liberal view, a degree of state power is justified; the area of individual freedom must be limited by law."(Falzon Christopher, Philosophy goes to the movies, 2002: pp121-3) However, what if the central authority itself is the one who interfere with individuals? What if there are some hidden agendas behind it's regulations? What if the power of the state becomes oppressive and threaten to crush individuals? In Faucault's theory, he tried to reveal the dark side of all forms of discourses claiming to serve 'the truth'. He indicated that discourses are constructed by the ruling power of each society, especially science, and members of the society never suspect those hidden purposes and just follow them. Indeed, constraints upon us are not only in the very obvious forms like laws and punishments, they are also in the subtle and insidious forms of coercion, such as advertising, propaganda, brainwashing and the like, which in fact ideally suit to the modern context under the mask of liberalism. This kind of coercion is far more effective than the external one. Because people are controlled and manipulated by filling their heads with false image of the world; or false consciousness, or a mistaken understanding of what they want, so they end up being obedient helplessly; we may able to do what we want, but it is our desires themselves that have been manipulated, it is not our real interests or nature.

In David's case, even though his life seems to be very liberal, he is controlled by the power of modern society, and, moreover, himself - a member of late capital society who also unconsciously adopts the discourse of 'good looks', 'perfect modern life' and 'bourgeoisie'. He decides to commit suicide by himself; he is the one who monitors and condemned himself, just like he is the prisoner in the 'panopticon', mentioned in Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It is a new technique of social control and the key point is a system of surveillance, which cells are arranged around a central observation tower. All the prisoners are visible to those in the tower, but they cannot see into the tower, consequently, they can barely know when they are being observed, so they have to behave well all the time. They finally become a warder, keep monitoring themselves. This disciplinary mechanism was employed on David's life, as well as our lives, it pervades his everyday life from class room, family, work place, hospital, media and society, and pressure him, especially after the car crash, when he gets disfigured face. For David, his charming face is everything. He has grown up among discourses that judge people from appearance; beauty is good, ugliness is bad; being rich is good, being poor is bad, etcetera. All these discourses act as disciplinary techniques that manipulate his life, his thoughts and his behaviors. Discourses in society make him label himself as 'the other'; abnormal, aberration and inferior, and kick himself out of society.

In The Lucid Dream, at this point, the film passes into a confusing dream sequence. One day, David wakes up on a street and surprisingly sees Sophia coming back to him. While the situation seems getting better; having his face reconstructed, and Sophia and Brian back into his life; he experiences something unexplainable, something unbelievable. Reality and dreams mix together and he cannot tell which is which. Simlarly, the viewers start to be confused about what happens in the film. After that, our protagonist is arrested for murder. He thinks he has killed Julia, but the police, Brian and everyone perceive that the victim was Sophia.

How things become such a mess? He is supposed to be able to control everything in his lucid dream, as Life Extension (L.E.), which sells a lucid dream to him, advertises. But why in a practical way, he barely controls his virtual life? Why what is supposed to be a perfectly good dream becomes a nightmare? The technician of L.E claims that it is because of the system errors. However, who can prove if this is true? He may lie. Similarly, in late capitalism, individuals seems to have loads of freedom in their lives. However, we may be fooled. L.E is the one who is in power and controls David's life behind the mask of liberalism. All the errors in the Lucid Dream make David confused and start to question things, like Foucault did. Those errors are just like the viruses in the system or 'the others' of our society who are excluded and repressed. Overall, in my opinion, this is a dilemma. It just like he escapes from one frame to another frame which is not different, in term of being under controlled and manipulated by the power of modern society. It is just like what Foucoult points out that discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; it is impossible to escape discourse.

Moreover, it may be a plan that intends to persuade David to murder Sophia. L.E. might intend to add some errors in the system leading to wrong digital image in David's perception. But Why? For Foucoult, the role of surveillance and discipline is not only to control individuals but to transform, to rehabilitate, to standardize them into a certain kind of upright citizen. Therefore, individuals are regulated not by a law and police but by a standards of normality. In David case, because he sees some errors and starts to question things, L.E - the central authority of Lucid Dream - traps and brings him in a process if normalization.

Life in The Lucid Dream may not be real world but 'hyperreal'. Finally, David finds out that his life is not real; it is just a dream, it is just an imagination. At this point, Baudrillard's simulation plays an important roll to explain Vanilla Sky. According to him, in this postmodern age there is no reality, but only a 'desert of real'(Baudrillard, 1983); instead we are living in the world of 'hyperreality'- the real more than real, a cultural space where maps, models, television, film and computer images are more 'real' to us than the non-media physical reality surrounding us. He points out that "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory." (Baudrillard, 1983:2) He further states that we are now in the age of simulation which "is no longer a question of imitation, nor reduplication, nor even parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself."(Baudrillard, 1983:4) In this current stage, we are unable to identify the distinction between real and artifice, just like in the lucid dream. The situation is developed through three 'orders of simulacra': Counterfeits, Production and Simulation, which transforms in the course of historical periods. Douglas Kellner points out in his book, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, that a historical sketch of the 'orders of simulacra' is heavily influenced by Foucault's archaelogies of knowledge in The Orders of Thing.(Kellner, 1989: 78)

In feudal-medieval period, before the advent of the 'orders of simulacra', signs were fixed and distributed according to rank, duty and obligation. Society was in symbolic order, which signs were dominated by unbreakable and reciprocal order, so at that period the question of reality didn't arise yet. From Renaissance up to Industrial Revolution, the early modern period, once mobility of signs was introduced in society by the bourgeois order and the emergence of the open competition on the level of the distinctive signs, we entered first order of simulacra. Fake, counterfeits and false images enter the scene: fashion, theatre, forks (fake limbs), baroque architecture. In this stage, counterfeits tried to imitate original according to the nature law of value, however a difference between semblance and reality could still be distinguished. Signs moved from reflecting a basic reality to masking and perverting a basic reality. After that, in industrial period - 19th century, we entered second order of simulation, where the distinctions between the image and representation began to break down due to mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such serial production masked and replaced an underlying reality by imitating so well: signs now masked the absence of a basic reality. In this order of simulacra, nature turned to be the object of domination; instead the industrial order was ruled by the 'commercial law of value'. "All serial objects of production are equivalent, and their worth is masked by their market value, which makes possible the change of equivalents, while reproducibility now becomes the fundamental logic and code of the society." (Kellner, 1989:79)

Yet today,in postmodern age, since the middle of the 20th century, we are living in third order of simulacra, the era of pure simulacra - simulations: signs bear no relation to any reality, as David experiences in lucid dream. According to Baudrillard, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is the representation precedes and determines the real, which is given rise by extensive advances in science and information technology. There is a collapse of difference between the true and the false, replacement by hyperreal - the real more than real. Everything David experiences in Lucid dream is in fact just a digital code, dominated by the computer system of L.E company, or simulation models or codes. Nothing concrete has happened, it is all perceived in his brain. Both the third order of simulacra and the lucid dream are dominated by 'the structure law of value', and distinction between reality and its representation is gone.

Media culture is one of the main factors contributing to the disappearance of the absolute reality. According to McLuhan that"media is message" has so much influence on Baudrillard's thoughts. Contemporary media: television, film, magazine, billboards and the Internet, are not just means of communication, they are message themselves. In fact, they interfere our private selves, making us approach each other and the world trough the lens of these media message. Just like Foucault's disciplinary society, media creates a curtain kind of discourses, and the society of simulation thus come to control individuals' behaviors and minds. In Vanilla Sky, David's modern life is overwhelmed by all kinds of media that makes him unconsciously nervous, as presented in the opening scene of the film. David has peculiar dream of being alone in an empty Time Square, surrounding by lots of big screen presenting commercial images and messages, then he is woken up by the mysterious voice, "Open you eyes", which is a key phrase of the whole story. However, he cannot live without them, as we can see that when he cannot bear sorrow in real life he choose to experience further beautiful life through digital media in lucid dream instead.

Once he finds out that he is living in a dream, he wants to wake up to the reality, no matter how painful it is. However, in my point of view, he doesn't know that this is only a trick created by L.E.. Lucid dream is just like 'Disneyland' from Baudrillard's looking glasses. Both places, which are in the third order of simulation, conceal the fact that there is no reality. Baudrillard indicates that "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the face that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle." (Baudrillard, 2001:175) Therefore, in my point of view, David is not going to wake up in the real world but in the real hyperreal, in the another simulation world.

In my opinion, the whole movie may be all in his dream, the dream of having dream of having dream of..., which I have no idea how many layers there are. Consequently, it is impossible to ascertain how many layers to get through until reaching reality. This may sound so hopeless and desperate. But I wonder, why people desire for truth and reality? What is wrong with simulation or hyperreal. If there is no distinction between reality and hyperreality, and sometime the latter even better than the former, why worrying about going back to reality? Why most people, including me, perceived these fakes as immorality? Why David immediately wants to wake up, while if he stays on he would have been able to have Sophia and his ideal world? I think that Foucoult and Baudrillard's theories are another form of discourse that stresses the superior position of realities over lies, fakes or artifices. Knowledge about hidden agenda of discourses and media encourage people to seek reality because we unconsciously prefer it, even we know it is quite hopeless. Nevertheless, these theories, like an immune system, can help preventing us from being over infatuated and manipulated, so that we can live in this world or society with more understanding and ability to adapt ourselves to the changing environment, which is becoming more and more complicated. Thanks to Michael Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.

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Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. (1983). Simulations. translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. The United States of America: Semiotext[e].

Baudrillard, Jean. (2001). Selected Writing. edited and introduced by Poster, Mark. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Butler, Christopher. (2002). Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, The United States: Oxford University Press.

Falzon, Christopher. (2002). Philosophy Goes to Movies. Antz - Social and Political Philosophy, pp 121-148. London and New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. (1991). The Foucault Reader, Truth and Power. edited by Rabinow, Paul:Penguin Books

Horrocks, Chris. (1996). Baudrillard for Beginners. Australia: Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd.

Kellner, Douglas. (1989). Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Media, Simulation and the End of the Social, pp 60-92. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Palmer, Donald. (1997). Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners. Michel Foucault, pp 87-112. London and New York: Writers and Readers.

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