X-Message-Number: 18222
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 06:05:24 -0500
From: <>
Subject: Re: Milli Vanilla Marmalade Sky
I too, have a horror-dream. I am married to bitchy, demanding Nicole Kidman, and
am trapped in an endless fantasy campy overdone faggoty musical review
melodrama set in fin de-siecle Paris, but with Elton John songs. It goes on and
on without end or exit. At some point Toulouse-Lautrec comes out and says Boss,
de plane, de plane! and I know I must be going mad. I have to do something.
Take Prozac. Chase younger women. Get a divorce. Get rid of more engrams. Jump
off a building. Make soul-searching dream-movies about how I m rich and handsome
and famous, and yet I m nearing 40 and it s still not enough! Anything to get
out of this living nightmare.
Help. Tech support! They re going to do Roxanne again...
I didn t have as much trouble with this Cruise movie. Yes, there's the problem
with the Penelope Cruz voice waking the main character up in the
empty-Times-Square Ferrari sequence that begins the movie. Problem: he indeed
hasn't met her yet. But accept that as a screw-up (or maybe something else see
below). The front end of the movie is then merely the real life of an all-too
real JFK, Jr. playboy editor-type. Who happens to live in Manhattan with a
knockout blonde girlfriend Julia, who (no comment on John-john's marriage)
eventually turns into the devouring-woman from Fatal Attraction. Maybe a comment
on Kidman? Enter the sultry Penelope Cruz/Sophia just in time for the main
character to get mutilated (instead of killed like JFK Sr. and Jr.), and thus
find himself in the Frankenstein problem of what to do when you're suddenly the
ugly outcast. The worse after having everything.
After that, just as advertised, segue into the VR "lucid dream" sequence which
the main character has elected to wake up in, after dying and getting frozen.
Just as Ettinger and others have promised. See, you can have anything you like
when you wake up from cryonics- it's just like having your tonsils out. Vanilla
ice cream. Solipsistic VR being the perfect punishment here for the
self-absorbed main character. Who finds that there's one big problem with
techno-solipsism: what if there's something about yourself you don't like? Wups,
now your fantasy becomes nightmare, as monsters from the id punish you for your
crimes of selfishness and complacency in life. It's worse than Dickens'
Christmas Carol or Crime and Punishment. We need a tech support patch for this
screw-up, indeed. To be sure, we've seen something like it already in the movie
_What Dreams May Come_ (title from Hamlet, of course, who was one of the first
to point out this little "rub."). Point being that you can mak!
e your Heaven a Hell if your conscience demands it -no God is required.
And I thought there are heavy borrowing from Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory
Bank" (1976), a very classic VR story which points out that life inside a
computer might start to show some frayed wires after a while. Man was not meant
to have anything he wants, as the Krell found out. And in any case, we need the
bitter and the sweet, as the movie title song says.
Yes, you can see the homework. Cryonics as route to possible techno-hell is as
old as Ettinger's Penultimate Trump. The sequence of people getting older and
younger are right out of Life Extension Foundation advertising. The dog seems
indeed the Seagle beagle, and I too thought I recognized a particularly
humorless Linda Chamberlain running the cryonics company "Life Extension." Such
earnestness. Here's VR Heaven, and if you don't like it, here's Microsoft Tech
Support. And Mike Darwin certainly should recognize the tech support guy,
because it s probably him, from old Alcor clips. Or else Carlos from newer clips
<g>.
And I, too, wonder at the Pizer connection. Not only is there the Arizona
mention, but also something of Pizer's novel Ralph's Journey here. In
particular, a strong suggestion that the Sophia character didn't forget the main
character, and perhaps took the necessary steps to follow him. But the point is
that the main character cannot be told that information at the critical point.
He must embrace life freely and come out of his navel. There are tests to pass
if he wants to win the fair lady for real. At the end, when he's told to open
his eyes to honest to God reality, that's Sophia's voice also. We're supposed to
have some ambiguity about whether or not she's there, even after hearing her
voice, and that's probably the only reason why the exact same wake-up call
("open your eyes") also begins the movie. It's done to deliberately put in
ambiguity, because that's the one line which you're really not supposed to know
is dream or real.
SBH
BTW, there is a tribute to George Harrison in the movie, but it's only the main
character saying he likes George more. "Vanilla Sky" is a painting and also a
typical acid-rock synesthetic lyric of Paul McCartney's (which could as well be
tangerine people or marmalade skies). Indeed, Paul sings the song over the end
credits.
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