Psychology, Postmodern Dissociation & Fragmentation Under A “Vanilla Sky”

Have you ever watched the movie “Vanilla Sky” starring Tom Cruise? It’s quite a ride, blending dreams with reality in a way that’s both mesmerizing and a mind-boggling. This movie isn’t just about a rich guy who faces some serious ups and downs; it dives deep into intense themes, using dreamy (and sometimes nightmarish) visuals to do it.

What’s “Vanilla Sky” All About?

Released in 2001 and directed by Cameron Crowe, “Vanilla Sky” is this cool mix of romance, mystery, and psychological thriller wrapped up in a postmodern vibe. Tom Cruise plays David Aames, a charismatic New Yorker who literally has it all. He runs into major trouble, though, after a car accident, orchestrated by an ex-girlfriend, leaves him disfigured. This is where the movie takes a wild turn into explorations of what’s real and what’s not as David tries to piece his life back together.

Why This Movie Sticks Out

You might read a regular movie review and think “Vanilla Sky” is just another Hollywood flick about a rich guy learning life lessons the hard way. But if you put on your “depth psychology glasses,” as Michael Glock suggests in his analysis from March 2004, you’ll see it’s stuffed with symbols and myths that poke at our subconscious. The movie uses these layers to talk about big ideas like identity, dreams vs. reality, and personal transformation.

David’s journey is kind of like a modern hero’s quest, where he encounters not just physical challenges, but deep psychological ones. He navigates through a world that blurs the lines between dreams and reality — much like we do in our own lives, where we juggle who we are with who we think we should be.

The Postmodern Twist

Postmodernism is this fancy term that basically means looking at the world in a way that questions the usual black-and-white truths. It loves to mix things up and challenge our expectations. “Vanilla Sky,” with its complex narrative structure and ambiguous ending, is a perfect example of this. It doesn’t just tell a story; it makes you question the nature of storytelling itself.

The film is rich with symbols like masks and disfigurement, which aren’t just for show. They symbolize deeper themes of identity and the masks we all wear. Plus, the whole story might just be a critique of how modern life — full of media and constant consumption — leaves us feeling fragmented and disconnected from our true selves.

A Look Through a Psychological Lens

Glock points out that the film is not just entertainment; it’s a gateway to understanding deeper psychological truths. It plays with ideas introduced by famous thinkers like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell about myths and our collective unconscious — basically, the shared pool of memories and experiences we all dip into without realizing it.

In simpler terms, “Vanilla Sky” challenges us to look beyond the surface and explore the deeper meaning behind our actions and dreams. It’s like a nudge to question not just the choices we make in life but also the very nature of reality and our understanding of it.

Final Thoughts

So, next time you watch “Vanilla Sky,” or any movie really, try to see if there’s more beneath the surface. Films like these are more than just a couple of hours of entertainment; they can be profound explorations of human nature and the modern world. And who knows? You might just find a piece of yourself reflected back in unexpected ways.

Curios? The following text explores Postmodernism, Dissociation and Fragmentation in depth.

This paper explores in two parts the Postmodern dissolution and fragmentation we face on multiple fronts intra/extra-psychically and culturally. I have chosen a contemporary film, Vanilla Sky, as a cultural artifact, a society dream that, through its depth of understanding, leads to an expanded and perhaps less heroic recognition of our own ruptures and descents. Vanilla Sky was written for the screen and directed by Cameron Crowe, released in the United States December 14 2001 and distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Part 1 is both a synopsis of the film and a linking together of multiple themes, conditions, insights and perspectives; part 2 is a brief critique and analysis of my own point of view in relation to the material.

The film stars Tom Cruise as David Aames and Penelope Cruz as Sophia Cerrano. Cameron Diaz as Julianna represents the ordinary world from which Aames’s soul wishes to depart. Kurt Russell represents the animus and the bridge that illuminates David Aames’s intrapsychic predicament; he plays the role of the psychologist.

In support of this paper please review the 12-minute re-cut (my re-cut) version of Vanilla Sky as I have attempted to identify the thresholds that mark the souls journey towards a vital relationship with the Self. It is interesting to read a Hollywood review of this film as it reads very differently than when a depth psychological lens is used.

Vanilla Sky (2001) A Hollywood Synopsis: Handsome, wealthy and charismatic, New York City publishing executive David Aames leads a charmed life. But one night David makes a small mistake that causes him to lose Sofia, the girl of his dreams. In his search for her, David is thrust unexpectedly into a rollercoaster ride of romance, sex, lies and suspicion that results in his ex-girlfriend’s suicide and a car accident that leaves David hideously disfigured. Soon, however, his luck seems to change when Sofia declares her love for him and the doctors are able to rebuild his face. But when strange things begin to happen, he starts to realize that his life has taken a turn beyond his control. (Hollywood.com 2001)

From a depth psychological and postmodern perspective the story reads very differently because the review above can be said to be written from and within a narrow modern sentiment and thus perpetrates and colludes with a system that wishes to nourish what Jung suggests is “mass mindedness”. This is the outcome of a scientific materialism that has stripped us of the Gods and separated us from each other, the earth and ourselves. We have become a society of fragmented dissociated schizophrenics seduced by the intoxicating images that drive us through desire to consume, and to consume without thinking, which leaves us un-nourished. I think this is what Jung meant when he said our 20th Century culture “Hangs by a thin thread.”

However lurking within this cultural artifact, this film, are archetypal myths, heroic journeys, anima/animus figures, metaphors, thresholds, transitions and alchemical motifs and images that play and prey upon our own shadows and complexes. This I suggest leads towards a sense of meaning, and individuation, we not only have an emotional response to the story, narrative and images within the film but we also derive meaning from them. Why? Because I believe profound truths are accessible through the power of imagination, visualization and mythology and much of these truths cannot be laid bare purely by the analytic power of the intellect. Allegory, myth and metaphor reveals more than concrete and literal description it is the artist today “who communicates myth for today.” — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. In Tibet they have a language for describing the soul “twilight language” (Hope 1997) and it is this twilight language I shall attempt to use in the unpacking of the film as written below.

Part 1: Vanilla Sky is a cinematic exploration and investigation into the complex irrational world between Maya (illusion) and reality, between dream and a souls journey. It unfolds in the form a visually intoxicating mélange of atmospheric neo-noir/science fiction/futuristic physical and emotional landscapes. It is a depth psychological thriller and opens with Sophia’s voice, (the voice of wisdom) saying, “open your eyes” perhaps a thinly veiled request for us all to open our eyes. It’s interesting to note here that three of Tom Cruise’s films in as many years explores the themes of, seeing, of seeking vision, or sight inside.

First there was Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in which he couldn’t see beyond his privileged upper class existence. His latest movie Minority Report deals with oracles, divination and inner seeing, where he portrays a Pre-Crime fighter blinded by his wife’s loss and his own sense of righteousness. He has a one-sided perspective that eventually leads him to exchange his own eyes on the black-market for another pair, which paradoxically gives him an expanded realm of sight. Vanilla Sky was written, directed and produced between these two films and represents a character that cannot distinguish between past, present, and future, and between reality and dream! This clearly demonstrates the postmodern dissociated and fragmented dilemma we find ourselves in. David Aames is caught between two worlds, two opposing forces and encounters a rupture that leads to a liminal space and transition. This catapults him into a journey of self-discovery and psychoidal growth that leads to his eventual seeming suicide, a Christ figure that spreads his arms and dives to his awakening.

The film ends with an extreme close up of his eye where we assume he has arrived 150 years into the future reborn and re-leased of his anima/mother/puer golden boy complexes. For a depth psychologist the reference to eyes leads inexorably to Oedipus and Freud. Perhaps the first explorer of the unconscious to discover and name a complex — the Oedipus complex. The name comes from the play written by Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus, who killed his father, married his mother unknowingly and put his own eyes out (which Freud interprets as symbolic castration) when he discovered the truth of his origins.

This is a mythological and a psychological motif and Vanilla Sky is rife with both as well as philosophy, postmodern angst, politics, archetypes, symbols and images some of which we’ll address.

But first a very brief synopsis of Vanilla Sky from beginning to end. “Open your eyes” the voice requests, David Aames wakes up and drives to work only to discover that Times Square is devoid of people. A postmodern fear where the human is absent and the consumer-media-machine, it’s advertising billboards and hawking voices demanding consumption have outlived humanity. Fast, furious cuts are interspersed with fragments of bombarding images and intoxicating visual and verbal ‘samples’ of a crazy consumptive world.

The music here is eastern and alien, music of the unknown and the unwelcome ‘other!’ Imagine Edvard Munch’s The Scream and that is his state in which David Aames (Tom Cruise) awakes to his ordinary world! Yet he has inherited a publishing empire, from his brilliant book-writing father and he has just made love (four times throughout the night) with the beautiful Cameran Diaz who plays Juliana!

We cut to his office where we see this boy child, the Puer Aeternus archetype with the golden boy charm, addressing the board, which he fondly calls the seven dwarfs. (I suggest a thinly disguised stab and identification with the morally corrupt state of our conglomerates — Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, Doc, and Dopey.)

He has inherited the controlling shares of the company but only by a thin margin and the board, which represents authority, responsibility and the system, or matrix doesn’t approve of his irresponsible attitude, flam-boyishness and youth. That night it is his birthday party where Juliana is unwelcome, yet she has crashed the party anyway.

It is here that she speaks of the significance of having made love four times, Jung’s obvious symbol for wholeness. We could say he devoted the whole of his life’s work to demonstrate the vast psychological significance to the number four. Marie-Louise von Franz in Number and Time is very clear on this. “The fact that mankind’s repeated attempts to establish an orientation toward wholeness possess a quarternary structure appears to correspond to an archetypal psychic structural predisposition in man.” (Franz 1974) P115.

The film has now established the dynamics and position of his relationship with Juliana, and the landscape of his cultural ‘matrix,’ his ordinary world. We have discovered the source of his wealth, his drives (cultural) and urges (sexual) while we have also seen his primary flaw (being a Puer) and outer problems (Julianna) all this paints him as a three dimensional character, with which we can identify.

However a problem manifests, he meets Sophia, (The Greek Goddess of wisdom, who offers her cup filled with wisdom, and offers stillness to listen to what needs to be heard,) introduced by his best friend (a Judas archetype) who had met her that day in the library. He falls head over heals and whisks her away into the inner chambers of his apartment. He walks her home and quietly falls in love with an honest, authentic woman who can say no. He leaves the apartment early in the morning only to discover Juliana has stalked him and entices him to her car, where she proceeds to declare the meaning of having made love four times. “It means something David,” she says.

She drives them to death, literally for her and symbolically for him, as he is disfigured losing his charm and after forty operations returns to the world needing to wear a mask. He has crossed a threshold caused by a rupture; he is now committed to the journey, the descent, yet he doesn’t know where it is to lead. He has left his ordinary world and prepares to enter a what could be called a temenos space. On his first evening out after all the operations and the first time wearing his mask he meets Sophia at a local club where she rejects him. His best friend, the Judas archetype has in the intervening time stolen her heart, we feel the tension and the driving beat of the club, a Dante’s inferno scene.

He is betrayed and has lost the one love; (very Puerian) he falls asleep on the city sidewalk. But unknown to us (the viewers) it is at this moment the splice happens and David Aames is transported into Maya itself. Into the dream, where everything is perfect, Sophia, is in his arms, they love each other and vanilla skies are everywhere. But the dream turns into a nightmare and he kills what seems to be Juliana, but in fact it is Sophia. Tech support arrives, in the guise of a man who knows everything that is going.

He is lead upwards only to confront Sophia and the other characters in his dream. It’s 150 years into the future and all he has to do is die by jumping from the roof of the skyscraper, crucifix like with his arms out-stretched only to be born again and resurrected.

This film is about themes of reality, dream, transformation and the alchemy of our conscious-unconscious processes. As Christopher Hauke suggests in “Jung & Film,” such alchemical transformations can only take place where there is a projection to relate to, and moreover, one which requires a much larger screen than most of us can generate in our personal lives.” (Hauke and Alister 2001) P1.

David Aames is desperately in search of a deeper relationship with himself, and a meaning his life. He finds this in his projection onto Sophia, known as the Goddess of Wisdom. Sophia (pronounced sew-fee’ah) in Greek, Hohkma in Hebrew, Sapientia in Latin, all mean wisdom.

She is the Judeo-Christian God’s female soul, source of his true power. As Goddess of wisdom, her faces are many: Black Goddess, Divine Feminine, Mother of God, and for the Gnostic Christians, Sophia was the Mother of Creation; her consort and assistant was Jehovah.

Her sacred shrine, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, is one of the seven wonders of the world. Her symbol, the dove, represents spirit; stars crown her, a Middle Eastern icon, to indicate her absolute divinity. Sophia reminds us, that we, and only we have the truth within.

This is a symbolic encounter with an archetypal character because it links us with a living, yet unknown realm. David Aames is attempting to know himself, precisely because he doesn’t know his own identity, his pathology as the “eternal golden boy, the father’s boy, is in a sense undifferentiated from his family history and inheritance.

Alchemically speaking this is the prima materia, the base from which the creation of his Self takes place. This film is about identity disorder, dissolution and a psyche that is fragmented, essentially the postmodern conditions described by Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida and Scheper-Hughes to name a few critical thinkers in the field. This film responds to identity disorder because it explores identity, through transformation into disfigurement, the wearing of the mask, which as a metaphor for the persona is what we all wear to exist and survive.

Obviously this paper could explore the mask symbol as disfigurement, the anima in film, the quarternity in detail but alas attention is placed elsewhere. Yet this film is about thriving, growing and expanding, it is a film fascinated by dissociatiated identities, points of view, reality, dream, subjectivity, and what is real!

Vanilla Sky explores these themes by plunging us into a liminal space through a rupture between his ‘matrix,’ his reality and dream, between a personal local frame of reference into an archetypal one where the figure lead us inexorable towards death. Yet can paradoxically only be reached through the third space, the middle between the collective and the psychoid.

This is a very postmodern film because we see the deconstruction between reality and dream, and the wall between them, yet here the barrier has been breached. It is a story set in the margins, in the middle, initiated by rejection and disfigurement.

The story is fundamentally a story of the hero and the god. It is a rite of passage, a magnification of the formula as articulated by Joseph Campbell in the Hero with a Thousand Faces. As “separation-initiation-return,” and which he names “the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”(Campbell 1968) P30.

He sums this journey up as a hero who has ventured forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: “fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” (Ibid P30.)

But let us explore this journey in greater detail through Victor Turner’s ritual process of limanility and communitas. These are the essential steps and ingredients that make David Aames’s journey across thresholds from the mundane, ordinary modern world into the fragmented, dissociated, postmodern, sacred space, his own ‘center of the world.’ Victor Turner in his book The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure discusses rites of passage.

He credits Arnold Van Gennep as being the first to call the rite of passage a ‘liminal phase.’ He defined this rite of passage as “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.” (Turner 1995) P94. I suggest therefore that David Aames in Vanilla Sky is thus confronted with this liminal space and the film itself demonstrates the psychic move from fragmentation and dissociation towards wholeness, essentially a move from the postmodern condition to one of integration, wisdom and clarity. Van Gennep Turner suggests clearly demonstrates that these rites of passage are transitional spaces marked by three phases: “separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin) and aggregation.” (Turner 1995) P94.

These three phases can be clearly seen in Vanilla Sky, we have the initial separation from Aames’s ordinary world, triggered by an anima figure. (Sophia.) He thus becomes detached from the group, and the responsibilities of his role as majority shareholder of his deceased’s father publishing empire.

This could be described as his cultural condition, initial state or ‘matrix.’ It is through his disfigurement and the wearing of the mask, which signifies a descent into a liminal personae, Turner describes this as a threshold person, a ritual subject, the passenger, who becomes entwined in an ambiguous space, where the cultural realm has few or none of the attributes of the past.

In the third phase the ritual passage is consummated, Turner describes this as a reaggregation or reincorporation. Where the ritual subject re-turns to a relatively stable state once more.

Lets look at liminality more closely and how it reveals itself in Vanilla Sky. Liminal entities according to Turner are neither here nor there; they are betwixt between positions “assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and the ceremonial.

A very postmodern description indeed. “Liminality is often likened to death, to being in the womb, (a very alchemical symbol signifying solutio,) to invisibility, (precisely the function of the mask,) to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.(Turner 1995) P95.

Liminal entities “such as neophytes” suggests Turner in initiation rituals “may be represented as possessing nothing… they may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing or nothing at all.” (Turner 1995) P95. This turner suggests is to demonstrate that liminal beings, those that are in transition have no status, role or position, rank or position in a kinship system.

I suggest that David Aames mask is exactly such a device it strips him of his individuality, his rank, it is as if he is being ground down to a uniform condition, only to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers on his aggregation, his re-entry into a world in the future.

But where does this limanility lead? According to Turner it is a fascinating blend of lowliness and sacredness. In this state, this rite of passage, we are presented with a “moment in and out of time,” (Turner 1995) P96. An in and out of secular social structure “which reveals however fleetingly, some recognition of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.” (Turner 1995) P96.

Turner suggests that there are two main and major models for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating. “The first is a society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating man in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’

The second, which emerges recognizable in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of ritual elders.”(Turner 1995) P96.

Liminality implies that the “high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low.” (Turner 1995) 97. This is identical to the alchemists saying, “True, true. Without a doubt. Certain: the below is as above, and the above as the below, to perfect the wonders of the one,” (Roob 1997) p8, and as Jung suggests this is both the cause and the function of enantiodromia, a pendulum swing that brings the constellated opposite back into balance.

Hence Jung’s theoretical model of balancing the opposites that nourishes and supports the journey towards wholeness. Victor Turner describes this three-part sequence as a developmental cycle, he sees this cycle impacting individuals, groups and social life, this is also a cultural phenomena. Social life Turner argues is a dialectical process that

“Involves successive experience of high and low, commnitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality. The passage form higher to lower status is through a limbo of statelessness. In such a process, the opposites, as it were, constitute one another and are mutually indispensable…each individuals life experience contains alternating exposure to structure and communitas, and to ritual states and transitions.”(Turner 1995) P97.

Now let us talk about the idea of archetype and the collective unconscious as formulated by Jung. Specifically I wish to turn towards the idea of David Aames rebirth or transitional journey resulting in his seeming second death. We can view this from multiple aspects, as a resurrection myth, and as a rebirth into another state of being.

According to Jung in his the Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, resurrection means the ‘establishment of human existence after death…..where a new element becomes established: that of change, transmutation, or transformation of one’s being.” (Jung and Hull 1980) P114 para 202.

Rebirth (renovatio) however concerns rebirth in a very strict sense; rebirth within the span of an individual life, its whole “atmosphere,” suggests Jung, “is the idea of renovatio, renewal, or even of improvement brought about by magical means.” (Jung and Hull 1980) p114, para 203

I suggest that our hero character experiences both a resurrection and a rebirth, as he dies to another life and he also experiences a renewal without any fundamental change in being. “Inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement.”(Jung and Hull 1980) P114 para203

Jung goes on to suggest that rebirth isn’t a process that we can empirically observe, nor can we measure, weigh or record it in any way. He suggests it is entirely a psychic reality. However in Vanilla Sky we are shown exactly this, a rebirth after a three-part journey, which is characterized by separation, a descent into the margins, into a liminal space followed by a re-entry, and a reaggregation or reincorporation.

Rebirth then according to Jung must be counted among “the primordial affirmations of mankind.” (Jung and Hull 1980) P116 para 207.

This journey of David Aames is a deeply psychological one as we can see that an integration wishes to take place, for his failure to cope with his disfigurement, his loss from his known world must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Isn’t the same journey seen in the clinician’s office? The stages of the journey are often revealed in the dreams and fantasies of the analyzed.

This is the souls hunger for depth beyond the shallow knowledge of self, of self-ignorance. David Aames psyche/soul wishes to become known and seen, hence it sets the course and is in charge of the rudder of the ship.

But let us for a moment return to the postmodern conversation. I have suggested the film is postmodern and I also suggest the main character David Aames and his turmoil is also a postmodern subject.

He represents a dissociative ego structure, he is made up of bits & pieces, a high functioning yet borderline personality, with an imposter syndrome, he’s only inherited wealth and his fathers publishing empire. His central question must be; who am I really?

Perhaps he is the negative divine child, the archetypal the rock singer, a Jim Morrison, perhaps a fashion model, archetypal figures that now dominate our postmodern world.

Postmodernism is a relatively recent phenomena originating amongst artists and critics in New York in the 1960’s according to Madan Sarup. In his book “Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism” he acknowledges Jean-Francois Lyotard and his famous book “The Postmodern Condition” where Lyotard attacks the legitimizing myths of the grand narrative, the progressive liberation of humanity through science, and the idea that a universal knowledge exists for humanity.

He says Lyotard believes “that we can no longer talk about a totalizing idea of reason for there is no reason, only reasons.” (Sarup 1993) P132. Sarup names the central features associated with postmodernism and as you read these note how each can easily be seen in both David Aames’s character and the film as a composite whole. …”

The deletion of boundaries between art and everyday life; the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between elite and popular culture; a stylistic eclecticism and mixing of codes…… that there is parody, pastiche, irony, and playfulness, a shift of emphasis from content to form or style, a transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents, references to eclecticism, reflextivity, self-referentiality, quotation, artifice, randomness, anarchy, fragmentation and allegory.” (Sarup 1993) P132.

The idea of our postmodern angst being one of dissociation is prefigured in Jung’s’ work, he sees the “whole personality split in half, but only smaller fragments are broken off…. Universal supposition of a plurality of souls in one and the same individual.” (Jung 1969) P174 “This dissociability also enables us to set aside the difficulties that flow from the logically necessary assumption of a threshold of consciousness.” (Jung 1969) P174.

As Helene Shulman-Lorenz suggests in her book Living at the Edge of Chaos, “no one needs an image of unity more than someone who is fragmented and dissociated.” (Shulman 1997) P43. She describes our society as one in which we have lost access “to a ritualized world center where deep healing and rejuvenation can occur. The end product can be a dissociated adult who has been taught more about correct behavior. Competition, and conformity than about inner wholeness.” (Shulman 1997) P43.

Christopher Hauke in his book Jung and the Postmodern, suggests that Jung early on pointed out “that the degree of differentiation, separation and opposition manifested by contemporary consciousness results in a degree of dissociation and of sickness that goes beyond the individual.” (Hauke 2000) P35.

He quotes Jung from The Collected Works, “The political and social conditions, the fragmentation, (the dissociation,) of religion and philosophy, the contending schools of modern art and modern psychology all have one meaning in this respect…we must admit that no one feels quite comfortable in the present-day world; indeed it becomes increasingly uncomfortable.” (Jung, Read et al. 1953) (My addition in bold and bracketed.)

The postmodern condition, which is most frequently revealed and celebrated, is its commitment to the surface image. “In contemporary culture we are surrounded by fast moving streams of images…. images which start out as representations of reality end up as representations without any reality behind them at all…. Hollywood films themselves are imitations of reality.” (Hauke 2000) P46 This is Hauke’s description and our opening scene in Vanilla Sky.

Which brings us to the idea of a clinical description of Identity disorder or DID, Why? Because you will notice the description matches the state we find our lead character in.

DID’s (Dissociative Identity Disorder) symptoms include headaches, aggressive behavior, trance like experiences, amnesias, lying, sleep disturbance and depressive symptoms and alternative personalities according to the six authors of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Five Turkish Cases. They frequently exhibit signs of “attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, conduct disorder, depression, anxiety, somatization and post-traumatic stress disorder….oppositional defiant disorder, schizophrenia and various affective disorders.” (S. Zorogula 1996) P254.

The authors discuss in this article the common occurrence of multiple personalities within the one person, and personality switching, the hearing of voices, horrifying images and epileptic fits. Are these not the symptoms we see in David Aames and the role switching between Sophia and Julianna, between dream and reality?

Lets now speak about the center of the world as I suggest that David Aames in his journey travels to the center of the world. His world, his dream world, this is his center, the center for all of us. It is this ritualized space that we in the postmodern world have lost, thus causing the fragmentation and dissociation and obsessive attachment to the intoxicating surface image.

From The Encyclopedia of Religion “The term center of the world refers to that place where all essential modes of being come together; where communication and even passage among them is possible. The center of the world is the heart of reality, where the real is fully manifest.” (DP-861 2004)

It is always a sacred place qualitatively different from mundane space. “In cultures that conceive of the universe as multiple realms of heavens, hells and strata for various kinds of beings, the center of the world is that point where all realms intersect and where the most direct contact with the sacred is obtained.” (DP-861 2004)

It is a sacred point that “stands apart from the homogeneity of general space; symbolic openings from one level to another; an axis mundi (tree, mountain, ladder vine or pillar) that symbolizes the communication between cosmic regions.” (DP-861 2004)

The axis mundi is also “known as the ‘hub of the world’, which symbolizes communication between cosmic realms. It likewise brings up the symbolism of ascension, since one transcends the planes of existence along a vertical axis.” (DP-861 2004).

Isn’t this identical to the closing scenes where David Aames is riding up an elevator with windows out onto the external world, he is ascending, preparing for the transcending moment, traveling up a vertical axis, against the backdrop of vanilla skies. And the symbolism of the center “its multivalent character makes it capable of extending its significance to multiple levels of meaning and planes of reference.” (DP-861 2004) Thus we can make the jump that the center of the world is also the ‘self.’

Yet we could also say that the death and dying in Vanilla Sky is really only a subtext as David Aames journey is essentially engaging in pleasure and play, he has escaped the very real disfigurement, the mask an unworkable reality in his known ordinary world and opted for death in a cryogenic chamber, in the hope of being resurrected in the future.

He has escaped into an imaginative world of fantasy, of vanilla skies, where he has re-connected with his fantasy love (Sophia) and “created a world where there is never a need to confront limitations of the flesh, and therefore no place for loss and abandonment. In such a world there is no need for grief, since death has no meaning.” (Hooks 1996) P46.

Isn’t this also the postmodern condition we find ourselves in unable to grieve, unable to confront our own limitations, unable to process loss and abandonment, merely numbed by the plethora of prescription medicines, seductive images that bombard us with the never ending message to consume.

David Aames’s character is ego inflated; yet we are all born in a state of inflation. Aames ego is in complete identification with the self. “the self is born, but the ego is made” (Edinger and C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. 1972) P7 States Edward Edinger in ‘Ego and Archetype.” H.G. Baynes calls this “the provisional life,” an attitude that is innocent of responsibility “towards circumstantial facts of reality as though these facts are being provided for, either by parents, or the state, or at least by providence.” (Edinger and C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. 1972)P13.

I suggest we as a postmodern society are living just that a provisional life where the state is taking responsibility and we in our childishness have relinquished responsibility and become dependant. Yet David Aames in his inability to successfully navigate the rejection he suffers from Sophia, is his pathology yet it serves him as I have suggested earlier because his psyche is at the helm. His soul wishes to be free of the shackles of his golden boy archetype. M. L. Von Franz describes this provisional life as the same condition as a person caught in the puer aeternus archetypal complex.

She says that what the person is doing is always having “the fantasy that one time in the future the real thing will come about…. it means an inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often a savior complex, a Messiah complex…. a pathological megalomania…with the secret thought that one day one can save the world and have the last word to say in philosophy, or religion, or art.” (Edinger and C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. 1972)P14.

A description of our current society, political system and perspective on natural resources, democracy and globalization in the early part of the 21st Century.

David Aames’s is in a state of inflation at the beginning of the film due to identification with the Self but because of his encounter with reality, his disfigurement, he chooses a death that leads him into a cryogenic dream state, which brings about an estrangement between his ego and the Self. Like Jung’s psychology “the fragmented self that has little or no option to be otherwise despite a fantasy of wholeness.” (Hauke 2000) P283.

The postmodern condition then perhaps is the reason for David Aames’s initial separation. I suggest it is loss of soul, the primitive term that connotes a diminution of personality and this alters personality and thus I suggest our postmodern culture suffers a diminution of personality through a loss of soul. The soul has just gone off like (Jung suggests) a dog that runs away from its master overnight.

This phenomena happens because the nature of the “primitive consciousness lacks the firm coherence of our own.” (Jung and Hull 1980) P119 para213. Jung is suggesting and I make the move directly into our postmodern culture that this loss of soul occurs precisely because the psyche is fragmented, dissociated and unconsciously engaged in participation mystique.

An unconscious identification with the culture at large. David Aames forgoes participation mystique because as I have suggested earlier his soul has requested the journey. He has experienced a rupture and a descent out of the matrix into another realm. He has in a sense experienced a loss of soul, Janet’s term for this was ‘abaissement du niveau mental’ This is a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which Jung suggests could be likened to “a low barometric reading presaging bad weather.” (Jung and Hull 1980) P119 para 213. Jung suggests that this can lead to a paralysis of will and can go so far, that the personality falls apart…that consciousness loses its unity…where the individual parts of the personality make themselves independent and thus escape from the control of the conscious mind.”(Jung and Hull 1980) p120 Para 213.

I suggest that this is precisely what has happened to our hero and this is the pre-eminent condition of our postmodern times. Abaissement du niveau mental is the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock. All present in Vanilla Sky, both in the character, and also in the society and cultural frame the film is set within. “The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one’s self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing egocentricity, narrows the mental horizon. In the end it may lead to the development of an essentially negative personality, (perhaps Freud’s Thanatos, the death drive) which means that a falsification of the original personality has supervened.”(Jung and Hull 1980) P120 para 214.

Could this be where our postmodern society is headed? We can already see the narrowing of the mental horizon in the fundamental relgio/political movements in the current Republican Party. (April 2004 in America.)

In processes of transformation we can also have natural functioning transformations. Jung suggests that “all ideas of rebirth are founded on this fact. Nature itself demands a death and a rebirth. As the alchemist Democritus says: ‘nature rejoices in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature.’ There are natural processes that simply happen to us.” (Jung and Hull 1980) P130 para234. And this destiny as so brilliantly articulated by Sophecles in his Three Theban Plays, all three tragedies reverberate with issues of destiny, divine dispensation and the human condition!

And Jung goes on to say that natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams. And this Jung likens to a cave, it is the place of rebirth, the secret cavity in which one is shut up in order to be incubated and renewed. Jung uses an example from the Koran in his book The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, the Islamic mystic Khidr. ‘the Verdant One.’ The following story is taken from the eighteenth Sura entitled ‘The Cave.’ The ‘middle’ suggests Jung is the center where the jewel reposes, where the “incubation or the sacrificial rite or transformation takes place. Just such a place of the center or of transformation is the cave in which those seven had gone to sleep, little thinking that they would experience there a prolongation of life verging on immortality. When they awoke, they had slept 309 years. ” (Jung and Hull 1980) p135 para 240.

Fascinating as we have in Vanilla Sky the reference to the seven dwarfs, and a dreamlike existence for 150 years, only to awaken by sacrificing himself and leaping from a tall building arms outstretched in a Jesus like pose.

Jung suggests this story has the following meaning. “Anyone who gets into that cave, that is to say into the cave which everyone has in himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an-at first-unconscious processes of transformation. By penetrating into the unconscious he makes a connection to unconscious contents.” (Jung and Hull 1980) p136 para241

Part 2:

Thus I say this film allows us to identify ourselves and the culture we live within by riding along and penetrating deeply into unconscious personal and cultural unconscious material. It gives me another glimpse, another sidelong glance at my own imposter, Puer nature and how the culture surrounding me nourishes this perspective.

It’s interesting because during the writing of this paper (March/April 2004) I have had numerous dreams of snakes, being devoured and feeling a sense of loss. My main client in Xtrapolate (my company) substantially lowered what he wanted to pay for the monthly retainer, causing a severe (temporary) financial shortage to the extent where it could severely impact my ongoing participation in the Depth program.

My journey clearly echoes David Aames’s in the film and the cycle of separation, descent and (hopefully) reaggregation. One could say reviewing the film closely that David Aames’s character after the disfigurement was addicted to pain killers, a powerful metaphor that suggests our prescription drug taking in America is merely a response to an abandonment of ritual, an absence of the sacred and the very real possibility that we are living in the phase of rupture and descent.

It makes me think that we could characterize the entire journey (of life) as one in which we live permanently in the state of descent. Prior to birth we are contained in a liquid environment, connected on multiple levels to psyche, mother and heart beat, we are then ejected, ruptured into life and our entire life is an attempt for the ego to grow effectively and in time partner appropriately with the unconscious.

A journey whose mission is to connect and allow the wisdom of the psyche to influence and participate in ones life. A momentous struggle for psyche to re-turn amidst a life within the descent and liminal space. Perhaps this is why we have so many seductive distractions, intoxicating images, influential experts and a deluge of mind numbing fragmented information, it all distracts us from the horror of our own dissociated condition

References:

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