Open Your Eyes (Spanish: Abre los ojos) (1997) Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Starring Eduardo Noriega, Penélope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martínez, and Najwa Nimri.
In 1938, French avant-garde poet and playwright Antonin Artaud published a collection of essays called Le Théâtre et son double, or The Theater and Its Double, which contains what may be the first use of the term “virtual reality.” Theater, Artaud writes, is la réalité virtuelle, a reality in which “in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy’s visionary internal dramas” which create “a purely fictitious and illusory world.” Artaud was discussing—in his very 1930s French avant-garde way—his conception of what he called “The Theater of Cruelty,” an experimental style of theater that seeks to immerse the audience in the performance and break through any critical detachment that allows the audience to sit back and assess the performance without emotional involvement.
Artaud was writing about the very human experience of live theater, not about technology. The technological involvement in the concept of virtual reality came a bit later. American filmmaker Morton Heilig is generally credited with being one of the first to develop a virtual reality machine, although he didn’t call it that. In the early 1960s he invented the Sensorama, a machine that employed sensory inputs such as sights, sounds, smells, and vibrations to create an experience for the user. The Sensorama never took off; Heilig couldn’t get funding to build more than a single prototype. But you can take a look at US Patent #3,050,870, which describes the machine’s purpose as “to simulate a desired experience by developing sensations in a plurality of the senses.”
People have never stopped working toward the same fundamental goals as Artaud and Heilig: to create immersive experiences in which the audience feels a presented scene so intensely they are persuaded to cease distinguishing between fiction and reality. Both the concept and the actuality of virtual reality have, of course, changed significantly as technology has evolved, and so too has the way virtual reality is explored in science fiction.
Alejandro Amenábar made Open Your Eyes when he was about twenty-five years old, the same age as the film’s caddish playboy protagonist. It was only Amenábar’s second movie, following his 1996 debut, the film school horror-thriller Thesis. Many years later, while speaking at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Amenábar would say that he considered Open Your Eyes to be his worst film. His words suggest he’s embarrassed by it: he considers it immature, a film written by teenagers with a very teenage feeling to it. I’m fascinated by this statement, because I don’t think Open Your Eyes is an immature film. I think it’s pretty smart, well-acted, and effectively unsettling combination of sci fi tale, noir thriller, and emotional melodrama. (I have not seen Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, the 2001 American remake of this film.)
Open Your Eyes tells the story of Cesar (Eduardo Noriega), a wealthy, handsome young man who is, frankly, a bit of an asshole. When we first meet him, he is behaving callously toward the woman he’s sleeping with, Nuria (Najwa Nimri), and his best friend, Pelayo (Fele Martínez), and he doesn’t seem want anything besides skating through life without having to care about much.
But almost as soon as the film begins, the story shifts to reveal a framing device: Cesar is in a prison cell. His face is covered by a blank mask that eerily mimics his own features. A psychiatrist, Antonio (Chete Lera), is trying to get him to talk about the events leading to his arrest. Cesar has killed someone but does not remember what happened.
The film jumps back and forth between the prison cell and the backstory, sometimes diverting into Cesar’s dreams and memories. The effect is intentionally disorienting, because the film is very much focused on Cesar’s point of view. He doesn’t know what’s going on, so we don’t either, but it never really stumbles into being confusing.
The story Cesar relays to Antonio begins on the night of Cesar’s birthday party. He has broken things off with Nuria, but she shows up anyway to linger in a menacing Fatal Attraction kind of way. Cesar immediately begins to hit on Sofia (Penélope Cruz), Pelayo’s friend and crush, with the excuse that he needs help putting Nuria off. He really just wants to make a move on a woman who looks like Penélope Cruz and doesn’t care that she came to the party with his best friend. Pelayo sulks away in resignation, Nuria fumes, and Cesar and Sofia spend a friendly but not sexual night together. She seems charmed and probably interested, but Cesar—well, in Cesar’s retelling to Antonio, he claims he fell irrevocably, completely, head over heels in love.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Nuria is waiting outside in the morning, and Cesar foolishly agrees to let her drive him home. Nuria deliberately crashes her car, killing herself and attempting to kill Cesar. He survives but is badly injured, resulting in severe facial disfigurement that doctors are unable to remedy.
This is all a very melodramatic and soap opera setup, but it’s where the story really begins. Cesar may be a shallow and callous young man, but his pain isn’t only about vanity; the world does treat visibly disfigured and disabled people very differently than it treats healthy, handsome young men. What he needs is therapy and a strong support system, but he doesn’t have either, so he falls into depression and isolation—before things change abruptly, and he reconnects with both Sofia and Pelayo, and the doctors call with good news, and Cesar’s life improves again, at least for a little while.
Then it all goes to hell again, naturally, this time in a off-kilter, surrealist way. I’m not going to recount all the twists and turns that make up the final act of the film, because just like in World on a Wire, what matters more than the details of the plot is the emotional impact it has on the main character. Cesar is confused, angry, and afraid as his world is unraveling around him—and the fact that it’s happening again, after the attempted murder and subsequent injuries already did that once, lends a desperate hopelessness to his state. Eduardo Noriega is fantastic in this role and a very good example of how it isn’t necessary for us to like or relate to a character to feel the impact of what he’s going through.
A curious effect of the film’s central framing device—Cesar telling his story to a psychiatrist in a prison—is that we suspect, every step of the way, that there is a line, somewhere, between what is real and what is not. There are too many complicating overlaps between the conversations, dreams, flashbacks, and memories. There are mirrors everywhere. Cesar’s shift between dreaming and waking frequently interrupts the narrative. The characters have multiple conversations about discerning the differences between acting and sincerity, between dreams and reality, between truths and lies. Sofia is an actor and a mime, and Cesar falls in love while looking at photographs in her apartment: a filtered perception of her real life. Antonio keeps asking Cesar to take off his mask, insisting that his face is fine, he is no longer disfigured, the damage has been undone—but the camera never allows us, the audience, to see whether that is true.
This is yet another sci fi movie with essentially no sci fi special effects. The only obvious effect is the facial prosthetic; everything else is so firmly grounded in realism there are no cues, visual or musical or otherwise, to indicate when scenes are shifting from the real world to the virtual one.
In fact, one of the most “unreal” scenes in the movie is one of the last that takes place in Cesar’s real world. This is the scene at the club where Cesar meets Sofia and Pelayo for a night out. It’s one of my favorite sequences in the movie because of how eerily it juxtaposes something very mundane—three twenty-somethings at the club—with imagery that showcases the deeply unpleasant tension of their situation. Cesar is (understandably) hyperaware of other people’s reactions to him. Sofia is extremely uncomfortable because, as Pelayo points out, she barely even knows Cesar; the tragedy of their grand lost romance is entirely in Cesar’s head. From Sofia’s perspective he’s a guy she talked to a couple of times who is now obsessed with her. And Pelayo is unhappy to be stuck in this spot between two friends, one of whom very clearly needs help that none of them are equipped to supply.
It’s hardly subtle when Cesar takes off the blank mask that is a sad parody of his own face and begins wearing it on the back of his head, nor is it the most unique cinematography to present a montage of scenes in which Cesar wanders through the crowded, shadowy club suffused with dancing strangers, crisscrossed by angular lighting, and ringing with the kind of ’90s music that I would listen to alone in my bedroom when I was a depressed high school sophomore. The cinematic tropes in use are familiar, even clichéd, but it’s a striking sequence anyway. He’s alone while surrounded by people. He’s lonely even when friends are nearby. He’s still wearing the mask even with his injured face exposed.
We learn later, at the very end of the movie, that this night is the last “real” thing we see. Everything after the moment Cesar collapses drunkenly in the street happens inside a virtual world—a virtual world that his mind inhabits while his body is cryogenically frozen in anticipation of a future in which doctors can better reconstruct his face. (The movie doesn’t care about the science involved, so we don’t have to either. Let us all cheerfully handwave it away together.) The rest of the film is concerned with exploring how we get from Cesar’s apparent turning point—the romance with Sofia, the miraculous surgery—to the conversations with the psychiatrist in prison.
Not all movies about virtual or artificial realities are thrillers, but quite a lot of them are, for obvious reasons. The reality-bending possibilities of virtual reality lend themselves well to the suspicion, paranoia, and tension that go into building a good thriller. Here, the snags in the artificial reality begin subtly, with slippage between dreams and wakefulness, conversations that echo or repeat, and startling flashes of memory. The tension builds dramatically as the odd occurrences grow more significant, until it finally all culminates in Sofia seeming to disappear while Nuria takes her place, something that nobody but Cesar sees or acknowledges. This is what leads to the revelation that although he doesn’t remember it, Cesar has chosen to live in this artificial world, and he can now choose to leave it, if he wants.
Right at the end of the film, there is one final revelation that I find especially interesting, mostly because it’s a bit different from what I expect from virtual reality stories. The man who explains the situation (played by Gérard Barray) tells Cesar that while the cryogenics company has made it possible for his mind to exist in this virtual world, they haven’t maintained any control or influence over what happens in it. There is nobody tormenting him; there are no glitches causing him pain; there is no game, no scheme, no experiment. Nobody has trapped him here for any particular reason. There is no purpose to this situation besides the passage of time, and the company has no real interest in what happens in his artificial reality. They’re just doing what he paid them to do.
Everything else is up to Cesar. It’s his world, built from his memories and his desires, however bleak and tormented they may be. Sofia and Nuria blend together because Cesar never really knew either of them in life; in his memories they are more symbols of hope and pain than they are real women with lives separate from him. He slides between dreaming and waking often because there is no real difference. His face is sometimes disfigured, sometimes not, because he views himself both ways. As Cesar says to Antonio during an argument, even before he understands what’s going on, “It doesn’t matter what you see. It only matters what I see.”
Our buddy Antonin Artaud wouldn’t care for this kind of story. He devised the Theater of Cruelty specifically to push back against stories in which the audience sits apart and psychoanalyzes the characters, and Open Your Eyes is a film in which analyzing the psychology of the main character is the entire point. There is complete sensory immersion in a fictional world happening, but it’s happening to Cesar, not to us.
All fiction is about making up a guy and sticking that guy in situations. Or something like that. More or less. I studied rocks in school, not literary theory. Virtual reality sci fi allows us to play with our fictional characters on multiple levels, by manipulating situations within situations. Very often writers and filmmakers will use virtual reality to say something about society, conformity, politics, philosophy, technology. Big ideas, big themes. But that’s not all it can do. I appreciate that Open Your Eyes goes small instead of big in its ideas and themes, intimate instead of expansive. This is the story of one man, his flaws and his pain, and the story is so inwardly focused in that respect that we are left not knowing what happens after the end. Maybe Cesar wakes up 150 years in the future. Maybe he doesn’t. All he went through happened anyway. That’s something I love about virtual reality stories, the way they provide a space in which the emotional journey is real even if “real” means only what we—storyteller and audience together—want it to mean.
What do you think of Open Your Eyes? Does anybody have any thoughts on comparisons to Vanilla Sky? I’ve read that the ending is different, but without watching Vanilla Sky I’m not entirely sure I understand the difference. I’d love to hear from anybody who has seen both!
Next week: We’ve spent enough time playing around in computer worlds that pretend to be the real world. Let’s change things up and vroom our way into something completely different with Tron (1982). Watch it on Disney, Amazon, Apple, Google, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft, and the well-worn VHS that your older brother’s geekiest friend brought over last weekend.
