Vanilla Sky and Simulated Reality

“I want to live a real life... I don't want to dream any longer.” So says David Aames (played by Tom Cruise) when he realizes that he has been “living” in a simulated reality, in Cameron Crowe’s science fiction/fantasy film, Vanilla Sky. In this purposefully confusing movie, the audience sees various parts of David’s life, not knowing where reality ends and the dream turned nightmare begins, only to find out in the end that he has killed himself and is living in a “lucid dream” in a cryonically suspended state of animation, which he purchased from the Life Extention Corporation.
The corporation advertises the “lucid dream” as the “cryonic union of science and entertainment.” Through this fictional futuristic technological development, viewers can see the possible far-reaching implications of the technology currently being developed in the area of virtual reality, with its “goal of unmediated visual experience” (Bolter & Grusin 4). Extending this to all senses, people would have the ability to experience simulated reality, which, as opposed to virtual reality, “would be impossible to tell apart from ‘real’ reality” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality ). Tom Cruise’s character experiences this simulated reality, which is the culmination of remediation, a process that current technology is now undergoing at a rapid rate. Remediation consists of a “double logic,” expressing how “[o]ur culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (Bolter & Grusin 5). These two facets of remediation—hypermediacy and immediacy—are “contradictory” yet “mutually dependent” (Bolter & Grusin 6). Immediacy is seen in the fictional Life Extension Corporation’s “lucid dream” creation in that David (Cruise) “feel[s] as if [he] were ‘really’ there” (Bolter & Grusin 5), not knowing for a long period of time (years?) that he is not actually physically living; the medium is invisible, the experience immediate. Ironically, it takes an innumerable amount of media to create this invisibility of media; every sense is mediated. This is hypermediacy to the utmost.
The movie ends with Edmund Ventura, a Life Extension scientist, entering David’s dream, explaining the situation to him, and giving him the option to stay in this dream or return to an uncertain reality. After musing over David’s situation, Ventura asks him a pivotal question: “It's been a brilliant journey of self-awakening. And now you've simply got to ask yourself this: What is happiness to you, David?” This is a question that society likewise has to ask of itself in an age where more and more versions of “reality” become possible. For example, Alcor Life Extension is an existing company, formed in 1972, and “[a]s of July 2005, Alcor had 765 members, and 68 patients in cryopreservation” (http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/index.html). Although lucid dreams are not yet possible, life extension is. With mediated technology on the rise, Vanilla Sky does not seem like such a far-fetched fantasy anymore.
We are playing God, but without the wisdom and foresight. Do we want to create a man-made world, where death is defied but the rules are unknown? Do we want to return to a simpler time when newspapers, photographs, and music were separate entities? Or do we want something inbetween? We have to ask ourselves, “What is happiness to us?”