睁开你的眼睛

复活公司老板说男主在梦中世界已经渡过了150年，很明显男主的梦并没有那么久，而且前部分不断切换男主在床上被女声闹钟唤醒的场景，说明男主已经循环梦境很多次了，直到这个梦境里的男主崩溃跳楼死了，也只是进入下一个新梦境，如此反复循环。女声闹钟响一次，就是新梦境的开始，复活老板的项目就是一个骗局。细思极恐啊…

“In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.”

—The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges

When I was watching Open Your Eyes, Borges’s short story The Circular Ruins also came up to my train of thoughts. Both stories narrate a similar theme, which is the protagonists’ waking from a dream that belongs to another dream. The absurdity of life is vividly revealed through these stories, pulling the audience into panic and skepticism, unable to discern what is real and its projection. Time seems to become an element of nihilism, as the path to wake up from the dream is like a matryoshka doll but infinite. It’s often difficult to have the self-consciousness of being in a dream when we are dreaming, the definition of reality is also obscured. The conflicts we face while choosing between dream or reality belongs to one of the most fundamental philosophical questions.

When the protagonist Cesar is disfigured in the accident, he loses the appearance that he’s proud of. For Cesar, the disfigurement for him is also the impairment of his love relationship, self-confidence, and his life. Facing the cruelty of truth, Cesar traps himself in the endless loop of dreams. The constant switching between hideousness and beauty also blinds the truth from us. To disguise his fragmented face, Cesar eventually accepts to hide behind the mask despite the initial rejection. At this moment, Cesar’s identity is also fragmented into disorder. There’s a backlighting scene in the movie when Cesar wears his mask on his back head, forming a silhouette of two side faces. This can also be interpreted as symbolism for Cesar’s divided identities and his disoriented perception of his existence in time. The protagonist has been asked several times in the movie about what is happiness, but he fails to answer. Whether it’s a nice dream or a nightmare, all depends on Cesar’s choices. When Cesar chooses his looks to be the protagonist of his dreams, he also chooses the most precarious shallowness which appears as frequent nightmares. In Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, he also expresses this entangled confusion between illusion and truth: “I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me.” Despite we believe that our sensory perceptions are real enough to be considered as realities, we shouldn’t forget that we were also deceived by the same thoughts in dreams.

However, when Cesar realizes that he lives in a constructed dream, he still faces the dilemma of choosing to live in the lucid dream or reality. The final moment when he chose to jump off the building also reminds me of the Matrix. While the Matrix delivers a sense of self-transcendence, Abre Los Ojos emphasizes the courage to face the truth. Can Cesar truly enter the reality after he opens his eyes or would he still be trapped in the endless loop of dreaming?