Long live the inevitable

Garrett Lambur
I feel strange writing about the movie Vanilla Sky. For one, I still am not sure what I entirely believed happened within the movie. Up until the end, the entire thing functioned as one giant Brian Fuck (pardon my French). The end for me brought some semblance of closing to the end of the movie for he was able to enter back into life. But it was the idea of a virtual world created by humans that we could entirely live in that boggled my mind. It is true that we create video games today but they are only played not lived. Once you begin to live in the video world do you not exit out of life itself and begin to play god? We watched the Decalogue film that questioned an interpretation of the commandment, place no god before me, and it seems as if the ending of doing so cannot be good. Look for example at what happened to Tom Cruise at the end of the movie. He was forced to recognize that he was still scarred, that he was truly rejected by the ones he deeply loved and that he would go back to a new world that he truly did not understand. By entering that stasis pod he cheated death.

I do not think that cheating death is necessarily a bad thing but I do feel that death is inevitable for every living being. Medicine is a good thing for it allows us to cheat an early death and hopefully live out the rest of our natural lives. Extending someone’s natural life is something that should not be taken lightly. This is hard subject for me because I watched my grandmother’s life slowly come to an end. So with a loved one I was deeply for extending her time on earth but the key is that it was not extended beyond any normal length of a human life. By scientific standards, humans should live to either 6 or 7 times their growth period meaning we should average a life span of 120 to 140 years. I support extending a person’s life on this planet just not to an extreme of trying to live forever. Eventually we all must leave this planet and journey on to whatever is next for us, be it nothing or be it heaven. As Tom Cruise had to eventually face his greatest fear, jumping off a building to move onto the next life so do all humans have to face death at some point in life, though all may not fear it.