“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?
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