Vanilla Sky: Venus-Pluto Relationships

Vanilla Sky is an interpretation of the Spanish film, Open Your Eyes. The movie stars Tom Cruise (David Aames), Penelope Cruz (Sofia) and Cameron Diaz (Julie). It is a bittersweet love story wrapped in idealism, obsession and tragedy. Cameron’s character has a small role, but she is the main catalyst for the following events. David Aames is a wealthy business owner, who inherited his entire fortune from his father. Aames lives the lifestyle of a bachelor and casually sleeps with Julie. The relationship for him is not serious and he refers to her as his “sleep buddy". However, Julie has deeper feelings and is obsessed and deeply in love with him. One night, David meets Sofia and falls madly in love with her, so at this point he is unaware that it has formed a rather dangerous love-triangle.

The following morning he leaves Sofia’s place and sees Julie pull up in her car. It’s obvious she is consumed with jealousy after being rejected once again. Aames gets into the car and this fateful journey turns uncomfortable when he is forced to confront his lover's real feelings. Aames has been leading his sexual partner on and treating the relationship as superficial and nothing more. Julie explodes emotionally and drives the car off the Central Park Bridge. The event painfully shadows the death of his parent's in a car crash. Julie is instantly killed and David survives the trauma, but is left horribly scarred.

The film is a beautiful and disturbing portrayal of true-love, rejection and transformation. We watch Aames painfully try to win the affection of Sofia in his new form, but with zero success.The movie progressively moves into a dream state where he envisions his “ideal” romance, and enters the lucid dream life with his facial disfigurement. David has a successful operation and his old skin peels off and his appearance is completely re-newed. However, his unconscious keeps erupting into his dream life and is twisting his fantasy world into a terrifying reality, forcing him to confront his own repressed nature.



The relationship themes, closely describe Venus-Pluto aspects and Pluto in the 7th house. Pluto symbolizes death and rebirth, elimination and transformation. The unconscious becomes conscious through profound purging and cathartic experiences. Pluto urges us to bring changes deep in consciousness, and thus transform life. David’s relationships are powerful and transforming, but also violent and destructive. Love can not exist on a superficial basis and if the person tries to relate on a surface level, destiny takes over and attracts the Plutonian side of life. These people are often drawn to obsessive, demanding and jealous partners, and there is a somewhat fated quality in relationships and the involvement is usually intense and highly complex. Pluto represents regeneration and its effect can be seen as the shedding of an old skin to reveal another.

Partners become the catalyst for evolutionary changes and sometimes the individual attracts relationships that are compulsive and contain deep rooted problems. More usually, it takes a powerful relationship to cleanse the psyche and facets of the nature that have been deeply repressed and buried. We could surmise that the early trauma of losing both parents at a young age, blocked his real feelings. Aames has kept relationships on a superficial basis only, until he met Sofia. Through the agency of others an individual attracts what they have suppressed, denied and pushed down. Plutonian partnerships can be traumatic and frequently fall into crisis. In the film, David’s best friend talks about the Sweet and the Sour in life. "The Sweet isn’t so sweet without the Sour," he states. Now, Julie who probably has a Pluto chart, confronts him with real emotional honesty which he finds disturbing and she challenges him about the lack of depth in their relationship. To Scorpionic people, relationships are very important.

“There are a lot of current opinions and definitions of Jealousy. From Cosmopolitan magazine to eradiate psychology books, jealousy is one of the most perplexing and ever-present of human emotions. Some people believe that jealousy is a natural accompany to life, the sour with the sweet. Others think it’s pathological, a sign of insecurity. Others believe it has something to do with older standards of morality. Still others believe it is morally wrong, and not part of the idealized state of self-abnegating love which says, “Whatever makes you happy makes me happy”. You won’t hear a Scorpio mouthing that sort of drivel. More likely he’ll tell you, ’Whatever makes you happy without me, you’ll pay for.’ By Liz Greene

David Aames relationship with Julie spiralled into a massive catalytic event, and he surfaced from it with permanent scars. Plutonian relationships often leave people permanently and psychologically scarred. However, this experience forced him to look more deeply at love. David created his ideal version of romance in his lucid dream state. Still, buried and repressed feelings tormented him when he should have felt his happiest and most contented, and his real wounds were not the surface ones, but went back much further and deeper and forced him to face the dark shadows left behind by his past. In his dream world, he woke up on the street under a 'Vanilla Sky' with the scars still on his face, so deep down he wanted a real relationship with Sofia, warts and all. Whatever psychological wounds we carry in Plutonain relationships, relating has to be ‘real’ and we can‘t pretend that whatever problems we have don't exist.

“The Venus-Pluto individual needs to trust that another person will really love them - and all of them, not just their beauty, their sex appeal, their power or their money. There is a need to love intensely with this combination. This is the person who might say, ‘If we love each other we must be prepared to die for each-other.’ There is often a strong dramatic element to the romantic life of the type. ” By Sue Tompkins