October 25–November 1, 2001
movie shorts
(recommended)
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Waking Life begins with two kids playing with one of those hand-held paper puzzle games, what we used to call cootie-catchers. After the children go through the game — counting off the letters in a selected color name, then a selected number — they arrive at the boy’s apparent fortune: "Dream is destiny." At this point, the kids’ part is done, but for you, the game is just beginning.
The game in Linklater’s Waking Life is elaborate and engrossing, part animated jaunt, part narrative shake-up. Framed as the ongoing dream of an unnamed character (played/voiced by Wiley Wiggins, from Linklater’s Dazed and Confused), the film was shot as live action in Austin, San Antonio and New York City, with lightweight, hand-held video cameras. The digital images were then animated in a process that art director Bob Sabiston calls "interpolated rotoscoping" by some 30 artists, so that each character has his or her own style times two — that is, with input from the actor and then the animator. This means that the movie’s appearance is quite unlike anything you’ve seen in feature filmmaking, and it takes some getting used to; the environment shimmers and shakes, as unstable as the characters in it, with floors and windows and sidewalks in constant motion.
"Wiley" (as we might as well call him, as Linklater does when talking about the film) is on a quest, though he’s not quite sure what he’s seeking. He appears a few minutes into the film, riding on a train. At the station, he catches a ride with a guy driving (or is it captaining?) a car-boat, literally a boat on wheels. His fellow passenger is Linklater himself, reprising, sort of, his early appearance in Slacker, holding forth on the nature of experience, time and identity — "There’s only one instant, and it’s right now, and it’s eternity" — before he instructs the driver exactly where to let off Wiley.
At the appointed place, Wiley finds a note in the middle of the street, telling him to look right. He does, and he’s immediately hit by a car. Boom, and shades of Slacker. He wakes up, the dream continues, he moves on to the next conversation. Some of these chats — which he may or may not be dreaming; at some point the film becomes its own thing, without a clear point of view — don’t even include him. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy show up, apparently post-coital, apparently still living inside Before Sunrise, speculating about the relationship between dreams and reincarnation; from this lovely, intimate scene, the film cuts (or more precisely, floats) to a prisoner (Charles Gunning) in his cell, pacing and grumbling about all the "motherfuckers" on whom he’ll have his revenge, with methods ranging from a "hot cigar in your eye" to "molten lead up your ass."
If the concept of a waking life has to do with coming to clarity and self-consciousness, the conditions for the journey have to exist materially. The juxtaposition of these two scenes may be the most startling moment in the film, a lurch from movie-star privilege and possibility to harrowing despair. The prisoner is easily the grimmest character in Waking Life, but his appearance and ideas tend to be forgotten in the rush of everything else. This is probably too bad, as he brings to the film a sense of life outside granted to folks with leisure time to ponder large questions; he’s got no options but to ponder, and can’t even begin to reflect on his rage.
The rest of the film is less aggressively disconcerting, but disconcerting nonetheless. It follows Wiley’s probing around for a range of opinions on the interrelations of consciousness, free will, community, the effects of media saturation and quantum mechanics (these academic chatty Cathys include professors Louis Mackey and Robert Solomon, of the University of Texas). As he wanders through his dream, he becomes increasingly conscious that it is a dream, and the movie itself becomes "conscious" of itself as a movie, or maybe a series of movies: Wiley attends one film projected by a chimp, another in which Caveh Zahedi discusses André Bazin’s faith in film’s capacity to capture, even create, a "holy moment"; at another time, Steven Soderbergh jags about films and money; and in New York, Wiley runs into Speed Levitch, beloved subject of the 1998 documentary, The Cruise, still cruising on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Above all, the movie asks you to become awakened as you watch it, so you are not consuming so much as you are processing, in a very self-conscious way. Waking Life is as interested in itself as it wants you to be, and pushes the point about film’s shifty status as entertainment and/or art.
Indeed, the film’s website invites you to "read all about it," listing the famous names dropped, including the usual suspects in philosophy (Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche, et al.), as well as cultural theorists like Guy Debord, Philip K. Dick, and Benedict Anderson, whose notion of "imagined communities" might be the very one underlying all filmmaking and film viewing. The movie is an adventure, and the more conscious you are about your part in it, the better.
