Waking Life Continues To Be Wonderful

Waking Life invites viewers into the vast potential of imagination. This is a Richard Linklater film where reality unshackles from the concrete aesthetics it’s typically confined. Those experiencing holy epiphanies spew sparks. The enraged turn the hot colors of their volcanic outbursts. The world is literally an impressionistic painting, while various characters spout philosophical notions, yet the legacy of Waking Life may not be a single idea it shares.

The movie centers on a nameless protagonist played by Willy Wiggins (Dazed and Confused). This individual enters the dreamworld with the same mundanity everyone else does by simply falling asleep. Once there he proceeds to have multiple encounters as well as visions of others who express a variety of philosophical ideas about existence. These include concepts concerning free will, determinism, post-humanity, social philosophy, existentialism, film theory, and lucid dreaming. There are others, but the movie is mainly aimed at presenting someone growing aware of inquiries into the nature of reality. At the very least, actively questioning what existence is.

Much of this is achieved by having the protagonist drift into dreamlike encounters with various individuals. Conversations ensue which often sound like Philosophy 101 courses delivered by effusive stoners. Eventually these become less asymmetrical as the protagonist becomes a participant rather than someone passively listening to monologues. Still, over the course of Waking Life sometimes there are only visions of individuals as if ethereally observing some monologue or interaction.

One such instance involves the infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. His screen time involves him driving around in a car, screaming into a mic that blasts his nonsense out onto the street. Whenever his rage crescendos, his face turns purple as if his head might rupture in volcanic rage. He was included in the project because, at the time, Jones was nothing more than a comical blowhard on public access television in Austin, Texas.

Richard Linklater said, “[Alex Jones] was this hyper guy that we’d all kind of make fun of. But he wasn’t so virulent; he just had all that energy. I just thought he was kind of funny.”

Everything changes given time. Even the notions expressed by several characters are open to question in the shifting realm of philosophical inquiry. Nowadays, for instance, there are potentially new insights into the nature of free will, the inner self, and the existential crisis courtesy of neuroscience.

A lot of what Linklater offers sounds like philosophy delivered by people who learned most of their ideas from memes and music videos spiced up by a thesaurus or word-a-day calendar. Sometimes the performances feel like interacting with the most insufferable stoner at a party. The kind of people with zero interest in another person’s opinion, they just can’t wait to share their latest shower thoughts.

There’s a surface level quality to many of the topics that’s hard to escape. For example, more than once, the idea of time as an illusion is bandied about without really clarifying the meaning of that statement. In other words, it’s given as true because a dream thinker says it, rather than an argument made with credible evidence. One of the few instances time as an illusion is given proof that isn’t rhetorical is Richard Linklater himself as a pinball playing dream-traveler pontificating on notions expressed by author Philip K. Dick in the essay “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”.

Here the celebrated sci-fi writer claims that after writing Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said he encountered versions of the characters in real life in addition to inadvertently copying the events found in Acts 8:26-40. However, Waking Life never mentions Dick also believed at that time he was inhabited by the spirit of the prophet Elijah among other religious and mystic visions he experienced, which could be explained as psychosis brought on by a manic depressive abusing amphetamines. Essentially, Dick was a mentally ill drug abuser who may not be the most reliable authority on reality, but damn, that story sounds cool — he wrote characters then met them in real life.

Granted, scientists are exploring the idea that time is illusory. Nima Arkani-Hamed is a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. “experimenting with abstract geometric shapes that can describe events without using time.” The thing is Waking Life isn’t really exploring its ideas so much as inviting the audience to wonder.

I actually saw this movie when it first came out in 2001 and can attest it inspired me to steer my college education towards a few more philosophy courses. Years later, when I saw it again on television, I was struck by the shallowness of this philosophical primer. However, the visual elements of Waking Life remained potent.

After watching Raging Bull, Richard Linklater came to the realization that movies could be “a potential outlet for what I was thinking about and hoping to express.” In an interview with Variety, the director said that Waking Life was an idea born out of a dream in high school that gestated until he discovered a means to make it work visually. Since it was always in the back of his mind that may be why the movie shares certain DNA with much of his early career.

After shooting the short Woodshock (1985), his first films often incorporated a semi-documentary sensibility. Most of the narrative is then driven by conversation rather than action. Slacker (1990) alongside Dazed and Confused (1993) are prime examples of this. Most characters don’t actually do anything; they loiter or cruise around talking about life as well as what they’d like to be doing. Linklater then used this style to infuse a romantic tension throughout his Before trilogy, exploring attraction and koi no yokan then what happens when such moments have passed.

These conversational dives into deep topics are oddly more realistic than how fiction usually explores those notions indirectly. Two people philosophically discussing what makes a person human is truer to life than a pistol wielding detective hunting androids; the latter implying the questions such conversations ask directly. Consequently, Waking Life shares a certain kinship with films like My Dinner with Andre (1981), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), or in a way the British film adaptation of Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade (1967).

Still, watching teenagers in Dazed and Confused orbit issues, fingertips brushing the weighty topics of life after high school, isn’t the same as watching John Christensen say he’s a lucid dreamer who converses with Albert Schweitzer. Linklater clearly understood he needed a degree of the unreal to sell the dream realm explored by Waking Life’s protagonist. That all changed when he experienced the short films made by Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallota.

The brief videos Snack and Drink, Figures of Speech, and Roadhead, utilized a computer program that allowed for digital rotoscoping. This radically advanced a preexisting technique invented in 1915 by Max Fleischer. Numerous cartoons used rotoscoping such as The Adventures of Superman, and Disney employed the process to help animate a portion of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). Ralph Bashki famously used the process on films such as Wizards (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), and Cool World (1992).

The difference here is the Sabiston-Pallota shorts utilized a proprietary computer program called Rotoshop. According to Bob Sabiston, “that allows animators to save labor by interpolating computer-generated lines among those drawn on the film by hand” which essentially means the process becomes “much less time-consuming — and hence less expensive — and gives it a stylized look.”

As Jason Silverman wrote for Wired, “Though each minute of Waking Life’s raw footage took up to 250 hours to animate, the project was a bargain by Hollywood standards (a Pixar- or Disney-animated feature might cost 10 to 15 times as much).”

That allowed Richard Linklater to make Waking Life on a modest budget. This kept the experimental film independent, allowing the director to capture the vision he intended. He recorded the movie on Mini DV cameras, an early form of digital video which also kept costs down. Footage shot over the course of six weeks in 1999 went to animators using Apple Macintosh computers. Employing the Rotoshop program, they gradually produced the various visuals seen throughout Waking Life.

One of the film’s strengths is that from scene to scene there’s a regular shift in animation style. No two segments are ever exactly the same. Events, people, and places acquire a certain surrealism that firmly plants it all in dreamlike territory. Even when the lines recited aren’t the most captivating the visuals remain intriguing. Four men walking along conversing as if in some verbal version of Brewster’s Millions, spouting fifty-cent words and phrases as though compelled to spend a certain amount in two minutes, are at least intriguing as impressionistic displays of people in motion. There’s never a stillness in Waking Life, reminding the viewer that existence is always in flux, regardless of how imperceptible that may be.

Linklater was so satisfied with the visual outcome he would utilize the process again when he filmed A Scanner Darkly (2006) then once more with Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022). The former is an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, and I feel safe calling it one of the best adaptations ever made. It indirectly captures all the philosophical notions Waking Life wanted to explore, minus the blunt sermonizing, while faithfully envisioning events from the book.

Sadly, both movies are not terribly well known. A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life occupy a certain niche. It’s not that Richard Linklater is hidden in the indie corner of cinema, or terribly unsuccessful. Dazed and Confused was a cultural touchstone in the ‘90s, and School of Rock (2003) is practically a classic kids’ movie. Something about these animated features just seems to have never appealed to a broader audience.

That may be because Waking Life never goes far enough. Animation is often a means to break away from the more mundane aspects of reality. That can best be seen in animated features such as Paprika (2006), Belladonna of Sadness (1973), or even Into the Spider-verse (2018) which feel otherworldly.  

Consider, the minute Willy Wiggins encounters Timothy “Speed” Levitch on a bridge an interpretation of Federico García Lorca’s poem “City That Does Not Sleep” ensues. Snippets of the poem pepper the monologue, but the scene is ultimately a lecture by Levitch describing his sense of Lorca’s intent. Waking Life could have done a surreal recitation of the poem but settled for two guys on a bridge talking about poetry. The audience is left to hear what could have been seen.

Perhaps that’s why Frank Lovece wrote while “beautifully drawn” Waking Life is “pedantic navel-gazing.” The movie never gets away from the reality it’s trying to heighten artistically. Things are always grounded to a degree regardless of the surrealism it achieves.

Still, Linklater showed how critical digital innovation would be for the future of film. He found a way to make budget conscious animated features that surreally explored adult subject matter. From a visual perspective, Waking Life is uniquely captivating, and clearly paved the way for other flicks such as Love Vincent (2017), an experimental animated look at the life and work of Vincent van Gogh.

Plus, it’s worth noting this isn’t in any way similar to generative AI. Waking Life is the product of several artists coming together to consciously produce a vision. This isn’t a bunch of material slopped together from stolen sources. Real people performed the exchanges then actual individuals animated the images. I say that because what was cutting edge innovation is now basically a filter on everyone’s phone. Modern audiences may not appreciate how unique this film was at the time.

 Waking Life is a great first step for those dipping a toe into philosophical inquiry. Visually, it stands apart in a way that will be remembered for ages as first of its kind. Waking Life is why experimental movies matter. They pave the way to greater potential.