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See, now I hated Slacker—turned it off after 38 minutes, and I never turn off movies—but having finally caught Waking Life on tape, I thought it was a lot better. Far from perfect—ultimately (in my opinion) unsuccessful, in fact, but a fascinating experiment.
Consistently beautiful to look at. I loved the way the animation would change styles from shot to shot—as opposed to the slightly sterile consistency of a Disney film: I could really sense/feel the different hands of the different animators at work. It felt like a jam session: animation jam, trading shots the way musicians trade fours.
But the technique's potential was underutilized, I felt. There were a few spots where characters morphed and backgrounds shifted in accord with the stories they were telling, but they seemed too few and too far between. Too much of the film, frankly, felt like an animated version of Slacker.
But it undercut one of its own key philosophies by being as moving as it was. In a wink to the audience, Linklater provides a self-serving argument and defense of his own technique, in the conversation (in a film-within-a-film, no less) about "the Holy Moment" and Barzun's theories of cinema—but for all his assertions that it's a lie and a cheat to impose a narrative onto a film, I think the reason this film did work as well as it did (better than Slacker worked, anyway) is because it did have a narrative plot, slight though it was: Wiley Wiggins is dead and doesn't know it, and slowly comes to that realization, allowing him to let go of the illusion of life.
So the film itself is a refutation of Barzun's (and Linklater's) argument, simply because it is a narrative film.
Question: does anyone think that any of the scenes of the film are meant to take place in the objective/consensus reality—that is, in the waking world? Or is the whole film a dreamscape?
The early scene where Wiley is struck by the car—is this "real"? Is this how Wiley died? Or is it simply a reminder—an afterimage of the event, recontextualized into the dream-state? The surreal element of the note in the street ("Look to your right") seems to indicate the latter—that this is his subconscious (or the world-soul, or God) trying to clue him in that he's dead.
If this is the case, then it's a another wink to the audience—Richard Linklater himself is the guy in the car who directs Wiley to that specific address where he run down, and later reappears to tell Wiley that life is a continuous rejection of God's invitation to give up the illusion, deconstruct the ego, and become one with all—and that death is the process of going from "No" to "Yes."
Shortly afterwards, having heard this, Wiley ascends, having (it seems to me) made his peace, had his breakthrough, and said Yes.
The filmmaker casts himself as a God-figure, nudging Wiley towards both his physical death and his eventual passage beyond death, engineering all the events. And of course as a writer director, that's exactly what he's done. |
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