Waking up is hard to do

I have no idea what that little origami-snowflake toy is properly called; when I was growing up it was a "cootie-catcher," and after flexing it enough times, you'd pop it open, unfold a section of it, and somehow your fortune would be told.

So when the girl opens up the device in the early moments of Richard Linklater's Waking Life, I had to keep watching no matter how much I might have been put off by the premise. What it says is "Dream is destiny," and while I've always distrusted dreams — my dreams, anyway — I felt I could trust Linklater, if only because he'd given us Before Sunrise, a romance I dearly loved because, unlike the case with almost every other such story, I could identify with either lead.

Linklater didn't let me down. The structure is something like what I remembered from Slacker, with seemingly-random people coming by, speaking their piece, and then dissolving into the next scene. But the look is wholly different: the thirty or so scenes were shot in live action and then turned into animation, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes sort of realistic, sometimes hyper-unrealistic. If this seems a hodgepodge, well, so do my dreams, and dreams are at the very heart of Waking Life.

About ten minutes in, I was prepared to dismiss the whole thing: "Eye candy," I thought, "to compensate for the preposterousness of the words." But that, too, is characteristic of dreams: whether you can learn anything from them is independent of whether you can make sense of the narrative. "There's no story," asserts one character, a novelist. "Just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest story ever told." Nothing at all in there about continuity.

So slowly, surely, I was drawn in, marveling at the look of the thing while trying to keep its seemingly-contradictory premises from overwriting my own programming. And I decided that Linklater wasn't trying to sell me a packaged philosophy: he did, after all, throw in an almost-perfectly serious scene in which a film class on Kurosawa is conducted by a monkey. If there is a philosophy, it's that of the salad bar: there are plenty of things you'll like, but if you go for all of them, you'll quickly discover that there's too much on your plate. You can call it a "neo-human evolutionary cycle" if you'd rather; for a moment I saw myself as Horatio, being informed by Hamlet that there are more things in heaven or earth than I'd suspected. And the ending, well, isn't.

Perhaps Waking Life was intended to recapitulate, then extend, Descartes: "I dream, therefore I am." Dreams and reality might even be somehow interchangeable. We already know that some of our "objective" measurements are affected by our perspectives: accelerate yourself towards the speed of light, and keep one eye on your watch, if you can. Was Linklater trying to anticipate what might be beyond Einstein? I don't know. I do know this, though: in 2001, when it was released, I couldn't have sat through Waking Life. My mindset of the moment wasn't prepared to accept anything that didn't fit into the structures I'd built for myself; I'd have dismissed it out of hand as Slacker Goes to Grad School. Today, it seems more like an artifact of a life I didn't know I'd had. Maybe it really was all just a dream.

(Review copy lent me by a friend — thank you, Aero.)

Posted at 7:01 PM to Almost Yogurt