Waking Life

Review by Nora Archambeau, M.A.

WAKING LIFE by director Richard Linklater is an ideal movie for any dreamworker. Created with an updated filmmaking technique called interpolation, all of the characters are actors who have been animated. Interpolation, animation software developed by art director Bob Sabiston, is taking a video frame of a face, tracing a nose, let's say, then moving ahead a few frames, and tracing the nose again. At times, the viewer doesn't know if s/he is looking at an animated form or a real person, kind of like the characters that show up in a dream. The fluidity of the movie takes us from one situation to the next with a likeness to everyday waking life situations. Then, as the movie progresses, the scenes change in a more abrupt fashion and become more and more like non-waking or dreaming situations.

The movie begins with a boy and a girl playing a paper puzzle game. The game ends with the answer the boy receives, which is "dream is destiny". This main animated actor (or dream character, if you like) turns into a young man in college who has a thirst to know and understand answers to life's most sublime and complex questions. He's a somewhat average, laid-back, yet fairly deep thinking dude. So, while the scenes are set in the external world, filmed primarily in the director's native Austin, Texas with excursions to San Antonio and New York, one feels that s/he is traversing the landscapes of the mind and internal realms of existence.

There is an expansive range of eclectic characters. The movie starts with a college professor speaking about Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of existentalism, proceeding to a discussion with a woman on the importance of language. From there, it progresses to perhaps a real physicist-scientist who discusses the evolution of a human to a neo-human, inserts a jailed prisoner's intense hate toward his accusers, and meandors to a bedroom talk between actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke on how we telepathically share our experiences with everyone all the time. What makes this movie especially attractive for dreamers are the insertions of characters who speak specifically on the topic of dreams. Solid research has been applied in this movie to the
authenticity of a few dream states we experience. There is much said on lucid dreaming. There is also a well-articulated monologue on the difference between dream and waking realities, and lastly, how we should merge waking reality with our dreams. The best line from this movie just
might be "[we are often] sleep walking through the waking state and wake walking through dreaming". I will refrain from giving away the most exquisite part that occurs with a turn of dream events towards the closing.

One criticism I have of the film is that my eyes sometimes went cross-eyed due to the constant change of visuals found in interpolation animation. The second is the sometimes annoying verbage that only serves to create a sense of intellectual superiority.

WAKING LIFE is thoroughly enjoyable if you are drawn to absorb some highly mental discourses on the dilemma of human existence and, of course, to the reality that dreams, waking and non-waking, interface more than some want to admit with our everyday lives. You are invited to view, ponder, and delight in an incredible endeavor from an indie movie artist.

Nora can be contacted at (510) 893-3137 or at narchambeau@hotmail.com.

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