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It would be impossible
to discuss Waking Life without weeding out its slacker and
stoner roots. While Richard Linklater's latest is a work of profound
originality, how is the director to reconcile the fact that many
will undoubtedly construe his animated metaphysic as a mere
pot-stoked fantasia? More importantly, is it even possible that
anyone other than stoners and fans of writer/director Caveh Zahedi
(I Was Possessed By God) will even care? Those fond of
cinematic innovation will pay mind as the film's palette challenges
the dimensionality of perspective; shot on video, the film's images
were animated using computer software and a machine called the Wacom
Tablet. The effect is hallucinatory as filmic space is turned into a
plane-shifting realm nursing free-floating ontology; whether it's a
product of stoic contemplation or reefer madness, Linklater's waking
life becomes an elusive, one-way vehicle to God.
The film's main character (Wiley
Wiggins) remains anonymous
throughout the film--names don't matter here, Linklater's pawns are
everyfolk. He awakes from a dream (or "a dream within a dream, not
that it really matters), aboard a train heading toward spiritual
enlightenment. A little girl's determinist toy informs a younger
version of the film's journeyman that "dream is destiny." The boy
floats off the ground and, holding onto a parked car's door handle,
returns to Earth. Older, although certainly not wiser, Linklater's
protagonist silently bemoans the abstractness of his geographical
foothold (is he awake, dreaming or dead?), oblivious to the essence
of his journey which is to float off the ground with God and
without fear. As Linklater maps the young man's run-ins with
dozens of "slackers" (their minds, though, are anything but slack),
a web of spiritual complacency seems to ebb toward one final
encounter with Linklater himself, a more self-aware version of the
film's hero.
The logic of Linklater's Life is that of a
nondenominational fugue state, where everyone is part of God
although free from the demands of a group collective. No doubt it's
a challenging goal, which makes much of Life so difficult to
take; Linklater's philosophy, though, isn't very complex although
its fulfillment is difficult to fathom. Linklater's doppelganger
undergoes his "neo-human evolutionary cycle" as friends and
strangers deconstruct everything from postmodernism to reincarnation
(seen by Julie Delphy's character as "a poetic expression of
collective memory"). While everyone in Life seems to ascribe
to the same thought, their free will is painstakingly celebrated
through individual color schemes. (Animators on the film were paired
with specific characters, thus the film's vastly heterogeneous
landscape.) One character--a man in prison for undisclosed
crimes--is, quite literally, red with anger. He dreams of revenge
against those responsible for his jail time, seeking to tear their
eyelids from their faces (forcing them to stare into the face of a
different kind of God, although not quite the devil).
Whether intentional or not, there are few splashes of red
throughout Life; the color aptly compliments the angry mugs
of two faces (the prisoner and an anti-politician) while violent
bloodshed after an ironic barroom brawl subtly condemns guns. A
widespread acceptance of the film's philosophy poses a more complex
problem--one that Linklater is more than willing to admit. Following
the scene in jail, a fearful thinker poses the question of God as a
supreme planner; if God (read: Destiny) exists and has set
everything in advance then how can we possess free will? If so, then
how can man be held accountable for crimes set in motion by a
higher, more abstract order? While justice is necessary in waking
life (if only as protection from harm), all rules seem to fall apart
in the dreamstate (the kind of deep sleep David Lynch would relish).
If destiny lies in dreams--as the little girl says in the beginning
of the film--then what is to be made of the lucid dreamer, the one
that consciously controls the logic of the dream?
Caveh Zahedi celebrates film theorist Andr?Bazin's Holy Moment,
which asks that we welcome curiosity and strip ourselves of the
layers that prevent us from achieving higher consciousness. In the
film, Zahedi and a friend literally morph into a puff of clouds
after staring into each other's eyes and embracing their Holy
Moment--it's also a euphoric one, visually splendorous and full of
endless spiritual possibilities. Linklater, a pinball machine, The
Book of Acts and Philip K. Dick lend perfect credence to the
director's near-tangible fantasia. Even if life is not a "no thank
you" to an invitation from God, Waking Life is, at the very
least, a humanist embrace of self-affirmation. As in dreams, life is
full of endless possibilities and while the film may amount to one
monstrous rant from a hardcore stoner, Linklater is willing to admit
that active thought is nothing without active action. The film's
journeyman manages to take a plunge and come closer to God, although
a larger question remains: what will we do?
From
www.slantmagazine.com
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