Fever Dreams

There is an old Zen koan about a man who falls asleep. He dreams that he is a butterfly. Upon awakening, he can no longer tell if he is a man who dreamed about being a butterfly, or is now a butterfly dreaming that he is a man.

Waking Life covers this very territory, both logistically and philosophically. There is no real plot, as the narrative simply follows the unnamed male protagonist, played by Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused) through a series of seemingly chance encounters with various individuals who each have slightly different yet interlocking ideas on the meaning of the Big Picture. The film presents us with a mystery; is Wiggins dreaming and unable to awaken? Or is he dying, and his dream is actually the transitional state of consciousness before death?

The film traverses a shifting, Technicolor terrain, which was created by special software that used digital video footage as a live-action rotoscoping template. Once this footage was reinterpreted both by the software and by the visions of the individual animators who worked on the project, it was transformed into a living painting, at times in an impressionist, fauvist, or neo-cubist style. The result is an intentionally dreamlike, swimming image, in which people and objects are always slightly off-kilter. It is also reminiscent of an altered state of consciousness, like a hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience.

The closest comparisons to this film might be such discourse-based pictures as My Dinner With Andre, or better yet, Mindwalk. Yet part of the beauty of Waking Life is that it never answers any questions, but simply suggests that the point is the asking. Wiggins’ character is merely a vehicle for transporting us through the animated ether, as he rarely speaks, but is instead almost always spoken to. He is a surrogate for the viewing audience, as if director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused) were speaking to us from his soapbox.

Linklater cannot take all of the credit, because while the main idea is his, he was wholly dependent upon animator/software designer Bob Sabiston for the software that allowed such beautiful images to be created. Sabiston’s last film created with the same software, the short work Snack and Drink, is part of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. And although the film was scripted, Linklater wisely allowed the personalities of his performers, mostly non-actors, to shine through in certain moments of improvised dialogue.

Waking Life is a daring film, in that it functions as an artistic and intellectual construct first, and as entertainment second. It’s certain to find an audience, but its fans will likely be composed of people exactly like those portrayed in the film – thinkers, seekers, and mad poets. All too often the philosophical dimension is divorced from cinema, as if its status as a populist medium somehow means that the portrayal of deep thought is taboo in narrative film. Not only is Waking Life successfully populist (in a fashionably outsider-ish style), but its playful, artistic, wise-fool aspects clearly make it more kin to the chaotic humanities than to rigid academia. It’s deep, but not ponderous, and clearly wears its laughing Buddha-nature on its sleeve.

You’ll never learn whether Wiggins is alive or dead, because it doesn’t matter. Nor will you learn whether he’s supposed to the butterfly or the man, because he’s both, as are we all. One of the characters during the film neatly sums it up when he says, "There’s no story. It’s just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest story ever told."