Waking Life Critique

The movie Waking Life opens with the suggestion that dream is destiny. It soon becomes apparent that the protagonist ‘Wiley Wiggins’ is caught in a lucid dream from which he cannot escape. “A lucid dream occurs when the dreamer becomes conscious that they are dreaming, allowing potential for the manipulation of identity in surreal situations” (Lee, 2000). The lucid dream motif informs the hallucinatory visual style and fractious narrative structure of Waking Life. The visuals, shot on digital video, have been layered with animation by a team of artists, each in their own style. The different animation styles change between expressionistic and cartoon-like caricature, echoing a general theme that seeks to probe the multiplicities of cultural and social identity, and question the reality of the world in which we live.

Raymond Lee in his essay The Self, Lucid Dreaming and Postmodern Identity, proposes that lucid dreaming allows freedom for the deconstruction of self identity.The phenomenon of lucid dreaming allows such manipulation to occur, freeing the individual to explore various possibilities of selfhood without the burden of conformity to waking roles. It parallels the postmodern perspective on the decentered nature of the self. The postmodern self subsists on fractal identities that in lucid dreaming form the basis of personal creativity. Lucid dreaming converges with postmodernism to suggest an alternative method for transcending the conventions of everyday life (Lee, 2000).

In this essay I will investigate what I consider to be a binary opposition within Waking Life, existing between a post structural narrative, and the reoccurring suggestion of a potential for ultimate self awareness; a juxtaposition between postmodernism’s arbitrary self and the advocacy of personal responsibility and self realization. By drawing out the different and seemingly contradictory threads of discourse that run through Waking Life I hope to demonstrate that the resulting destabilization of meaning operates as a prompt for viewers to seek their own resolution to the posed existential dilemmas by pushing beyond the limitations of the rational mind into a heightened dream state lucidity.

Waking Life begins with Wiggins walking through a train station atrium and it appears that the physical world is threatening to fall apart as walls, floor, and ceiling drift out of position. This destabilization extends to traditional narrative structure. Wiggins moves between vignettes without any disclosure of linear relationships in narrative space or time. Seemingly disconnected meanderings of dream narrative allow for a number of characters, disconnected emotionally and dramatically, to engage in lengthy didactic monologues about existentialism, politics, science, philosophy, theology, metaphysics, and mysticism. Transitions between scenes re-enforce the characteristics of a disordered dreamscape. Wiggins lies on his bed and floats to the ceiling. The camera establishes a point of view simulation of disembodied dream travel as it drifts above suburban rooftops. Impersonal and lacking destination the drifting camera references the ramblings of the content, divorced from the meta-narratives that characterize our rational waking life.

Parallels can be drawn between the dream motif and post structuralism. Post structuralism defines language as a field of interrelated meanings that lack underlying intrinsic certainties. The disjointed narrative of Waking life reflects the uncertainty of textual analysis as asserted by deconstructionists."One consequence of deconstruction is that certainty in textual analyses becomes impossible. There may be competing interpretations, but there is no uninterpreted way one could assess the validity of these competing interpretations. Rather than basing our philosophical understanding on undeniable truths, the deconstructionist turns the settled bedrock of rationalism into the shifting sands of a multiplicity of interpretations." (Jones)

Waking Life has the potential to become an overwhelming miasma. Sympathetic to Roland Barthes’ seminal critique Death of the Author (1967) in which he seeks to liberate the text from authoritative tyranny, the narrative in Waking Life has been treated as a multi dimensional space, open to interpretation and providing no didactic answers to its many questions. The viewer must forge their own meanings, navigating their own path through the dreamscape. The poetic ‘Speed’ Levitch (an actual New York tour guide) appears on Brooklyn Bridge suggesting that “We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance…Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence… and as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream....that is self-awareness” (Linklater, 2001).

Despite the deliberate ambiguity of meaning within Waking Life, I recognized a sympathy to an affirmative existential position. Early in the movie Professor of Philosophy Robert Solomon appears as himself to champion an existential outlook on life. He suggests that the idea of free will is missing from a post modern philosophy that views the individual as a confluence of forces. This negates individual responsibility and results in cynicism, implicating post modernism as a negative theoretical position. Alternatively, existentialism acknowledges the absurdity of life while maintaining the active agent of choice; your life is yours to create. As stated by Solomon, “I think [existentialism] has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life” (Linklater, 2001).

Waking Life, by disrupting narrative structure, establishes itself within a post structural context, a field of interrelated meanings that have no underlying intrinsic certainties. Consequently it could be concluded that Waking Life is unconcerned with any totalizing truths through which one might comprehend the enigmatic nature of the absurd environment in which Wiggins finds himself. However Wiggins (and the viewer) are not completely abandoned within a groundless and drifting nihilistic nightmare. The suggestion of the possibility for self awareness within the absurd environment of the movie implicates an agent of personal responsibility and free will, negating absolute arbitrary identity.

I recognize the dichotomy between free will and pre destination; Spiritual self realization and post modern deconstruction as being interwoven between the filmic treatment and theoretical content. Lee, in his essay on postmodern identity and lucid dreaming quotes Sarup to suggest that a fragmented self seems to have emerged from the crisis of the modern self

Are we all made up of bits and pieces of this and that? Is identity nothing more than an illusion of socialization or a fiction of ontology? It is difficult to imagine a self without an integrated identity, a “subject in process” that is “constructed in and through language” (Lee, 2001).

I suggest that the ontological inquiry suggested here by Lee is the redundant activity of objective rational discourse that Waking Life avoids. Any attempt to imagine an identity constructed through language has already assumed the objective identity of the searcher which post modernism rejects as untenable. Accordingly the movie assumes no objective position and offers no direct answers, remaining sympathetic to a post structural position that regards it impossible to step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively. The existential dream narrative leaves interpretation open to interpretation. I am reminded of the old Zen Proverb that states, ‘searching for self is like riding an ox in search of an ox’.

The binary opposition between spiritual realization and post modern deconstruction is continuously at play as Waking Life unfolds, forming two interlocking aspects of the filmic content. Could Waking Life be making an oblique affirmation of mystical traditions that view ultimate truth as existing beyond the dualistic comprehension of the rational mind? It is a principle of structuralism that all language is hinged on binary oppositions. The western Zen Buddhist Scholar Christmas Humphries observes that, “when thought is divided dualistically, it seeks to favour one at the cost of the other, but as dualism is the very condition of thought, it is impossible for thought to rise above its own condition” (Humphries, 1969, p.16).

In Waking Life the Character Aklilu suggests the immanence of “[a] greater, greater mind. A mind that yet is to be” (Linklater, 2001). and thatThe moment is not just a passing, empty nothing, yet, and this is the way in which these secret passages happen, yes it's empty with such fullness that the great moment, the great life, of the universe is pulsating in it. And each one, each object, each place, each act leaves a mark, and that story is singular, but in fact, it's story after story (Ibid). Aklilu introduces the idea of a transcendent moment liberated from the aspirations of a linear, self affirming narrative. He describes union with this ‘moment’ as a universal transcendent experience. The idea is revisited by a number of different characters. An old man suggests that to say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence while the director Richard Linklater appears as a pinball philosopher and describes a multi dimensional reality where linear time collapses. Linklater draws the conclusion that all we really have is this moment, and that life is a journey from the no to the yes, the absolute embracing of the moment.
There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And, it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, "Do you wanna be one with eternity, do you want to be in heaven?" And, we're all saying, "Nooo thank you, not just yet." And so time, is actually just this constant saying "No" to God's invitation. I mean, that's what time is…There's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in (Ibid).

The power of Film as a creative force for manipulating social perceptions of reality and shaping self making narratives is introduced through the film theory of Bazin and the ‘holy moment’. The film maker Caveh Zahedi appears in Waking Life to explain.

Cinema in its essence is about an introduction to reality… It's just that reality is actually reproduced. And you know, Bazin is a Christian, so he believes that God obviously ended up being everything, and for him reality and God are the same. So what film is actually capturing is like God incarnate, creating. And this very moment, God is manifesting as this. And what the film would capture if it was filming us right now would be like God as this table, and God as you, and God as me, and God looking the way we look right now, and saying and thinking what we're thinking right now, because we are all God manifest in that sense. So film is actually like a record of God, or the face of God, or the ever changing face of God. (Linklater 2001).

Bazin felt that life and art (Which he recognized as a spiritual pursuit) were objectively divorced from each other. He wanted to re-inject the magic of creative reverence back into people’s lives from which he felt it was missing. He opposed divisive narrative structures in film. He felt that traditional narrative structures were corrupted by a slavish adherence to script and ideologies, resulting in a disruption of the viewer’s experience of God in the moment. A didactic film could stifle the creative capacity of the imaginative human being, which Bazin recognized as being holy. He was inspired by a deep desire to utilize film as a medium for the revelation of truth.Bazin recognized that film art always condenses, shapes and orders the reality it records, but what he looked for in film-makers was a kind of spiritual disposition towards reality – an intention to serve it by a scrupulous effacement of means and a corresponding unwillingness to do violence to it through ideological abstraction or self-aggrandising (sic) technique (British Film Institute, 2005).

The presentation of Bazin’s film theory unfolds with Wiggins sitting in a movie theater watching David Jewell & Caveh Zahedi (both film directors) appearing as themselves, on screen discussing Bazin. An inversion takes place as the discussion of Bazin’s theory becomes a movie within a movie. Are these actual film directors or are they actors? Zahedi seems unaware of the presence of the camera “what the film would capture if it was filming us right now would be like God as this table, and God as you” (Linklater, 2001). The discussion cuts away to Wiggins sitting in a movie theater watching the movie within the movie. This device is used to demonstrate Bazin’s theory, bridging the dualism he felt existed between art and life. I believe this device was employed as a prompt, to awaken the viewer to their role as an implicitly active agent in the creation of the dream narrative of the movie/life/dream. Jewel finishes the scene with the comment, “Everything is layers, isn't it? I mean, there's the holy moment, and then there's the awareness of trying to have the holy moment. It's the same way that the film is the actual moment really happening, but then the character is pretending to be in a different reality, and it's all these layers” (Linklater, 2001).

Professional intellectuals underrated the profoundly dialectical nature of Bazin's thinking. To put it another way, they were stone-blind to Bazin's poetic genius - his ability to hold contrary terms in a state of paradoxical suspension that transcends mere theory and approaches mystical understanding.(British Film Institute, 2005).

Language as an illusion weaving tool is implicated in the construction of self identity, binding the individual to an imaginary past. Benedict Anderson’s theory of Imagined Communities (1983) is referenced in relation to the instability of identity and linear time. Two women appear in Waking Life discussing Benedict Anderson’s theory. One woman suggests that to tie herself to a baby photograph she must invent a story which is essentially fictitious.

So, you pick up this picture of this two-dimensional image and you say, "That's me." Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, "This was me when I was a year old, and then later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am." So, it takes a story that's actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical....to create your identity (Linklater, 2001).

Her companion explains that when she was young she always thought she would arrive at the object of her striving; at some kind of plateau, “When I was younger, there was desperation, a desire for certainty, like there was an end to the path and I had to get there” (Linklater, 2001).This is what self and identity mean in postmodernism, “a movement that disparages closure and completion. Because of linguistic relativity, the self cannot maintain a solid identity but must defer to the arbitrariness of all conversational interactions. Hence, the self appears fragmented as a consequence of the fluidity of speech” (Lee, 2000).

I suggest that the self only appears fragmented if it is interpreted from the frustrated objective perspective of a self that assumes permanency. Accordingly I believe that linguistic relativity and its related branches of thought have deeper implications within the content of Waking Life, informing the employment of dream narrative. Waking Life repetitively contrasts the rational scientific, academic, intellectual modes of philosophical inquiry with a metaphysical and mystical sensitivity, intimating but never committing, to a transcendent beyond. Collaboration in the animated construction of the unique visual world of the movie can be interpreted as a metaphor for what I suggest is the underlying theme, that life is a co-authored dream informed by a synthesis of shared human experiences and simulated constructs that lack any permanence.

At the conclusion of the movie, a distraught, flummoxed, and highly unstable Wiggins, floats off into the sky. Sympathetic to Wiggins predicament I decided to write the remainder of this conclusion from within a lucid dream, the problem being that dream reality renders narrative structure, academia, and stylistic conventions essentially indecipherable groundless and absurd. Indeed, it appears it has been my mistake from the beginning to regard them as anything other.

The genius of Camus and Beckett lay in their showing us the fundamental absurdity of modern life. Death is reason's limit. If everything must end in the utter silence of the grave, what reason do I have for living? In strictly rational terms, life is fundamentally absurd and meaningless. Therefore whatever meaning we see in life cannot come to us rationally. It must come from somewhere else, even if it amounts to a courageous engagement with the Absurd as such, as in existentialism. It must come to us through the faculty of intuition (Martel, 2009)