In the cinematic hub of Austin, Texas, home to a reputable university, shortly after the turn-of-the-century and the disaster of September 11th, Waking Life plays out its enthralling rotoscope dreamland with what seems like a disordered, chaotic flurry of dialogues. It is all very unremitting—loquacious, academic fuzziness, street-talk and bone-dry theory rattled off as though it were the effluvia of something in the air, a vapor or an intoxicant, a poison maybe. While most narrative films, including those that are experimental, avant-garde, tend to exploit film as a visual medium, using dialogue as a supplement to the bread-and-butter of the cinema—the moving image—Waking Life emphasizes dialogue, which is so densely profuse that one would struggle to find this logorrhea in any other film of the past century.
It wouldn’t be fair to hold Waking Life up to the intellectual standards that it hints at by using academic extracts, lectures, and bits and pieces of pseudo-learned dialogue. It is after all just a film, intended to entertain as much as it “edifies” (if this edifying can be said to exist for those over the age of twenty-two). I think its head-over-heels use of ideas and concepts, exhibited with a panorama of all walks of life, from academia to a jail cell, tries valiantly to show how humans make out their own experiences, realities, and lives. Waking Life looks at philosophy (and more broadly ideas) as a human endeavor, and it does so with a bemused, enraptured shallowness that fits its whole shebang into a taut 100 minutes.
Waking Life is visually fascinating, animating from live-action using what is called rotoscoping (done by computer), and it might have been revelatory had it stuck to its visual ideas, cut down the dialogue, and elaborated its themes of dreaming-as-waking; as it is, Waking Life is a muddle, and it gets in its own way. If there weren’t the whiff of middlebrow spuriousness emanating from all this dialogue like a sickness, it would be much easier to take; no pretension would be detectable; it would be like a long flower-girl’s skip through the fields of the mind. But the dialogues discredit the film’s sincerity, showing how self-regarding, credulous, and smug humans can be.
The characters of this film seem to be entranced by their own word-spinning, so much of it barren, fanatical, pseudo-religious, and anti-intellectual. We have, besides the musings on time and dreams, tons of sewage on oneness and mystical unity, anarchism, theory-driven suicide-as-protest, the “popular” kind of existentialism (with nothing about phenomenology), Darwinian guesswork, barely any metaphysics, conspiracy-theory activism (from the unhinged Alex Jones) and some stuff on having human moments of real connection. It’s as if every private moment of philosophical cliché, delusion, and concept-sickness were poured into this film, ordered for our consumption, and served out of a cannon.
The taste on the palate is that of a sobering boilerplate of the human condition. After watching Waking Life, one sees how grossly deficient is the human mind, which has to express itself with words and concepts that, even in the best of hands, remain convenient shorthand for the true complexity of things. One also sees just how unimpressive is human intelligence, which seems to think highly of itself, and how manipulable humans can be, always wading into bogs and fens and swamps out of a primitive need to find coherence, meaning, and purpose in the world, as though all at once with their word-webs, notwithstanding their own limitations.
Whatever the validity of ideas and concepts in themselves, Waking Life reminded me for some reason of dogs barking, barking at each other and at their smiling, indulgent owners. We chide dogs and indulge them because they’re so far beneath us, they’re just animals. But to them, barking is a meaningful means of speech, and their only communicable utterance. And so—wait a moment, isn’t language ours? Aren’t we like dogs, sufferers of our own limitations, animals to what we can’t understand? If all language is a kind of vulgarity, a spinning of wheels, then for those that realize this, silence has a special kind of dignity. And Waking Life is far from silent.
