Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Good Vibrations: Waking Life

291 Good Vibrations Waking Life The cinema is an anti-universe where reality is born out of a sum of unrealities. —Jean Epstein I must have come across this statement by Epstein, a French theorist and filmmaker (1897–1953), in the late 60s or early 70s, but I no longer remember where. I’ve scanned his writings on several occasions since, but I haven’t found the quote. Sometimes I wonder if I read or heard about it in a dream—making it one of the unrealities Epstein is referring to. Wherever the quote comes from, it applies beautifully to Richard Linklater’s animated feature, Waking Life. The whole movie is a string of paradoxes and reflections about what’s real and what’s not, about when you’re dreaming and when you’re awake, and the unusual way it’s put together seems calculated to complicate all of the issues it raises rather than resolve any of them. Over twenty- five days, Linklater, one of his coproducers, and a sound person shot a first version of everything we see in this movie with two relatively low-tech digital video cameras in and around Austin, San Antonio, and New York—basically taping a lot of people talking and walking, as well as listening and sitting. It’s not clear how much of the talk was scripted by Linklater and how much was improvised, but if the methodology of his second feature, Slacker—the live-action Linklater film Waking Life most resembles—is any indication, it was mainly scripted. Much of the editing proceeded concurrently with the shooting. Then animator Bob Sabiston , credited as art director, spent about nine months with a software program he developed, a good many Mac G4 computers, and more than thirty artists who ‘‘painted’’ over the live-action footage, each one generally assigned one or more characters. About 250 hours of animation work were needed to create—or, more precisely, recreate—each minute of animated footage. What emerges is so radically different from most animation we’re accustomed to that the movie’s mode perfectly matches its subject—the ambiguous borderline state between waking and dreaming as perceived by actor and sometimes animator Wiley Wiggins while he’s drifting around. A constantly shifting panoply of visual styles conjures up a twitching and palpitating universe where everything is in a perpetual state of becoming, not only from scene to scene but from second 292 ESSENTIAL CINEMA to second. In the final sequence—before Wiggins floats off into the sky to the strains of a tango, just after he’s apparently woken up for the umpteenth time— he’s walking down a neighborhood street where literally everything (plants, trees, cars, dead leaves, even separate sections of flat ground) is unstable and volatile, slipping and sliding and fluctuating with all the unpredictable freedom of an artist’s brush or a deity’s whim. In a world where absolutely nothing can be taken for granted, everything qualifies as a miracle of one sort or another, major or minor, and the business of this movie is to chart as many miracles as possible— dozens, hundreds, even thousands at a time, most of them minor yet exquisite. One colleague has compared Waking Life to Yellow Submarine, and given all the hallucinogenic play with reality perceived as a nonstop construction, it’s easy to see what he means. But the fashionable greeting-card style of George Dunning ’s 1968 cartoon extravaganza is miles away from the overall look of this much better movie, which comes closer to evoking the grimmer styles of contemporary graphic novels. Paradoxically relentless yet easygoing, this philosophical jam session—with its incessant mutter of soaring words often playing a role like that of musical accompaniment , gliding in and out of our awareness and comprehension—is too laidback to be experienced as an assault, yet it calls to mind a constant (if gentle) battering of everyday reality as it’s usually experienced. That Linklater was born in Texas and never went to college undoubtedly has something to do with his ‘‘Aw, shucks’’ manner of interrogating the universe, something he does, quietly yet doggedly, without letup for 97 minutes. I’m reminded of a favorite aphorism coined by my father—mainly, like Linklater, an autodidact: ‘‘Life is a bowl of cherries —shot point-blank at you from a cannon.’’ The cultural reference points include Philip K. Dick, Jean-Luc Godard (whose Masculine Feminine is cited when one disgruntled ponti...