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  • "Dream Is Destiny":Waking Life and the Digital Aesthetics of the In-between
  • Maja Manojlovic (bio)

A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn't just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.

—Gilles Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life"1

The iguana will bite those who do not dream.

—Federico Garcia Lorca, quoted by Speed Levitch in Waking Life2

This essay examines how the cinematic figuration of the digital aesthetics in Richard Linklater's animated film Waking Life (2001) dissolves the conventional referential networks of sensation and signification. Generated by the animation technique called [End Page 184] interpolated rotoscoping, this dissolution reconfigures the conventional perceptions of space (and time) to produce an aesthetics of the in-between. I suggest that this interstitial aesthetics provides a platform for the transvaluation of the notion of life in contemporary cinema, as the process of interpolated rotoscoping used in Waking Life both materially constitutes and conceptually models digital aesthetics and its assimilation into contemporary culture.

During the first fifteen minutes of my big-screen experience of the film at the Laemmle's Sunset 5 Theatres in Hollywood, the sensation of nausea prevailed. This wasn't the delayed effect of being disoriented in the labyrinth-like parking garage, frantically looking for a place to park—a sensation one learns to transcend very quickly in Los Angeles. Rather, once immersed in the film, I was perceptually overwhelmed by the wobbly lines of the animated figures and the persistently shifting spatial layers, resisting the commonsense efforts of my brain to work along the habitual pathways of stable cognitive mapping. I found that my sense of orientation was dislocated, but not in exactly the same way as it was in the parking garage, where my sense of space was grounded in the materiality of the garage's physical delimitations. The dislocation of my sense of orientation induced by my immersion into the unstable imagery of Waking Life was anchored inside my body. It thus had a more profound effect on me because it required a rerouting of my embodied perceptual habits themselves, instead of, as in the case of the parking garage, merely demanding me to recall and solidify the structure of spatial object(ive) markers outside of the body. Now, this experience—I couldn't simply transcend. Instead, my nausea slowly gave way to various degrees of hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of alertness (or even drowsiness), all characteristic of the liquid quality of in-between states of consciousness.

Such intermediary states also mark the diegetic thread of Waking Life. Its protagonist, Wiley Wiggins, is a traveler who becomes a dreamer. He arrives in town by train, can't connect with his friend; embarks on a taxi-boat; arrives at a destination chosen by a mysterious man riding in the cab with him; and is hit by a car while pausing on a crosswalk to pick up a piece of paper with an inscription that anticipated the car's arrival. After that, as Wiley listens, the discontinuous diegesis meanders through a series of encounters with colorful, vivid characters who talk about what life is and what living means. Only later does Wiley participate in the conversations. As it turns out, Wiley is actually dreaming throughout the movie, or dreaming the movie, and all his encounters are a part of his dreamscapes where he seems to be more actively awake than in his actual waking life. [End Page 185]

Nonetheless, although this movie presents Wiley as its protagonist, it's ultimately not about Wiley's life, but about a life, as defined by Gilles Deleuze. Waking Life doesn't build or emphasize its signifying momentum by fleshing out Wiley's individuality or character through narrative continuity. Instead, its...

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