Buddhists, Existentialists, and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life

Introduction: What If Life Were Just a Dream?

Richard Linklater's 2001 film Waking Life is all about dreaming and how we can sometimes lucidly control our dreams. Yet it is also about some broad philosophical issues, including one of the oldest philosophical conundrums, the distinction between appearance and reality. When René Descartes sat at his stove and meditated on the world and on whether an evil demon controlled everything he perceived, he wondered, what's more real, dreams or waking life? The diverse collection of characters in Linklater's film asks the same question. Yet they ask it not just in a literal sense, but also as a metaphor for the nature of modern culture and for the human condition as a whole—in what ways do we fall asleep even while awake? How can we lead a life that is more awake, more aware of people and things, more authentic? The film provides the outlines of three wake-up calls to three more-or-less separate ways in which we sleep too easily.

This issue is not new. It goes all the way back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave: what if you were chained in a dimly lit cave your whole life, where you saw only the shadows of real things passing by the entrance to your cave reflected on its back wall? Suddenly you are free and come into the sunlight. Would you recognize this new world as more real than your cave world? And would you be able to convince those still enchained in the cave that there was a greater world outside their dwelling? Would you be able, in Plato's terms, to wake up to reality?

This whole idea of "waking up" is a key idea in a number of philosophies explored in the film. In ancient Eastern philosophy—the Indian Vedanta philosophy of the Upanishads, Taoism, and Buddhism—the key to waking up is enlightenment and a correct understanding of the relation of the self to the external world. In existentialism, we have to wake up to our personal freedom and our responsibility for creating our own selves and lives. And in the situationism of Guy Debord and others, we have to wake up from the sugar-coated spell of consumer society.

The film was made by first filming live action with a digital video camera and then transferring the video to computers and rotoscoping (coloring over) the images to turn them into animation. Thirty different artists were involved in the process, all with different styles. Rotoscoping has been used before—as early as Disney's 1937 Snow White and several decades later in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings and American Pop. It gives a flowing, surreal, dreamlike quality to much of the film, surely Linklater's intention. And although the film is divided into thirty-four more or less distinct shorts, they are linked together by the constant presence of the "dreamer," Wiley Wiggins, who also acted in Linklater's Dazed and Confused. In addition, the shorts are linked by most of them taking place in Linklater's hometown of Austin, Texas, and by thematic links between the ideas presented in adjacent scenes.

If one were to describe the visual style in a single word, that word would be instability. In some scenes, we see a fairly stable human figure, often Wiley, surrounded by a fluid, undulating background of objects, buildings, and other characters. In others, the very components of human bodies and faces are out of sync with each other: a head remains stationary as its eyes and mouth move back and forth; elements of clothing change their shape or substance; a character's hair waves up and down without any evidence of windy weather elsewhere in the scene. The style of animation also changes significantly from scene to scene, sometimes reflecting the topic being discussed (e.g., angry political rants tend to feature sharp colors and solid black lines), and in other cases merely to provide a contrast with preceding and succeeding scenes. A good example of this can...