Waking Life

[€uroMeinke]

Ok, Finally got around to seeing Waking Life, and while I enjoyed the film, I get the feeling that I should have liked it much much more. I mean, it’s a talking film in the tradition of My Dinner with Andre, discusses several philosophical topics, starting of with an exposition on the joyfulness of existentialism. On paper this should be in my top ten list.

But it didn’t. In fact the movie struck me as being a bit flat – and I’m not sure why. I’ve been thinking about it for days. Here are some of my speculations.

While I certainly agree with many of the ideas presented, they all were presented rather dogmatically - there was no contrary voice – no discussion - no Wally Shawn being exasperated saying, “you’re out of your mind”. In a way everything presented was an answer, a theory, no one really posed any questions (which to me is what philosophy is all about).

Of course in the context of the film, it works as he starts really as a spectator to all these ideas about the nature of reality as they slowly combine to reveal his presumed reality. Of course, that bothered me in other ways.

First that by the end of the film really only 2 or 3 are relevant to the films plot, the rest are just a sort of intellectual window dressing – interesting to be sure, but the discussion of the ontology of film didn’t really advance the story much (though it was cleverly countered through the use of animation).

I was also bothered by the stuff about lucid dreaming, apparently to the protagonist; this meant the ability to converse. He never once tried to control or engage the situation as one does in lucid dreams, rather he remained rather passive.

I guess I would have liked to see more conflict or a presentation and challenge to the ideas. There were lots of cool things laid out, but I’m not sure they were presented in as compelling a fashion as they could.

I appreciate what Linklater was trying to do with this one, but I think he was far more successful in playing out “ideas” in his films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Perhaps if the characters were telling more personal stories than spouting wisdom it would have been more effective for me, but with characters that were devoid of relationship to one another, it's hard to connect to any of them.

Perhaps I need to see My Dinner with Andre again and see if it still works for me as well.