My antennas have picked up a certain positive vibe vis a vis the director Linklater in general and his movie Waking Life in particular. I know, for instance, that Gobbo is a great fan of the film and Daybreak also fancies it in a generous proportion. I am also aware that wide consensus approves of Waking life as not only a sprightly piece of cinematography, but – and this is considerably more significant – a genuinely great film. I myself have watched it at the goad of a good friend of mine, who assured me that I would not only find resonance within it but also promised that it would literally “change my lifeâ€.
I watched and, admittedly, it did not, but during the process my puny intellect did raise several questions as to what is it that exalts this movie from the ranks of ambitiously quixotic verbiage to that of philosophically relevant content.
Note that in order to supply a consistent view upon significant matters, the work of art (any work of art) must emanate as a conscious structure, a mirror view of the artist’s self. There is no art in the lack of any idea, where structure is absent, or in random dislocation (I am willing to defend this). Art is born in the presence of the artist’s over-arching influence. A sequence of beautiful frames will not make up a good movie and neither will a selection of apothegmatic lines picked up from a philosophy manual. What I’d like to analyse is whether there really is a philosophy to Linklater’s movie, beyond the fancy Sartre references and the attractively queer narrative.
Ok.
There is the main character, whose destiny is dream. He keeps that somewhere in the back of his head, as a distant memory and this is about the only biographical information that we get about him. Sub rosa, we figure that he is probably the poetic, introspective human individual in a symbolic aspect.
He wanders like a lone cloud about town, asking himself whether things like the political ideal or human happiness are possible in the circle of existence. The conclusions are pessimistic. He passes by all sorts of awkward individuals, each of them sharing their wisdom to which our young man shows particular interest. Occasionally, we add to the puzzle distant pieces of solitary discourse, coming from characters who apparently have nothing to do with the plot. The main character, somewhat like an Ulysses, more like a Leopold Bloom, saunters among strange “fantastic†figures, all of which try to lure him with their song.
What we at some point derive from the sequence of events is that in reality there is no plot and every person met along the way is a projection of the main character’s psyche. The meaning of his visions is this: life is nothing more than the eternal phenomenal unfolding of a blind impulse to procreate, to reproduce, to gather in classes, to immure in categories. Such oblivious, inert, self-regulatory mechanisms can only bequeath evil. History is the uncoiling of this evil, the trend to institutionalise every aspect of existence and perpetuate the immorality of species. There are characters who arrantly express this belief – the guy in prison, the man shouting in the car, the girl with the ant allegory.
The only way to evade this evil is to sleep, to dream. A way to weaken the intensity of life and its evil is the ascetic experience, becoming a hermit. But by living through the prism of dreamlike experience one can dissolve the evil by impersonalizing it, exposing the pageantry of formal rules that shape our existence and rendering them null.
So far, sounds interesting. Very Schopenhauer. But how does this directly influence the manner in which one actually manifests ? If Linklater is sharing us his philosophy through this movie, what ethics does he propose ?
I wonder whether he suggests an aesthetical redemption, through artistic contemplation – art revealing the ideas that lie at the basis of any historical movement and liberating us from our taxonomic obsessions and trivial desires, the will to sit under the table of history.
Hm ? Does this make any sense ?
