REALLY BIG IDEAS : 'Waking Life'

Writer-director Richard Linklater created a name for himself with 1991's independent-film cult hit, Slacker. Slacker toured Linklater's hometown of Austin, Texas, capturing the rants and rambles of emblematic college-town figures--coffeehouse anarchists and video junkies, conspiracy theorists, punks and street people, and assorted kooks, like the woman who sells Pap smears of Madonna, or the guy who claims that TV's Smurfs were actually preparing America's children for the coming of Krishna. Praised for flaky originality and a directorial style that won comparison to the later films of Bunuel, Slacker caught the Weltanschauung of twentysomething naysayers who turned lethargy into a philosophy, conflating squalor and spirituality while announcing the latest American withdrawal from the rat race with a slacker's pledge of holy failure: "I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work for it."

Linklater's current film, Waking Life, is another series of encounters with intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals--passionate eccentrics intoxicated with their own talk (some are played by actors, but most are real), theorizing about human consciousness and the meaning of life. The plot, such as it is, follows an unnamed student-protagonist, played by Wiley Wiggins (he was the boy in Linklater's 1993 Dazed and Confused), who wanders through random encounters with people spouting off about God, man, and the universe, then trudges back to his apartment to relax in front of late-night TV--only to encounter still more about God, man, and the universe. He also has a habit of levitating from his bed and floating over the city. We're led to believe this is all either a dream from which Wiggins can't wake up--or possibly a last, slippery, extended moment of consciousness between a car accident and death.

Waking Life has won praise across the spectrum, from Roger Ebert ("exhilarating...a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas") to the New Yorker's David Denby ("a revolutionary and beautiful movie"). Much of the excitement centers on the film's technological innovation. Linklater shot Waking Life on video, then hired a team of thirty animators to go to work on it, using specially developed software that let them digitally paint each frame. The result is a world constantly in motion, both the background of buildings and trees, and people themselves, all gently oscillating, pulsing, and vibrating. Waking Life looks like a parody of handheld-camera shakiness or drugged-out perception (at a film festival screening, Linklater especially welcomed audience members who were high). It combines the feel of a documentary with the cartoon look of a graphic novel, and a soundtrack featuring a lovely contemporary cello theme, at once dreamy, urgent, and faintly playful.

"Mostly it's just people going off on whatever," Wiggins says, describing his experiences. "You know, really intensely." Our protagonist listens and listens. He listens to a professor lecture on existentialism, complaining about postmodernism's view of the human being as a social construction. He listens to a linguist discoursing on the inexpressible, and an evolutionary biologist on "the telescoping nature of evolutionary power"; to a philosopher citing Augustine and Aquinas on free will, a literary theorist on "the radical subjectivity... that opens the mind to a vast objectivity," an intense, bug-eyed film director on Bazin's ontology of film, and a self-described dream junkie--an "oneiranaut"--avidly describing how REM sleep effects serotonin.

Waking Life is a Great Ideas funhouse, tilty and disorienting. Linklater's intellectuals are really two kinds: professionals, the producers who riff effortlessly, if sometimes eccentrically, on their subjects; and amateurs, the consumers who try--often feebly-- to hum the melodies later on. The film is full of the fuzzy and precious secondhand intellectuality of people whose cafe conversations begin with, "You know that thing Benedict Anderson says about identity?" and who ransack pop science in search of hip metaphors for creativity, consciousness, and above all, the nature of the self. "Our cells are completely regenerating every seven years," goes another cafe conversation. "We've already become different people several times over--yet we remain quintessentially ourselves."

It all raises the question, is Linklater satirizing or celebrating? His cartoonists play wittily with his subjects' philosophical tirades: one character speculates on free will and quantum mechanics, saying, "I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic machine than just some random swerving"--and his head turns into a huge gear; another pontificates excitedly on the evolution of an information-age "neo-human, with a new consciousness...no longer restricted by time and space"--and his cranium swells monstrously, as if about to explode. The visual jokes suggest the wandering thoughts of a listener wilting under the onslaught, but they make it hard to read Linklater's intentions. For instance, at one point we follow a political activist driving through the city, broadcasting a loudspeaker rant against "the corporate slave state"--his face turning red, then purple, then gray, as he cries to the heavens about "the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit!" Is Linklater mocking him? Is he mocking an embittered young man who babbles on--in pro forma protest boilerplate--about political disenfranchisement, then pours gasoline over himself and calmly lights a match? Linklater remains as inscrutable as his protagonist, preferring to listen, and it's hard to tell whether he admires his interlocutors' incessant profundity or is gently prodding it.