May 10th, 2002
Waking Life
I saw Waking Life last night and it completely blew me away. There was something organic about the film, which was a refreshing break from the endless stream of manufactured vomit that comes out of Hollywood on a daily basis.
The film director Luis Bunuel once spoke of a disturbing trend that he had observed in cinema, in which film audiences would enter a zombie-like trance state during a film and become passive entities. Waking Life departs from this phenomenon and enters into a territory in which the audience must constantly focus and re-focus its gaze in order to follow the stream of thought on the screen.
Linklater (the film’s director) somehow manages to pull of the seemingly impossible feat of creating a feature-length film that is an amalgamation of various theories and philosophies on the subject of the human condition. There is a slight whisper of narrative structure in the film, but it is more of a secondary device than anything else. Like the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the soul of the film emanates through as something beyond the sum of its individual parts. That something is a comprehension of the vastness of the universe, but not in a manner that might lead one to dwell on his or her lack of presence, rather, it is a comprehension of some unspeakable binding-force that connects us as phenomenon and subsequently legitimizes our existence as human beings.
