Review of Waking Life (2001) by Joshua L — 02 Feb 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***.

"Super perfundo on the early eve of your day.".

We get what we want out of most movies; we get good guys and bad guys, lines of dialogue that make us think, romantic playfulness, maybe some laughs and/or tears, and we walk away feeling as though we have experienced some sides of life that we wish that we had more time to explore in our own. We also, of course get some stuff that we don't want, like bad acting that distracts us, overwrought plots that deceive us, characters that we think we could either have gone without or wish that we could take home with us. Nonetheless, movies are our escape and as much as we dislike admission that we see a lot (maybe too many), sometimes it's exactly what we need.

So, with that being said about the art of drama, we can now also look at the other side of film-making. The documentary has been another element in film, that has existed since the invention of the camera. The early part of the 20th century, for example was filled with propaganda pieces as well as informational and exploratory films. Fact, as opposed to fiction, has the mirror effect of education in the movie-making business. Here, we see that although a broad brush has painted film as an escape, another canvas has exposed a return to reality. Important to note, of course, is that there aren't a substantial amount of documentaries that attempt to encompass the entirety of human existence. Documentaries, instead, tend to focus on a particular area of study, compiling both facts and opinions that are intended to give us glimpses of those parts of life that we can be unconsciously overlooking in our daily routines.

In not only providing the audience with entertainment in realistic ways, but letting the same audience come to points of interest at their own pace and retain their abilities of judgment and thought, you might wonder how much of an escape is actually being given to people in need of such. Especially in a time of world disaster, poverty, repression, and terrorism, you might expect that we'd be seeing the better part of ourselves wanting to forget, to regret mistakes, to live in an alternate dimension of purity in wholesome rehabilitation.

However, we have gotten somewhat of a different reaction from a variety of places.

"It's up to each and every one of us to turn loose of just some of the greed, the hatred, the envy, and yes, the insecurities, because that is the central mode of control, make us feel pathetic, small, so we'll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny.".

"Waking Life", points out that there is no need to seek truth, when subjectivity will ultimately confuse our relations. It takes a seldom traveled path, where we accept that we will meet people whose ideas may have evidence but whom we will never be able to share even what amounts to a single shared experience in life. It's not because they don't intrigue us, or that the concepts they speak about don't ring bells. Only because we have the understanding that life is temporal do we learn to move on.

Through the idea that we have the ability to lucid dream in a state of unconsciousness, we can learn without processing thoughts or having recognition of natural instinct and rely on intuition alone. Often we have dreams with themes, some so progressed that they will reappear. This film exhibits the message that as a consequence of us contrasting existence with existentialist thought, it will undoubtedly result with conflicting viewpoints, in the way it was translated onto video, alone. Taken from an actual film crew with camera equipment, and then given to the hands of enhanced creative animation illustrators. The improvised yet informed and intellectual conversations become rhythmic with personal impressions whose sole works are our personal complexities inherited through time itself. However, we never lose sight of the fact that pedestrians exist if only as members of an eternal connection who can perceive the emotion.

It is with this film that instead of unwarranted commitment and loyalty we are assisted with the inward reflection of values, and learn the virtuous curiosity which accompanies the purpose of change through life, and ultimately the afterlife. We learn that the quest is what with as complete authenticity as the dream of life, under the constant conditions of time and truth, personifies the undefined belief system. There have been multiple instances of generation, yet the eternal beginning is enough that we have experience of the essence of life long before we even have science or reference.

This is the interpretation that I choose, that many critics have overlooked. I propose that the theme of this movie is more about birth than death. "Waking Life", although based on the extremity of uncertainties, is in my eye, less than guaranteeing the prophecy of the end to our human spirit. It isn't even guessing that you'll die without knowing the grandness of our universe. It is quite simply telling you that you'll always be positive of your soul's origin, everything that will happen to you is a prescription of morality, with decreasing potency as distance increases, until the inevitably and infinitely mysterious unforeseeable end of action. The film, in my opinion, implies that we are witnessing the poetic birth of a soul into the sphere of life.

All in all, Linklater has broken the mold of film production. His reminiscent air of nostalgia for the loss of time as golden as spent, does justice to the robbers of the human spirit, as the emotional outlook that captures us all when we look into the eyes of a photo album and feel the burden of a succession of guilt over the advancement of dreams.

"Dream is destiny.".

"Waking Life" (2001) 10/10.