Waking Life: Please Think

This review was published originally on cinekklesia on October 21, 2005.

When I first saw Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) a couple of years ago, I was a bit apprehensive. Knowing that it was a tale of a young man walking through an animated dream world full of swirling colors, floating objects, and heavily philosophical conversations, I was concerned that the movie would feel contrived, like a pseudo-intellectual variant of Slacker (1991), Linklater's groundbreaking film about Austin, Texas residents, who, well, walk around and talk.

I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Far from contrived, Waking Life is very fluid and comfortable: Most of the animated sequences are aesthetically pleasing, and most of the vignettes seem "natural." Sure, the characters discuss ideas that could be expanded into late-night digressions and debates lasting hours; yet, Linklater manages to introduce the audience to complicated concepts in a seamless and pleasant fashion. He appears to be encouraging us just to relax, soak in the film, and perhaps meditate on it later. Of course, with DVD technology, we easily can return to the film and jump immediately to the scene(s) that we want to explore further.

Yet, despite Linklater's creative script and deft direction, there appear to be elements who argue that Waking Life is mere pretentious pap. Who is this Linklater that he spouts such lofty language in a cinematic venue? Is he not merely a non-academic version of the professorial blowhard, who sits you down and tells you "how it is"? The professor who has some overarching theory of the way the world works and who finds all other views either incomplete or totally inane? If you happen to be this professor's student, then you'd better smile, nod, and stroke his/her ego; otherwise, the tenured, untouchable tyrant surely will destroy your career, if not your entire life.

That was an exaggerated version of one audience member's response to Waking Life, when cinekklesia screened it on October 8, 2005, at the Durham, NC-based Emmaus Way. She simply found it pretentious and annoying, and her stark, vigorous response challenged me: I knew that I disagreed, but I wasn't sure why.

Fortunately, one other audience member came to the rescue. He mentioned that he felt no pretentious vibe from Waking Life because all of the characters spoke about their ideas earnestly and passionately. They really cared about them. No mere careerists—like those obsessed with publishing the groundbreaking book, speaking at the invitation-only panel that "everybody will be talking about," receiving tenure at the prestigious university—the (largely) amateur intellectuals in Linklater's imagination seek to live the life of ideas, regardless of whether they receive any accolades.

Another reason why Linklater's film survives the condemnation stemming from the unpretentious is because it lacks the self-righteous moralism plaguing other "thoughtful" films. Magnolia (1999), for instance, can be mildly overbearing, as it beats audiences over the head with its theme of forgiveness (though I have to admit that P.T. Anderson's magnum opus has grown on me as time passes, largely because of others' thought-provoking reviews). An even more excessively didactic film is Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon (1991), a horrifically contrived tale of socially divergent characters who cross each others' paths, "affect" one another, and then bring some level of harmony to an otherwise alienated America. I saw this movie once, way back in high school, and I still remember feeling offended that the director assumed that I would "learn something" from his simplistic, sentimental schlock.

Linklater largely avoids this trap. His message is simple, and despite the characters' passionate elucidations, relatively subtle: "Wake up." Step outside the material realm. Think about ideas. Discuss. In one respect, the Linklater of Waking Life serves as host to a more intellectually challenging and interesting existence. He's introducing some members of his audience to new vistas and "roads less traveled" (forgive the cliché).

Yet, if Linklater is derided as pretentious, then is there any way a director can introduce Big Ideas to the slovenly masses without inviting the ridicule of the intelligentsia? Does that director have to forego earning and/or maintaining the respect of academics and other intellectuals?

Linklater's project reminds me of the tenured professor who decides to write a "popular" book. No longer fearing professional reprisals (and perhaps hoping to make some extra cash), he/she undertakes to "dumb down" the topic at hand. Such a practice almost inevitably produces scorn from a certain number of colleagues who feel their discipline cheapened by its mere contact with simple, pedestrian language. Of course, in some cases, such scorn is deserved; some popular books written by academics are overly simplistic and intellectually insulting, even to those of us without PhD's. However, is there a way for an intellectual to discuss complicated ideas in accessible language without producing pap?

This question also affects the spiritual lives of Christians, the primary audience of cinekklesia. There exist few gaps as large as that between the seminary and the congregation. Of course, such a blanket statement does not take into account individual churches that try to foster the life of the mind (a mind God gave us, after all); however, I hypothesize that American Christians generally do not challenge enough the anti-intellectualism and just plain stupidity of the culture around us. Many Christians criticize moral decay but neglect the intellectual degradation that leaves our minds flaccid. We certainly should not overly intellectualize our faith, but we also should not ignore the important role that our minds play in drawing us closer to God.

Thus, is Linklater's Waking Life pretentious? Not really. It serves an important role in American cinema (and American popular culture, more generally). Whether he cares about his reputation among the intelligentsia is perhaps unknowable (and ultimately unimportant). What matters is Linklater's intellectual passion for producing challenging films, a passion that is mirrored by the overall growth in the availability of informal, decentralized knowledge. Perhaps such growth signifies that the gap between Big Ideas and the masses is shrinking, regardless of the efforts of intellectual gatekeepers. If so, then Waking Life can claim to be one part of that larger trend.