“I’m gonna tell you about a dream I once had,” Richard Linklater – playing himself in his own film Waking Life – tells Wiley Wiggins, playing the film’s unnamed protagonist. “I know when someone says that usually you’re in for a very boring next few minutes, and you might be,” Linklater adds as he hammers away at a pinball machine. “But it sounds like … what else you gonna do, right?”
On paper, that’s the premise – and, if you’re cynical, the central dilemma – of Linklater’s 2001 genre-defying indie masterpiece. Wiggins plays a man wandering around Austin, Texas, who is uncertain whether he’s awake or asleep. He may be stuck in a dream, unable to wake up – or reality might just be this weird.
Films often try too hard to capture what dreams feel like, with violent, surrealist imagery, or wacky, quasi-Lychian abstractions. In Waking Life, however, Linklater propels our hero through what feels unnervingly like a dream with none of that ham-handed crudeness. We, along with Wiggins’ dreamer, are attempting to stay on track, only to suddenly find ourselves walking down a street talking to a stranger, with no word on why, or how, we got there.
That’s what Waking Life is, essentially – a collection of strange, dreamlike moments. We’re riding along with our hero as he meets a kaleidoscopic array of artists, philosophers and eccentrics, who wax lyrical about everything – from dreams, to politics, to the nature of reality itself.
“We had a very, very loose script initially which changed a lot as we started shooting,” Wiggins tells me. “There was a sort of open-casting looking for odd characters around town who could speak passionately about special interests, and then that was incorporated. The whole thing was very loose during filming, which was done with little consumer DV handy cams”.
Linklater has always told stories about people tussling with big, abstract ideas, whether it’s the walk-and-talk ruminations of Jesse and Céline in the Before trilogy, or the stoner philosophy of Dazed and Confused. His protagonists have the kinds of contemplative conversations we think we’re having when we’re talking the ear off a stranger at a party.
But Waking Life is not mere dorm room sophistry: it will likely introduce you to some genuinely mind-blowing ideas as you’re carried downstream through its visually sumptuous waters. The entire film is rotoscoped, a technique invented by Max Fleischer back in 1915, where artists hand-draw over each frame of the film, leading to a hyper-real animated style. Each sequence is drawn by a different animator, changing as the film’s tone does.
“There were all sorts of people involved in the animation stage, painters, people who might not have any existing animation experience before,” Wiggins says. “It was a very different technique than even other rotoscoped animations … it was jarring to some viewers, but I appreciated that quality.”
For some viewers, Waking Life prompted an exploration of lucid dreaming – the act of becoming aware, and maintaining control, during a dream. For others, it made them gently paranoid about whether they were, in fact, awake at all. “It’s funny, but I actually have done the thing where I try to turn lights on and off in a dream and can’t,” Wiggins says (as the film explains, you typically can’t do this in dreams). “I don’t know if that’s an artefact of having been in the movies, or something real.”
But does Wiley think he’s awake or asleep right now? He considers this for a moment. “The last 10 years have been a series of rude awakenings, one after another,” he finally says.
A great deal has happened since 2001, when Waking Life came out. In the wake of 9/11, Roger Ebert said that the film “could not come at a better time”, praising it for “[celebrating] a series of articulate, intelligent characters who seek out the meaning of their existence and do not have the answers”.
“At a time when madmen think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an afterlife, which is by definition unknowable, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones asking sane questions,” Ebert wrote. “True believers owe it to the rest of us to seek solutions that are reasonable in the visible world.”
And with that in mind, maybe now is the perfect moment to dive back into this strange film.
Waking Life is available to stream on Disney+ in Australia and Prime Video in the US. It’s available to rent or buy on in the UK.
