Waking Life
I must have come across this statement by Epstein, a French theorist and filmmaker (1897-1953), in the late 60s or early 70s, but I no longer remember where. I’ve scanned his writings on several occasions since, but I haven’t found the quote. Sometimes I wonder if I read or heard about it in a dream–making it one of the unrealities Epstein is referring to.
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What emerges is so radically different from most animation we’re accustomed to that the movie’s mode perfectly matches its subject–the ambiguous borderline state between waking and dreaming as perceived by actor and sometime animator Wiley Wiggins while he’s drifting around. A constantly shifting panoply of visual styles conjures up a twitching and palpitating universe where everything’s in a perpetual state of becoming, not only from scene to scene but from second to second. In the final sequence–before Wiggins floats off into the sky to the strains of a tango, just after he’s apparently woken up for the umpteenth time–he’s walking down a neighborhood street where everything (plants, trees, cars, dead leaves, even separate sections of flat ground) is unstable and volatile, slipping and sliding and fluctuating with all the unpredictable freedom of an artist’s brush or a deity’s whim. In a world where absolutely nothing can be taken for granted, everything qualifies as a miracle of one sort or another, major or minor, and the business of this movie is to chart as many miracles as possible–dozens, hundreds, even thousands at a time, most of them minor yet exquisite.
The press book for Waking Life insists that “there are no geographical references” in the film, and Linklater has made the same point in some of his interviews. Yet having occasionally visited Austin, I immediately recognized portions of the city–the state capitol is plainly visible at least twice. I didn’t feel that Austin was being represented, but that I was being somehow, incidentally yet indelibly, conveyed there.
