Lucidity in Five of Director Richard Linklater’s Films: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, The Newton Boys, and Waking Life
an essay written by Daniel S. Duvall
© 2017-Infinity Daniel S. Duvall - all rights reserved
Waking Life (written and directed by Richard Linklater) is a film by, for, and about people who understand that each individual on this planet can choose to be more than a citizen, more than a customer, more than an employee: in other words, more than what they are told to be.
Characters in Waking Life either choose to become lucid and take control of their dreams or just go with the flow. Don’t get distracted by the debate in some reviews about whether the main character (played by Wiley Wiggins) is awake or even alive; this film is a metaphor for the common human journey to the many forks in the ever-branching road of life where we find our locus of control and have a chance to seize it. The question is not “is the main character awake,” but rather “what does it mean to be awake?”
Waking Life suggests that we are only fully awake and alive when we trust ourselves and follow our instincts instead of being buffeted (like a small metal sphere) through life (like a pinball machine) by external forces.
Linklater’s oeuvre is saturated with characters on that journey toward full lucid control over their lives. Some are farther along the path than others. In Slacker, most of the characters have already achieved an “awake” frame of mind. They are comfortable in the present, with nary a time card or punch clock in sight. (“Sorry I’m late,” a painter says to her friend at dusk. “That’s all right. Time doesn’t exist,” the friend responds.)
In Dazed and Confused, high school students search every nook and cranny of their hometown for that magic timeless place and reach the depressing conclusion that it does not yet exist; they do, however, realize that they might have the power to create such a place on their own. In Before Sunrise (written by Linklater & Kim Krizan), the two main characters extend the present moment, a moment of connection with a stranger, for as long as they can over one long night in Vienna, but in the end they are jolted back into a world where clocks dictate what they must do. (“I hate this. We’re back in real time.”)
Even The Newton Boys (written by Linklater & Claude Stanush & Clark Lee Walker), a western based on the exploits of real-life bank-robbing brothers, is at its core about individuals seeking control over their lives. The Newtons rob banks so that they can retire young instead of picking cotton until they are in their graves.
Indeed, of all the external forces that can buffet characters around in Linklater’s films, the clock and calendar of society are perhaps the most omnipresent. The heroes of Dazed and Confused are imprisoned by external schedules (moving from class to class) until the final bell rings on the last day of high school. Once they are free of school, they have deadlines imposed by parents and coaches to grapple with: freshman Mitch has a curfew while Randall “Pink” Floyd has less than one day to sign a document that will allow him to remain on the football team (provided he sacrifices control over how he spends his time that summer). The Newton brothers are on a tight schedule every time they pull a heist: one can’t dally at the scene of the crime after one blasts open a bank vault. Before Sunrise is Linklater’s purest depiction of the external clock as an antagonist; if the boy played by Ethan Hawke didn’t have to catch a train by a certain time, he and the girl played by Julie Delpy could have gone on talking and sharing ideas forever. The characters resurface in Waking Life, continuing trains of thought that began in Before Sunrise.
The protagonist of Waking Life starts down the path to lucidity when he discovers that he cannot know what time it is even when he wants to; every clock he looks at is distorted and unreadable. A wise soul later advises him that the inability to read clocks is a sign that one is dreaming. Once you know you’re dreaming, this sage advises the hero, you can seize control of the dream and dictate what happens. Writers, rambling conversationalists, painters, and other artists might recognize that state of mind where time is irrelevant, when one is immersed so deeply in the present moment of a creative frenzy that the clock literally loses meaning.
Another recurring Linklaterian notion: television (like the clock) is an external force that exerts a hypnotic influence over viewers (and renders them into non-lucid sleep, metaphorically speaking). Consider a childhood memory of Jennifer Schaundies, who appears in Slacker as “Walking to Coffee Shop.” Jennifer’s bio (on page forty-four of the Slacker tie-in book from St. Martin’s Press) includes the following anecdote: “Formative Experience: As a small child, nearly choked to death on a Brach’s butterscotch candy while watching television in a dark room. She tried to continue watching television as her mother held her upside down by the ankles and shook her.” There have been empirical studies that examine the alteration of brain waves before, during, and after a session of TV watching, and I’m inclined to believe that Linklater and his friends are on to something. Louis Mackey, who plays the Old Anarchist in Slacker and appears briefly in Waking Life, once told me over the phone that he does not own a television. And at one point in Dazed and Confused, the characters attempt to name every episode of Gilligan’s Island. In Slacker, a young man attempts to dissuade a friend from leaving the country: “I’ve traveled… when you get back, you can’t tell whether it really happened to you or if you just saw it on TV.”
Waking Life is simultaneously the most obscure and the purest depiction of Linklater’s recurring message that we are all sovereign individuals who can shake off the influence of clocks and TVs in order to seize control of our time and lives: obscure because viewers will be distracted from the message by the dazzling psychedelic animation (I like to say that each frame of Waking Life is a hyperlink between your mind and the collective unconscious), but pure because at the end Linklater himself reappears as a pinball player and states his message clearly. There is only one moment, and it’s right now, Linklater advises the protagonist and the viewer, “So wake up.”
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