Even though it premiered at Sundance in January 2001, Waking Life will always feel like a 9/11 movie. This is in large part because of Roger Ebert’s review from that October, in which he wrote that it “could not come at a better time.” For Ebert, Richard Linklater’s celebration of “articulate, intelligent characters who seek out the meaning of their existence and do not have the answers” was, in the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers falling, “like a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas.” Elsewhere, the U.S. was sent into a violent fervor, with every apparatus of mass audiovisual media declaring a righteous vengeance on those that upset the Pax Americana. It sent many Americans into bloodthirsty psychosis. Some could see through it: Hunter S. Thompson was already in bracing, clarifying mode when, the day following the attack, he wrote, “Make no mistake about it: We are At War now—with somebody—and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”
Ebert, for his part, was not innocent of this psychosis. “At a time when madmen think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an afterlife,” Ebert wrote in that same Waking Life review, “which is by definition unknowable, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones asking sane questions.” The delineation between “madmen” who “think they know about an afterlife” and “us,” the Americans, sees Ebert placing the blame squarely on what the media demonized at the time as “radical Islam,” which flattened a set of geopolitical, sociocultural, and religious complexities into a dehumanizing hatred that would lead to the deaths of millions in the Middle East. In the same piece in which he praises questions, Ebert already implies an answer of his own.
Part of what makes Waking Life work is not that the characters “do not have answers”—many in the ensemble do think they have information worth following—but that the characters try to inspire thought rather than control it. Linklater even went as far in the director’s commentary to say that his “goal was really to communicate. I don’t want the movie to be obscure, I want it to be understandable.” The tone, then, as Wiley Wiggins’ unnamed dreamer wanders around Linklater’s rotoscoped world listening to philosophical ramblings, is approachable rather than didactic. Like Slacker, Waking Life is more concerned with a way of living, a way of conversing, than it is the nominal values espoused by its cavalcade of characters. These films are about living curiously and being active participants in ideas; in a moment as purely reactive as 9/11, something as simple as sitting and considering has a quiet radicalism.
Waking Life bounces from person to person casually, as fluidly as its ever-changing style, but it’s all still grounded in a sense of place and an atmosphere of real-life listening, be that a student listening to a professor, friends chatting at a café, or patrons telling stories at a bar. This film doesn’t have the direct here-to-here-to-here trajectory of Slacker, but the texture of Linklater’s dialogue maintains the spontaneous cadence of thinking out loud.
Waking Life is the capstone to Linklater’s loose trilogy of wandering, listening, and dreaming, after It’s Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books and Slacker. Slacker opens with Linklater himself playing an unnamed wanderer, emerging from slumber on a bus and chattier than ever. “Do you ever have those dreams that are just completely real?” Linklater asks his cab driver. The cab driver drops him outside The Castilian in Austin; a decade later, Linklater would guide Wiggins’ wanderer to that same intersection in Waking Life. Wiggins dismounts on that same block, walks to that same corner, finds a note in the intersection telling him to look to his right, only to find a car’s grill heading straight towards him. It causes him to have a false awakening, sending him about his day not knowing he’s still in a dream.
“Things have been tough lately for dreamers,” another character says. “They say dreaming’s dead and no one does it anymore. It’s not dead, it’s just been forgotten. Removed from our language. No one teaches it, so no one knows it exists. And the dreamer’s banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all of that, and I hope you are too.” It’s easy to see how, in his disillusion and despair, Ebert and many other Americans latched onto moments like these—why Ebert had already seen Waking Life three times and already wanted to watch it again. The dream-state of the movie theater can be more than escapism—a method of personal, mental salvation.
“I remember feeling like everything outside my life that wasn’t cinema was kind of this void,” Linklater recalls in the Plow commentary. “Relationships, family connections, everything. It was probably that necessary period where you had to separate yourself from everything you knew before or define yourself as an adult…Cinema was the thing that saved me.” Years later, Linklater would tell Kogonada in On Cinema & Timethat “Cinema has existed for hundreds of thousands of years in the dream-state. People knew immediately how to watch films because they had been doing it every night forever.” Cinema is a more voluntary exercise than dreaming, where one must choose to participate, but if there’s one word to describe Linklater’s cinema, it is “participatory.”
From his penchant for wide shots, which allow for ample gesturing by multiple characters, to his long-winded conversations, Linklater’s cinema is about being engaged. Linklater’s own engagement with the world grew from the banal travels of Plow, to the people-driven but distracted Slacker, to the monologuing of Waking Life, which Wiggins’ dreamer is always listening to with a careful seriousness. Linklater’s oeuvre, one which had been so concerned with listless youth, matures in front of its audience. “I have a lot of sympathy for people in their twenties who are wanting to do something different or discover what they’re most passionate about,” Linklater said in the Plow commentary, “live a life with purpose or they feel like what they’re doing is valuable to themselves or their community.” In Waking Life, Linklater doesn’t just paint a portrait of listless youth, but a youth ready to reach out and learn. It’s unsurprising Ebert found this invigorating.
Similarly striking is a statement made by a professor at UT Austin, early in Waking Life. “I’m afraid we’re losing the ability to live life passionately, to take responsibility for who you are, to make something of yourself and feeling good about life,” says Robert C. Solomon. “Your life is yours to create.” This inspiring notion feeds into what Linklater describes as the “reemergence of the individual,” which was an early fixation of the 21st century (think Time‘s 2006 Person Of The Year being “You”). In an era of consensus in reaction, like the immediate post-9/11 moment, this idea can feel liberating, but it is not without its own trappings.
Waking Life also became inextricably (and negatively) linked with 9/11 through Linklater’s casting of Austin radio nut Alex Jones, who would explode into the national spotlight for being the first prominent “9/11 truther,” positing on the day of the attack that the Bush administration had orchestrated a bombing of the World Trade Center as a false flag operation. Linklater remixes Jones’ sequence from Slacker—where he drives around spouting rambling violence from a car-mounted set of megaphones—into Jones turning red and purple, yelling through his speakers, heading south down Congress with the Texas State Capital in the background. Some have used Jones’ appearance in Waking Life (given Jones’ established reputation in Austin at the time) as further evidence of Linklater tacitly agreeing with all that’s spat out in his movies. Yet that doesn’t match the liberal politics of Linklater’s Bush-defying Fast Food Nation and A Scanner Darkly (which are Linklater’s two outright conspiratorial works—glean of that what you will towards what he might think about 9/11), nor his anti-Ted Cruz political ads.
This is all to say that Linklater’s films strive to portray the entirety of his milieu: the intellectual and meandering north Austin, full of professors, libertarians, punks, and all-around wackos. Linklater finds it contradictory, which is representative of its time and place. In Linklater’s 2002 short Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor, he catches up with a character previously featured in Waking Life. “We have this incredible ability to feel two things at once stereophonically,” the man says. “I can honor and prevail, feel sorrow, feel loss on the topic of September 11th, while at the same time, in the same moment, with the same passion, I can tell you that I never found the World Trade Centers to be that honorable.”
25 years on, Linklater’s emphasis on individuals, their contradictions, and their desires for fulfillment remains compelling, but any ideas of individualism ring hollow—Waking Life so clearly demonstrates that in times of spiritual vacancy, it’s other people that can help fill the void. While the film predates 9/11, Waking Life offers an opportunity to break out of the psychosis brought on by it, to capitalize on the “profound opportunity for reinvention, reprioritization, and new thinking” that the man argues for in Shiva’s Dance Floor. “Behind me here, this might look to you like a hole in the ground, but what it actually is is a delightful, benevolent opportunity for rebirth.” On a broad cultural level, this did not happen in the wake of the attack. But taken today, alongside the daily barrage of world-shattering event after world-shattering event, that opportunity still feels present, the idea of it still as bracing as Ebert found it in October of 2001.
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