‘Waking Life’ at 20: Richard Linklater’s Psychedelic Exploration Of Perception, Consciousness, and the Fragility of Reality

There comes a point in every young person’s life when they must stay up late with a bud and ask “wait, how do I know what I see as ‘blue’ is what you see as ‘blue’?” Oftentimes this segues into watching The Wizard of Oz timed to Dark Side of the Moon, followed by the ceremonial devouring of pretzel rods. 

But for others, this line of questioning becomes a career path. Some become artists, some become tenured professors, and many end up ranting at whomever will listen at coffee shops and bars. This all can be found in the filmmaking of Richard Linklater, whose more mainstream or awards success came in movies like School of Rock or Boyhood, but whose roots will always be in the free-floating philosophy evident in his first film, Slacker and the psychedelic masterpiece Waking Life, celebrating its 20th anniversary this month.

A decade after the plotless (but scripted) Slacker became an unexpected art house, Linklater returned to the formula of dipping-in on conversations with whacked-out people who might actually be geniuses, staying with them as they go deep about perception, theories of consciousness, and the fragility of reality. But Waking Life upped Slacker’s ante in two important ways. This time there’s at least a smidge of a plot (there’s a main character, a student played by Wiley Wiggins, who is never quite sure if he is dreaming) and the look of the project is something that’s hardly met its match in the “whoa, trippy” department.

Using a next-generation rotoscoping software called Rotoshop, Linklater shot the movie on video (whereas Slacker used 16mm film) and then animated it in ways that are impossible to stop scrutinizing. One minute things look preposterously cartoon-y, but other shots are close to the surface of reality. What this ends up doing (at least for me) is send part of your brain searching for meaning in how “deep” the technique is going for each scene. Perhaps in this we can find clues for an added layer of commentary? Are we supposed to take Professor Eamonn Healy’s impassioned monologue about the evolution of artificial intelligence at face value? Hard to do when his head keeps morphing into a balloon. 

Throughout the film there are moments of beauty (lots of flying set to a score performed by the Tosca Tango Orchestra) and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags. Also: there’s so much raw material for discussion. (What does it mean that Linklater himself is the one that directs the main character on to the street where he may or may not get hit by a car, man?) When our lead character is awakened, he’s just a simple line sketch in black and white. As consciousness rouses him and the blood rushes to his extremities, color fills in, as does definition. But he’s agitated, so there are scratches layered into the reality all around him. One can hit pause at any moment and rev up a lecture with this movie if you wanted to. The characters would want you to. 

Our lead character roams into different conversations with intelligent people, but Linklater balances this with jokes (Steven Prince jawing with a bartender ends in a gunfight; a chimpanzee narrates a film class; local TV channel surfing looks beamed in from outer space) as well as some darkness. At the time of filming, Alex Jones was just a local Austin kook, so watching him get red in the face (really red, thanks to the Rotoshop technique) as he screams into a PA system affixed to his car was just for laughs. Watching now, after the rise of QAnon and the January 6th insurrection, in takes on an entirely different shade. 

Different viewers will select different moments as more insightful, but for me there was one very practical revelation. I did not know that the inability to scrutinize numbers in a dream, like on a clock or phone, was a common phenomenon. Observing this made me feel a lot less crazy. Also, for fans of the Linklater-Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy Before Trilogy, there’s a great little scene that could and should lead to a deep discussion over whether or not it is “canon” to that text. (A Waking Life 2 would demand it!)

Linklater used this unusual animation style a second time, for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves. It being a film about drug addiction and paranoia, it made an awful lot of sense. Then the technique was quickly pounced upon by advertising. This caused some controversy when Earthlink — remember Earthlink? — did their own version around the creator of the software’s back. Then this very specific look receded, and, I suppose, is now something of a hallmark of a very specific time (post-9/11, pre-found footage horror?) and place (the arthouse theater, or your friend’s pad as he says “you gotta check out this DVD.”)

But I have good news! Linklater is rounding out the trilogy. Coming soon to Netflix is a project called Apollo 10 1/2, which the streamer describes as “a space age adventure set against the backdrop of the 1969 Apollo mission to the moon, inspired by Richard Linklater’s childhood.” Waking Life meets Boyhood meets NASA sounds like a perfect formula to me.

RELATED: ‘Slacker’ at 30: Richard Linklater’s Breakthrough Let JFK Truthers, Elderly Anarchists, And UFO Enthusiasts Co-Mingle In Austin

Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets about Phish and Star Trek at @JHoffman.

Where to stream Waking Life