Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Waking Life
2001 · Richard Linklater · Waking Life on Sightlines
Look at Wiley Wiggins's face while somebody else is talking. It barely moves. Everything around it does. The edge of his jaw drifts a little off itself and comes back. A wall behind him breathes. A coffee cup holds its shape for a second and then gives up on it. He is the stillest thing in the frame, and the frame will not stop swimming.
That wobble has a boring technical cause. Bob Sabiston's Rotoshop let an animator draw vector shapes on a handful of keyframes and had the software interpolate the frames in between, which spared the crew the old Fleischer labor of tracing every single frame by hand and left behind a residue: contours that drift and re-settle, because the machine's guess is never quite the artist's mark. It is an artifact. Linklater and Sabiston kept it. Nearly everything good about this film follows from that one decision.
Deleuze has a precise name for what keeping it produces. In most movies, people move themselves. Someone wants something, crosses a room to get it, and the camera goes along. In dreams it runs the other way: the dreamer stands still and the world does the traveling. Deleuze called that the movement of world, and made it the signature of the dream-image, which he was careful to separate from a flashback. A flashback is dated. You can say when it happened and whose memory it is. A dream-image is anchored to nothing you could date — a present surrounded by a widening halo of virtual images that never closes back into an action. Waking Life stages this at the level of the drawn line. Wiggins does walk from one conversation to the next. But inside any given shot, the thing that moves is the world, and it moves because a few hundred hours of somebody else's hand made it move.
The standard dismissal of this film is that it's a lecture series with a screensaver attached. Worth stating plainly, because the Deleuzian reading is what answers it: the screensaver is the argument, and the man who cannot do anything is the story.
Deleuze's central historical claim is that at a certain point cinema produced characters who could no longer act on what they saw. The circuit snapped — perceive a situation, act to change it — and what's left when it snaps is a pure optical and sound situation. You can look. You can listen. There is nothing to do. The character becomes a voyant, a seer. Wiggins is close to a limit case of the type. No goal, no antagonist, no obstacle he could remove by effort. He listens for ninety-nine minutes. His single action in the entire film is a question nobody can answer for him: am I awake?
The shape of the wandering comes straight from Slacker (1991), which handed the camera off from one Austin talker to whoever wandered into frame next. That is Deleuze's dispersive situation in its purest form — many characters, weakly linked, none of them the protagonist — and it is also his balade, the trip that transforms nothing. Slacker ran that structure across a city. Waking Life takes the identical relay and pulls it inside one skull, which changes what the aimlessness means. On the street, a stroll that transforms nothing is a comedy of freedom. Inside a dream you can't exit, it becomes a slow-rising dread.
Sandra Adair's cutting is where the dread lives. A normal cut is a joint: two shots that share a space or a logic, the seam invisible. Deleuze's irrational cut belongs to neither shot. It is a gap with its own value, an AND rather than a then. Here nearly every transition is a false awakening — he wakes, he walks, he is somewhere else, and no causal thread runs backward. Maya Deren built the grammar in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943): thresholds and repetitions that dissolve one scene into the next without a story connecting them. Buñuel and Dalí supplied the other half in Un Chien Andalou (1929) — the non-sequitur delivered with documentary calm. Linklater inherits the calm most of all. Nothing in Waking Life acts spooked by its own impossibility.
For most of its length the film keeps that loose dream circuit. Near the end it tightens. Is he dreaming, dying, already dead? The film will not say, and the refusal isn't coyness. Deleuze's crystal-image is the smallest possible circuit, the point where actual and virtual swap so fast you can't name which is which; the drift into an open sky at the end leaves the dreamer exactly there, released or lost, with no shot available that would settle it. The undecidable becomes the content.
Which is why the talk isn't decoration either. Deleuze's late cinema thinks rather than depicts — the screen as a brain rather than a window. Linklater populates his with real people. Most of the speakers are writers, academics, filmmakers and Austin locals delivering their own ideas, so what we hear is testimony rather than dialogue: people caught in the act of legending themselves, which Deleuze calls fabulation. Hawke and Delpy do the Before Sunrise register in a bed with no movie around it. Soderbergh tells a story about Billy Wilder. And because every segment went to a different animator, each encounter arrives in a different line quality, palette and degree of abstraction — an image you have to read rather than simply see, authored by a different region of the dreaming mind. Glover Gill's tango, played by the Tosca Tango Orchestra, is what keeps all of this from becoming a seminar. It sways. It gives the ideas a body and a bittersweet undertow.
What did it change? Practically, it inverted the order of animation: shoot cheap and handheld on consumer DV first, catch real performance, then spend the year painting. Cost moved out of the shoot and into post-production labor, which made animation hospitable to improvisation for the first time. Fleischer's rotoscope (Gulliver's Travels, 1939) traced painted figures over projected footage; American Pop (1981) proved feature rotoscope could carry adult material; Sabiston's short Snack and Drink (1999) proved the interpolation worked; Waking Life scaled it to a feature, and A Scanner Darkly (2006) took the same tool somewhere colder, where the wobble hardens into paranoia. Artistically, the achievement is rarer. Most philosophical films stage arguments as drama and hope the drama carries the thought. Linklater made the image itself unable to hold still, and let the instability do the philosophy.
So watch it again, and don't track the arguments. Track his stillness against the room's refusal to be still, and keep asking which of the two is doing the moving. Then take the question outside with you. If the world moves and you don't, are you dreaming — or is that simply what being awake and paying attention feels like?
Concepts in play
- movement of world — Wiley Wiggins stands or sits nearly motionless listening while the rotoscoped surface around him undulates — contours drifting, backgrounds refusing to stay fixed; the animation, not the character, supplies the motion in any given shot
- onirosign / dream-image — Nested dream-strata with no datable memory behind them: the protagonist drifts through encounters that turn out to be layers of a dream he cannot wake from, none of them a flashback to a former present
- pure optical & sound situations — A plotless, dialogue-driven odyssey with no antagonist and no goal, in which the protagonist can only look and listen as speakers deliver monologues on free will, death and lucidity
- voyant / the seer — Wiggins is 'a mostly silent, watchful presence who listens more than he speaks,' whose only arc is accumulating unease at his own inability to escape
- dispersive situation — The baton-passing relay inherited wholesale from Slacker (1991) — an enormous ensemble of weakly linked speakers, no one of them a protagonist, each abandoned for the next
- the balade / trip that transforms nothing — An 'essayistic and picaresque' structure: a chain of episodes linked only by the dreamer's wandering, with 'no antagonist, no goal, no rising action'
- interstice / the irrational cut — Sandra Adair's transitions 'mimic the logic of dreams — the protagonist wakes, walks, and finds himself in a new scene,' so cuts work as thresholds between dream-strata rather than continuity edits; the grammar descends from Meshes of the Afternoon and Un Chien Andalou
- hyalosign / crystal-image — The faint mystery spine — is he dreaming, dying, dead? — is resolved into ambiguity rather than revelation, with waking and dreaming becoming indiscernible rather than sorted out
- the unthought / the undecidable — The ending: the dreamer floating upward into an open sky, 'released or lost,' with the film declining any image that would settle which
- the image of thought — A feature-length talk film whose primary sonic content is 'the human voice thinking aloud' — the dreamscape structured as a mind rather than a place, each encounter a region of it
- acte de parole / the legending voice — Speakers are largely non-professionals — writers, academics, filmmakers, Austin locals — delivering their own ideas as monologue rather than dramatic dialogue
- fabulation / legending — 'This blurs the line between performance and testimony': real intellectual voices playing versions of themselves, including Hawke and Delpy reprising their Before Sunrise register and Soderbergh telling a Billy Wilder story
- the readable image — Each segment assigned to a different animator, so line quality, colour and degree of abstraction shift encounter to encounter — an image whose surface must be deciphered rather than simply read through to the action