By Lilia Santeramo

If Richard Linklater loves one thing, it’s good talk. There are few directors, save for the ones we suspect inspired him, whose films rival Linklater’s in sheer chattiness. In a Linklater film, the plot and action happen primarily within and around unending speech. Waking Life, Linklater’s 2001 foray into animated film, is no different.

The film follows a nameless, desultory young man played by Wiley Wiggins as he navigates a bizarre, existentially fraught dream in which he also happens to be trapped. In the dream, Wiggins encounters a large cast of characters who explain their worldviews, which are often influenced by briefly referenced artists, thinkers, and poets. As the film progresses, it repeatedly uses talk of art as an avenue to reach understanding and awareness.

For Wiggins, it becomes apparent that reaching awareness—of his own dream state, of art itself—is the key to freedom from his seemingly endless, inescapable reverie. Though only a few poets are mentioned in the film, each time they are Wiggins reaches a pivotal moment in his journey out of the dream. Once, as he becomes lucid; and then again, right before he wakes up at the urging of a character who resembles Linklater himself, after that character rants about Yeats’ lover.

Yes, at its worst, Waking Life is name-droppy and unconvincingly “deep.” The film is often indulgent of the musings of stoned teenagers, made more palatable because instead of kids, a contemplative French woman and her lover (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Before Sunrise’s Céline and Jesse) vocalize these ideas as they sit in bed, so it’s, you know, sophisticated. This is the kind of movie Woody Allen might have made if he was a slacker. But Waking Life isn’t just for Dorito-fingered, channel-surfing philosophers who reference artists and intellectuals without bothering to examine their ideas.

The flitting nature of dream logic allows the film to interrogate our interactions with the cultural canon through a unique lens. Though incessant gesturing at various big figures and ideas keeps things shallow and incoherent, the act of directly speaking about art gives the film a perspective about its uses that we should consider.

Take Wiggins’s encounter with the cartoonish Timothy “Speed” Levitch. The real-life Levitch achieved a small amount of notoriety after he was the subject of the documentary The Cruise, which follows his work giving eccentric bus tours. He’s a vivacious, though vaguely troubled writer who, at his day job, relies heavily on the artistic history of New York City to entertain tourists. It isn’t any wonder, then, that in Waking Life Levitch is talking poetry on the Brooklyn Bridge.

On this bridge,” Levitch announces by way of introduction, “Lorca warns: ‘Life is not a dream. Beware, and beware, and beware.’”

The quoted material appears in Federico García Lorca’s distressed, and indeed sleepless poem “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne).” Levitch does not read the poem in its entirety; he cherry-picks lines to impart his own perspective, which is mostly conveyed in amusing nonsense—and Levitch delights in nonsense:

“An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously,” Levitch says. “I do not agree entirely, which is to say that I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived, but the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.”

Levitch, in his own fashion, is echoing Keats on negative capability. There is exhilaration, even romance to be found in uncertainty. Uncertainty maybe, is its own kind of understanding, the visceral “life lived.” And a perfect marriage of uncertainty and understanding could very well be the lived, yet reflective experience of dreaming.

Levitch’s selection of Lorca’s poem also seems quite deliberate and in favor of dreaming. “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)” makes use of conventions of Surrealism, the artistic movement deeply fascinated by dreams and the subconscious, and could be interpreted as pitting the liberation found within dreams against the realities of life. In the poem, the longing for sleep is a universal longing for release, maybe from the restless, alienating urban landscape of New York City, but “ . . . No one, no one / No one sleeps.” Instead, Lorca forces the poem’s inhabitants to endure the nightmarish torture of being awake, illustrating the brutality that results from wakeful, straightlaced thinking and living.

For the surrealists, dreams and the subconscious were liberatory because they helped free the mind from “logical” rules imposed by society and enabled the dreamer to imagine things beyond what was conventional. The movement was explicitly politically radical, and, unsurprisingly, left-wing thinkers of the day were attracted to, and participated in, the movement. Lorca’s antifascist politics and his poetry were not mutually exclusive, and it’s worth noting that André Breton, who penned the manifesto that kicked the surrealist movement into gear, was a poet.

So it follows that the dream state and poetry—perhaps uniquely equipped to convey subconscious thoughts and associations—are privileges, opportunities to imagine more, to become a little wiser, and to enact change. Levitch and Linklater seem to be using Lorca’s poem with these ends in mind as Levitch pushes Wiggins to think differently.

Here’s Levitch: “Lorca, in that same poem, warns that ‘the iguana will bite those who do not dream.’ And, as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream, that is self-awareness.” As the film repeatedly emphasizes, Wiggins must gain lucidity and reach understanding if he wishes to wake up, and Levitch, prone to embracing the fantastic, is well-prepared for the task of helping Wiggins understand his predicament. Wiggins seems only to have to become aware enough of the dream to embrace it.

Ultimately though, the film’s use of the transcendent freedom found through poetry and within the subconscious is not nearly as developed as the artistic and political ethos it evokes by playing with surrealism and quoting Lorca; it’s too fixated on the self rather than the whole of society. It wants to (and does) embrace the liberation we might find in the nonsensical, but the film’s nonsense, as opposed to the nonsense of the surrealists, falls flat because it is the nonsense of underdeveloped ideas, which, because they’re underdeveloped, don’t allow for any deconstruction of the status quo. What exactly is Wiggins being freed to do or think in encountering garbled synopses of artistic thought? Probably nothing.

Yet, Waking Life’s fascination with playfulness and the broadening of one’s thinking through poetry and other artistic mediums shouldn’t be dismissed outright, even if we suspect it contains a great deal of posturing. It is, simply put, a rotoscoped step in the right direction. Perhaps the film even demonstrates an interest—albeit a selfish one—in collectivism through the ideas it floats about situating ourselves within a larger cultural consciousness.

In another scene, Céline and Jesse (Hawke and Delpy) wonder aloud to each other about the nature of intuitive knowledge and the mysteries of its manifestations. The concept of reincarnation, as Céline puts it, is “a poetic expression of what collective memory really is.” She expands and grounds her thought process:

“There was this article by a biochemist I read not long ago, and he was talking about how when a member of a species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on, and this is where we inherit our instincts.” In response, Jesse relays a story about a study that found participants performed better on crossword puzzles that were a day old, and he muses that maybe people performed better simply because the answers were already thought up by scores of people: “It’s like we’re all telepathically sharing our experiences,” he says, as though the collective knowledge of the human race is floating out in the ether.

Wiggins, who sometimes appears in an orange jumpsuit, as though he is currently, or was recently imprisoned (perhaps by his own limited worldview), arrives at an understanding of the unreality he occupies through his interactions with others. They only exist in his mind, yet their perspectives and knowledge— of Sartre, Truffaut, Kirkegaard, and of course, Lorca—assist him in ultimately transcending the dream state he is trapped in.

Maybe this is his inherited cultural knowledge finally starting to set in. He has moments of tapping into intuitive, collective memory that allow him to develop as a human being. Or maybe it’s simply a young person wishing to use his passing knowledge of artists and poets, important to him only because the culture says they should be, to some meaningful end. Like making a movie about a crazy dream that he had, for instance.

Either way, by the end of the film, artistic and maybe even poetic thought lead Wiggins to an awakening. Is it intellectual and spiritual, or only literal? We aren’t quite sure.

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Lilia Santeramo is the editor-in-chief of Backdrop magazine and an alumna of NextGen Journalism, where she produced a multi-media story for Cincinnati’s NPR member station, WVXU.