The Dazed Poetics of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life

July 12, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

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.

Can Mickey Dance?

June 1, 2025.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Sayandev Chatterjee

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2013. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

The jarring shriek of the alarm clock slapped Srinath into wakefulness. Fumbling through the tangled mosquito net, he wrestled with the timepiece, finally silencing its insistent bickering. Delicate strokes of sunlight filtered through the louvered windows, painting soft stripes across his cramped hostel room floor. He lay still, his heart thudding as fragments of last night’s dream clung to his mind like cobwebs on the peeling paint above. It was always the same dream.

The clock read 6:00 a.m. Gupta-ji, the boss, had demanded an early start. Srinath could almost smell the polyester and sweat from the Mickey Mouse suit waiting for him at the store. But first, there would be shelves to stock, floors to mop.

March 4, 2025.Reading time 43 minutes.

Mothers in the World Above and Below

By Abby Horowitz

Featured Art: “Persona-03” by Mateo Galvano

Your mother haunts the hardest; that’s what Selah’s told whenever she starts to whine: why hasn’t she come yet to pick me up?

Her mother haunts the hardest, so Selah is at the care center the whole day long, so long that Ms. Drae takes pity on her and gives her second servings of afternoon snack. The other kids trail after their parents up to the parking lot and off to home and there’s Selah again, all alone in a playground full of nobody, or at least nobody that she can see isn’t it possible that she’s got her own ghosts? Oh, get out of your head and get onto those swings, Ms. Drae tells her; then her eyes sink back down to her phone.

Selah swings, she jumps, she slides. Lady-like, please, Ms. Drae calls when Selah’s robe slips up by her thighs, but Selah ignores her. Let the world see her underwear; if only there were someone to look. She takes a clump of dirt and rubs it onto her leg. Look! she says, running up to Ms. Drae, A bruise! But Ms. Drae only rolls her eyes and shoos her away rather than tell her (again) what of course she already knows: you can’t have bruises if you don’t have blood.

The Strange Situation

November 16, 2023.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Valli Jo Porter

Featured Art by Tristen Luken

I escaped the religion of my youth by moving five hundred miles from Ohio to Virginia. There, I refused to pray as I drifted off to sleep, and I never roused for church on Sunday morning. I lived in a tiny broken-down ranch on a quarter acre lot, a single oak tree in the front yard and the world’s worst neighbor to my side. Wayne Bishop was his name, and he spent his afternoons in his driveway, under the shade of my oak, his feet propped on an upturned milk crate, empty beer cans lined up next to his lawn chair. He looked like a toad with a rosacaed face and giant turned-out lips. He called me over to help with his projects, and each time I’d internally debate just drunk or personality disorder. He’d enlist me to help him cut crown molding or install paneling, then he’d hover and insult my handiwork and calculations while he drank his beer. He was also breathtakingly litigious, prone to staying up all night authoring lawsuits that he asked me to copy edit before he filed. I picked random sentences and inserted commas—he never had enough commas—to placate him, so he didn’t sue me like he did his former employer, every doctor who tried to help him, and his own brother. I always helped because I was lonely, and it seemed prudent to stay on his good side.

Red Skies

October 11, 2023.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Danielle Batalion Ola

Featured Art by Ashura Lewis

Do you remember, Pa, our summer mornings? I woke when you did, most days. No matter how many times I did it, you were always shocked to see me standing in the kitchen, draped in one of your old shirts and an ebbing sleep. You thought it was unnatural to be up so early, for someone so young. “Up already? You get work or what? Go sleep some more, Baby Girl.” But you liked when I stayed. I could tell.

Speak Up

November 28, 2022.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Selected as winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest by Melissa Febos

1.

I dream I am teaching and it is not going well. I still have these dreams though I retired a year ago. Counting grad school, I taught 38 years so this particular nightmare is hardwired into my nervous system. In my usual dream, I am talking, then shouting, at students who are talking to each other and not paying any attention at all—something that never happened in real life, unless a dream counts as life. In this dream, though, it is the students who are yelling at me. I can see their mouths open, their tongues wagging, every one of their white teeth, remarkably straight after years of expensive orthodontia—but it is a silent movie. I touch my ears, a reflexive movement to check if my hearing aids are there. Yes, but somehow they seem to have swollen, tripled in size, and to be plugging my ears like fat kids’ fingers, making sure all I hear is the sounds of my body, heart, lungs, that we hear without using our ears at all.

Critical Insect Studies

April 18, 2020.Reading time 22 minutes.

by Tom Whalen

Featured art: Still Life with Poppy, Insects, and Reptiles by Otto Marseus van Schrieck

One more step and we are out of the circle and have entered the domain, equally delineated and autonomous, of a different species.
—Vladimir Nabokov, “Father’s Butterflies”

My wife departed on the day I began in earnest my Critical Insect Studies. Before this date, I had only jotted down a few thoughts and titles, cut and pasted a few class papers, nothing more, but I was sure, as much as I had ever been sure of anything, basking in my certainty like an oiled blonde in Cannes, that I had found, at age twenty-seven, the subject on whose wings my career would soar from campus to campus, lecture hall to lecture hall around the globe, sometimes Sam coming along, though increasingly, I imagined, taken up with his own concerns. Perhaps we would have had children by then, or new avatars, I didn’t know, or perhaps we would have drifted apart, he wanting nothing to do with me or my fame. Read More

Coyotes

December 13, 2019.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Terri Leker
Winner of the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins

The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.

It was over with Richard, had been since I’d found out about the baby. Anyway, I had come to believe that adultery sounded more illicit than it actually was. Between managing my schedule with Matt and making time to rendezvous with Richard, an affair often seemed more about time management than sexual gratification. I was meticulous with the calendar, but I would have known that the baby was Matt’s regardless, because Richard’s sperm could not locomote. He had told me so early on, while showing me the master bedroom of his faithfully restored North Oakland Victorian. His unexpected disclosure had interrupted my admiration of the exposed brick walls, so unusual for the earthquake-conscious Bay Area. Matt was having dinner just then with friends, thinking I was helping my mother set up her new television (she would be dead within a few months, but we all pretended to be optimists then), so he was eating eggplant parmesan at the Saturn Café as I lay with Richard on his king-sized bed, hearing words like motility and capacitation. Richard’s sober tone had suggested that I might comfort him in his sterility, which I did, if the definition of comfort was a passionate encounter that lasted as long as one might spend unboxing a 48-inch HDTV and connecting it to both Netflix and Hulu. But Matt and I had tried to have a baby for three years, so I took the pregnancy as a sign to recommit myself to my husband, who, predictably, jumped up and down on our unmade bed when I shared the news, attempting, in his white-socked excitement, to pull me up with him, not realizing that doing so might judder the bundle of cells loose, delivering me back to Richard and a childless but aesthetically pleasing life.

The Importance and Depth of “Ohio” in Two Poems by Rita Dove and Ai

January 6, 2019.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Marcus Jackson

Featured Art: Linez and Boxez by Felicity Gunn

In poems, Ohio—as word, as a set of landscapes, as a cradle for psychological, emotional, and cultural exploration—exists with significance and versatility. Derived from the Iroquois word that means “beautiful river,” Ohio, as a name, is vowel wealthy, bookended by o’s, assuring that its mention brings a sonic vitality and depth. Ohio, in terms of topography, is rolling plains, glacial plateaus, Appalachian hills, stretches of bluegrass. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, and its general position on the continent, Ohio has hosted all of the following: major, ancient routes used by Native American tribes to travel and trade; pivotal exchanges between Native American and European fur traders; the ruthlessness and violence brought on by the heightened European demand for exportable goods and by the grueling process of colonization; numerous battles fought during extended, armed confrontations or wars (Pontiac’s Rebellion, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War); hubs and final stops for freedom-seeking slaves along the Underground Railroad; early industrialization; and destinations for African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration. To many poets and readers, the mention or involvement of Ohio can at least subconsciously educe some of the locale’s extensive identity. Looking closely at two poems by Rita Dove and Ai, we will examine a few of the elements and forces that the incorporation of Ohio brings to the texts.

Weanie Tender, PO

October 28, 2018.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Jennifer Christman

Like the dry, hot winds of Santa Ana itself, the sound came in waves. Pop-pop- pop-pop-pop. Weanie Tender didn’t know from where. Weanie Tender didn’t know from what. Staccato bursts of varying lengths and speed, then brief respites. Now, however, is a different story. There’s a constant vibrato. Take any moment—take this moment—Weanie can hear it, by God. Pop-pop-pop-pop- pop. He can feel it. He need only focus his mind to detect what’s on the order of a cosmic palpitation. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Weanie is a low-level PO. He wants to be a detective someday.

“Force’s under attack,” says his partner, Dom, wolfing Chick-n-Minis from his own private 20-tray, steaming up the cruiser. Bag-of-bones Weanie is crumpled in the passenger seat.

“You hear it now?” says Weanie, drawing in a sharp, short breath.

He and Dom are on break outside the Chick-fil-A on Bristol. Weanie can’t sit still lately. He jiggles his legs and wrings his hands, listening, deeply, to what he’s now thinking must be an engine running—that’s it, an engine running rough, like an outboard motor, and snappy, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. But that would require a boat, and water. And the city, the entire county, is landlocked. And the seismic index is low. Weanie checks daily.

Haunting Houses

March 2, 2018.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Jacqueline Doyle

Featured Art: The Customs House at Varengeville by Claude Monet

In the movie I’m watching with my husband, “A Ghost Story,” a woman lies in bed with a lover and tells him a story. “When I was little and we used to move all the time, I’d write these notes and I would fold them up really small. And I would hide them.” “What’d they say?” he asks. “They’re just things I wanted to remember,” she says, “so that if I ever wanted to go back, there’d be a piece of me there waiting.”

We were in elementary school when my best friend moved out of the red house on the lake. She was moving hundreds of miles away, the rooms had been emptied, and we ran all over the house leaving tiny notes about our enduring friendship. There was a door in the upstairs-hall ceiling with a ladder to the attic, where we tucked notes in hidden spaces under the eaves. There was a small door allowing access to the bathroom pipes on the second floor. A dark basement with several rooms and pipes on the ceiling. Our footsteps echoed as we ran up and down stairs.

Regarding Isabelle Huppert

April 29, 2015.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Tom Whalen

Featured Image: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries), 1495-1505

Yesterday as I reread Hubert Hoskin’s translation of C. A. van Peursen’s Leibniz (1966/69), I couldn’t help but think of Isabelle Huppert. As with Leibniz, experience alone cannot account for her performances, but I don’t think, regarding Isabelle Huppert, I need concern myself with eternal truths residing in the mind of God. Judge advocate, nun, prostitute, mother, dressmaker, postal clerk, piano teacher, scientist, abortionist, war bride, writer, hostage, thief—whatever the role or source (Euripides, Diderot, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant, Conrad, James, Zamyatin, Crnjanski, Genet, Bataille, Duras, Highsmith, Bachmann, Rendell, Jim Thompson), energies feed the performances of Isabelle Huppert from without and within.

Have you seen many of her over one hundred films? Retour à la bien-aimée, for example, or Eaux profondes, Pas de scandale, Sans queue ni tête, La séparation? Are you older or younger than Isabelle Huppert?

At the door to the house of Isabelle Huppert one stands as if before a tabernacle of dreams. Have you, too, stood before the tabernacle of Isabelle Huppert, or perhaps even entered its elegant chambers, which others before and after you have also entered? I confess I have not, though I am convinced I can say without equivocation that the house of Isabelle Huppert is capacious, albeit modestly so.