Buddhists, Existentialists, and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life

douglas mann 1

Introduction: What If Life Were Just a Dream?

richard linkl aters 2001 film waking life is all about dreaming and how we can sometimes lucidly control our dreams. Yet it is also about some broad philosophical issues, including one of the oldest philosophical conundrums, the distinction between appearance and reality. When Ren Descartes sat at his stove and meditated on the world and on whether an evil demon controlled everything he perceived, he wondered, whats more real, dreams or waking life? The diverse collection of characters in Linklaters lm asks the same question. Yet they ask it not just in a literal sense, but also as a metaphor for the nature of modern culture and for the human condition as a wholein what ways do we fall asleep even while awake? How can we lead a life that is more awake, more aware of people and things, more authentic? The lm provides the outlines of three wake-up calls to three more-or-less separate ways in which we sleep too easily. This issue is not new. It goes all the way back to Platos Allegory of the Cave: what if you were chained in a dimly lit cave your whole life, where you saw only the shadows of real things passing by the entrance to your cave reected on its back wall? Suddenly you are free and come

dougl as mann teaches media studies and popular culture at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada, and is the author of Structural Idealism, Philosophy: A New Introduction and Understanding Society.

into the sunlight. Would you recognize this new world as more real than your cave world? And would you be able to convince those still enchained in the cave that there was a greater world outside their dwelling? Would you be able, in Platos terms, to wake up to reality? This whole idea of waking up is a key idea in a number of philosophies explored in the lm. In ancient Eastern philosophythe Indian Vedanta philosophy of the Upanishads, Taoism, and Buddhismthe key to waking up is enlightenment and a correct understanding of the relation of the self to the external world. In existentialism, we have to wake up to our personal freedom and our responsibility for creating our own selves and lives. And in the situationism of Guy Debord and others, we have to wake up from the sugar-coated spell of consumer society. The lm was made by rst lming live action with a digital video camera and then transferring the video to computers and rotoscoping (coloring over) the images to turn them into animation. Thirty different artists were involved in the process, all with different styles. Rotoscoping has been used beforeas early as Disneys 1937 Snow White and several decades later in Ralph Bakshis The Lord of the Rings and American Pop. It gives a owing, surreal, dreamlike quality to much of the lm, surely Linklaters intention. And although the lm is divided into thirty-four more or less distinct shorts, they are linked together by the constant presence of the dreamer, Wiley Wiggins, who also acted in Linklaters Dazed and Confused. In addition, the shorts are linked by most of them taking place in Linklaters hometown of Austin,
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Texas, and by thematic links between the ideas presented in adjacent scenes. If one were to describe the visual style in a single word, that word would be instability. In some scenes, we see a fairly stable human gure, often Wiley, surrounded by a uid, undulating background of objects, buildings, and other characters. In others, the very components of human bodies and faces are out of sync with each other: a head remains stationary as its eyes and mouth move back and forth; elements of clothing change their shape or substance; a characters hair waves up and down without any evidence of windy weather elsewhere in the scene. The style of animation also changes signicantly from scene to scene, sometimes reecting the topic being discussed (e.g., angry political rants tend to feature sharp colors and solid black lines), and in other cases merely to provide a contrast with preceding and succeeding scenes. A good example of this can be seen in the sequence of scenes 10 to 13 (see the table). In 10 we see the use of harsh colors and a jagged watercolor-type style as Alex Jones rants over a loudspeaker attached to his car; this is followed in 11 by a soft painted style reminiscent of oil portraits as Otto Hoffman afrms the value of everyday life. Scene 12 jars us again as the animation switches to a simple cartoony style with splashes of color and heavy black outlines. Finally, in scene 13, we see a simple painted style with subdued outlines as two women talk about aging. These contrasts serve to emphasize the fragmentation of Wileys experience of events, as well as the real diversity of characters and ideas in the lm. Lastly, in some places the rotoscoping presents a realistic view of the world, without adding any extra iconography, whereas in others it adds surreal cartoons that illustrate ideas being discussed or stories being told by characters in the scene. Specically, scenes 4, 9, 17, 25, and 33 all feature the sudden appearance of surreal icons such as brain waves, dancing molecules, and stars that help to give shape to the sometimes rather abstract arguments of the speakers in each. These cartoons enliven some of the more didactic discourses
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being delivered. The overall effect of the owing instability of the animation is to make it clear that all the experiences Wiley has in his seeming waking life are in fact events in a lucid dream, none of them having any tangible reality. It underlines Linklaters notion that a life not fully lived can become one long waking dream. To help readers understand the structure of the lm and to keep track of what is happening in each of its scenes, I have named and outlined each scene in the accompanying table. Each scene has been titled (using titles provided by the DVD track list where feasible), briey described, and situated in terms of the main philosophical ideas found in them. I have also indicated which ones I consider to be axial scenes when it comes to a philosophical understanding of the lm along the lines set out in this article. As noted, the central issue in the lm is dreaming. The idea of lucid dreaming, of knowing that you are dreaming and thus being able to exert some control over your dreams, has been explored by dream researcher Stephen Laberge of the Lucidity Institute, whose ideas are alluded to in the lm. The rst scene of the lm, Dream Is Destiny, features Wiley as a child playing with a young girl outside a house. They are making an origami fortune teller, which when they open it up tells them dream is destiny. Wiley then walks over to a car, grabs its handle, and starts to oat away. We return to this locale in the very last scene in the lm, when Wiley oats away once again. We get the sense from the way the lm is framed by these two scenes that in the dream world, time is an illusionWileys present and past mix together fairly seamlessly. More obviously, we realize from these scenes and from the unstable style of animation throughout that the whole lm is a lucid dream, one that Wiley can control only in part. In scene 24, The Human Ant Colony, Wiley is stopped by performance artist Tiana Hux, who engages him in a fairly long conversation on a variety of subjects (I return to this important scene a couple of more times in this article). Notably, the animator has given the scene the look of a Picasso or Matisse painting with a hint
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Scene in Film 1. Dream Is Destiny

What Its About A child dreams of playing with origami fortune teller (dream is destiny), then oats away, touching a car handle. Wiley as a young man arrives in town on a train, sees an attractive girl (Martha Banda). An orchestra plays a tango. Bill Wise picks up Wiley in his boat car, telling him to go with the ow. He is in a state of constant departure. Random choices important. Linklater is with them. Wiley is hit by car, awakens in black and white in his bed, then color. At home? Philosopher Robert C. Solomon defends existentialism against the socially constructed, fragmented self of postmodernism: its your life to create. Kim Krizan tells Wiley that words are inert, dead symbols. At rst they were survival tactics. They try to help us transcend our isolation, allow for spiritual communion. How to communicate love. Eamonn Healy, a chemistry professor, predicts the evolution of a neohuman manifesting truth, loyalty, justice, freedom. The information age makes evolution an active process. In bed, Wiley sees distorted numbers on his digital clock. Flies over rooftops and landscapes painted like watercolors. Journalist J. C. Shakespeare rants about human self-destruction and the media making us passive observers; he sets re to himself like the Vietnamese Buddhist monk in 1963. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke muse in bed about dreaming and multiple consciousnesses, death, collective memory, the simultaneity of scientic discoveries, and telepathic sharing of lives. Wiley oats over rooftops once again. Prisoner swears revenge against his captors. He is trapped in his self-created hell, like Sartres characters in No Exit. David Sosa, physics professor, discusses free will in Augustine and Aquinas and how it is compromised by modern physics. Alex Jones, radical broadcaster, rants over a loudspeaker about how political systems of control turn us into slaves. We willingly give up our sovereignty. Otto Hoffman, a Quaker, wants us to be free from nothingness, to say yes to one instant and thus to all existence. Aklilu Gebrewold, African American writer, speaks of liminal experiences, radical subjectivity, and the great moment.

Philosophical Themes Dreaming vs. reality

Interlude

2. Anchors Aweigh (The Boatisattva) AXIAL SCENE

Buddhism Taoism

Interlude 3. Condemned to Be Free AXIAL SCENE

Existentialism (especially Sartre on freedom) Vedanta Situationism

4. Signier and Signied

5. Neohuman Evolution

[neo-Existentialism]

Interlude

6. Self-Immolation

Situationism Existentialism

7. Collective Memory

Taoism Tibetan Buddhism Dreaming Vedanta

Interlude 8. The Prisoner

[Existentialism]

9. Free Will and Physics

Existentialism

10. Systems of Control

Situationism

11. Say Yes to Existence

12. Liminal Experiences

Buddhism Existentialism (Nietzsches love of fate) Vedanta Situationism

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Scene in Film 13. The Aging Paradox

What Its About Carol Dawson, novelist, and Lisa Moore, English professor, speak of feeling freer as they age and of the ction of personal identity. A chimp speaks of subversive micro-societies and the possibilities of art while screening a rock performance and a showing of Kurosawas lm Dreams. Louis Mackey, a philosophy professor, laments peoples fear and laziness, their inability to reach their true potentials. History as a futile addition of zeroes. Violet Nichols asks Alex Nixon what the story is he is writing; it is just gestures, moments, eeting emotions, he says. Steven Prince tells a bartender a story about why he treasures his right to bear arms. He shoots the barkeep, who shoots him in return. Blood ows. Wiley wakes up in bed, leaves phone message about his dream. Clips on television: a man talks of the awed reality of the present; Mary McBay speaks of the lucid dream state reached by sorcerers, shamans; man talks of the narrowness of the single ego. Three men: Jason Hodge (as an oneironaut) on how waking and dreaming perceptions are the same; Guy Forsyth wants to combine waking and dreaming abilities; John Christensen says fun rules. Wiley oats over rooftops to a cinema. Caveh Zahedi (on the movie screen) talks about lm allowing us to see holy moments (Andr Bazin saw God as reality, lm as presenting God). He and David Jewell have such a moment. Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt, two others want to rupture the spell of the consumer society, interrupt continuum of everyday life. Mr. Debord discusses not working. A man pops out of a train car and tells Wiley he is a dreamer and that it is the most exciting time to be alive: dont be bored. Ryan Power, an autistic kid, tells Wiley that 1,000 years is but an instant, to build beautiful artifacts, feel joy, sorrow, etc. Tiana Hux, performance artist, compels Wiley to communicate with her, rejecting the ant autopilot most of us use every day. Wants real human moments. In lucid dreams we are in control. Mad poet/tour guide Timothy Speed Levitch speaks of the ongoing wow, Lorcas poems; says that we are the authors of our lives, that life understood is life lived. Short scene: Steve Brudniak, artist, says the person you are in a dream is not your real self you have not yet met yourself.

Philosophical Themes Buddhism

14. Noise and Silence

Situationism

15. The Overman

Nietzsche on the overman (Existentialism) [Buddhism] [Postmodernism, Buddhism] Bad Existentialism1

16. Whats the Story?

17. The Right to Bear Arms

Interlude 18. Lucid Dreams

Dreaming [Buddhism]

19. Dreamers Muse

Dreaming

Interlude 20. The Holy Moment

Bazin [Vedanta] [Situationism] Situationism

21. Society Is a Fraud AXIAL SCENE

22. The Train Arrives

23. One Thousand Years

24. The Human Ant Colony AXIAL SCENE

Dreaming Buddhism Situationism Vedanta Taoism [Situationism] Situationism Dreaming Vedanta Buddhism Existentialism Situationism Buddhism Dreaming [Buddhism]

25. The Ongoing Wow AXIAL SCENE

26. Dream Self

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Scene in Film Interlude

What Its About Marta Banda asks, remember me? Kisses Wiley in sensually surrealist style. He wakes up, but digital numbers fuzzy! TV: Catholic puppet speaks of heaven and hell; Steven Soderbergh tells joke about Billy Wilder and Louis Malle; Mary McBay discusses post-death dream body. Short scene: man on the street says that as pattern gets more intricate, being swept along is no longer enough. Bill Wise returns as convenience store clerk (denies his other role) bemoaning customer who explodes burritos in his microwave. Mona Lee, actress, sees the self as a logical structure. Life was raging all around her, and every moment was magical. Loves all people. Short scene: an elderly woman draws Wileys portrait in a garden. Short scene. Louis Black: Kierkegaards last words were, Sweep me up. Orchestra from earlier in lm plays a tango; dancers dance. Linklater plays pinball, tells Wiley about Philip K. Dick story coming true in his life, dream of Lady Gregory in Land of Dead: there is only one instant; it is right now. God invites us into eternity. There is only one story: moving from the no to the yes. Wiley wakes up, walks down street on beautiful day, returns to house and car from scene 1, begins to oat again.

Philosophical Themes

27. Channel Surng

Dreaming

28. Swept Along

Existentialism (leap of faith) Existentialism (denial of personal responsibility) Buddhism

29. Exploding Burritos

30. Every Moment Is Magical

31. Garden and Portrait 32. Sweep Me Up 33. The Tango of Yes

Taoism Existentialism Dreaming Vedanta Nietzsches Existentialism

34. Wake Up!

Dreaming, Vedanta, Taoism

of German expressionismthe characters have oversized eyes as in Les Desmoiselles dAvignon; the background is primitivist and abstract and full of jagged edges. The jagged cubo-expressionism of the scene jolts us into paying attention to Huxs happening, to the encounter of souls amid the lonely crowds. Wiley asks her directly, what is it like to be a character in a dream? She avoids answering the question but does tell him that given the fact that he is dreaming, he can do whatever he wants. You have so many options, and thats what life is about, she says. So by revealing the fact that Wiley is dreaming, Linklater brings up the question of human freedom and indirectly that of authenticity. Its up to you to choose what you want to do with your life, he in effect says, so dont wait around for others to make your choices for you. It is up to you how lucid your dream-life is. We get further evidence of the power of the
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dream state in scene 19, Dreamers Muse, where Wiley visits three men in a white room. The rst one, Jason Hodge, explains to Wiley that our brain chemistry inhibited hallucinations early in our evolutionary development so that we did not confuse images of predators with real ones. But in dreams this inhibition is lifted, and we are free to have hallucinations, which from the point of view of brain chemistry are no more or less real than our waking perceptions. This becomes important when the second man in the white room, Guy Forsyth, explains that the trick is to combine your waking, rational abilities with the innite possibilities of your dreams, because if you can do that, you can do anything. Once again, dreaming is related to freedom and creativity. But this time, there is an evolutionary imperative mixed in to explain the limitations of waking life as compared to the freedom of the dream worldto survive, we had
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to learn to distinguish the dream world from the waking world. Throughout this scene the backgrounds and objects in the sparsely furnished room are undulating and shifting positions, emphasizing the fact that Wiley has entered a particularly dreamy territory here. The actual idea of lucid dreaming is briey mentioned by an elderly lady seen on a television show that Wiley watches briey in scene 18, Lucid Dreams. She links lucid dreaming to a venerable tradition of sorcerers, shamans, and other visionaries, who were able to control their dreams. Scene 27, Channel Surng, nds Wiley back in front of his television. The woman reappears, suggesting that perhaps after we die, our consciousness continues in a dream body, never again waking. This suggestion is followed up in key scene 33, The Tango of Yes, where Linklater plays pinball as he talks to Wiley. He reveals a dream he himself had of Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeatss patron, in the Land of the Dead. In the dream he learns that God poses a question to all of us when we dream: do we want to join him in eternity or return to waking life? We live our lives constantly saying no to Gods question, until we eventually say yes and shufe off the mortal coil. Yet it is important to note that Linklater is eager to leave the putrid-smelling Land of the Dead, to say no to eternity at least this time, and to return to waking life. He also tells Wiley that it is easy to wake up, waving his hands over his eyes in a sort of sorcerers spell. Yet Wiley winds up waking into just another level of his lucid dream, ending the movie.

Upanishads and later systematized by thinkers such as Shankara.3 The Vedantists argued that Atman is Brahman, and Brahman is Atmanthe soul is the universe, and the universe is contained in every soul. There is only one reality, which we can call God if we like, and which is represented by Aum, the sacred syllable. They also believed that bad karma can trap us in the senses and the physical body and that we must seek release from a narrow view of the self as physical and individual, to enlighten our consciousness to our connection to all things. The Upanishads argue that there is a higher self that watches over the more mundane self caught up in the world of the senses and the cycle of rebirth. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad puts it this way:
It is said of these states of consciousness that in the dreaming state, where one is sleeping, the shining Self, who never dreams, who is ever awake, watches by his own light the dreams woven out of past deeds and present desires. In the dream state, when one is sleeping, the shining Self keeps the body alive with the vital force of prana, and wanders wherever he wills. (Easwaran 4445)

First Wake-Up Call: Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism, and the Reality of the Now
Our rst wake-up call is that from attachment to the past, to the ego as an individual and unconnected entity, and to material things over the spiritual unity of the universe. This call awakens us to our connection to everything around us and to a meaningful life.2 The rst of three themes taken from Eastern philosophy has to with Vedanta, that is, ancient Indian thought rst presented in the
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More systematically, the ancient writers of the Upanishads argued that there are in fact four levels of consciousness and that the dream state is higher than that experienced in waking life (though there are two higher states still). The Mandukya Upanishad (Easwaran 6061) argues that these four levels of consciousness are (1) our waking awareness of the external world, (2) the dream state, (3) a dreamless sleep, and (4) a superconscious state where we use neither our senses nor our intellect. This fourth state, turiya in Sanskrit, is where we are one with Brahman. It is the shining self referred to previously. Shankara argued that Brahman is the one absolute reality that underlies all external appearances. Further, he noted that just as dream objects seem unreal only when we wake up and experience them with our waking consciousness, when we wake up to the higher reality of

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Brahman, we see ordinary sense experiences as a sort of dream. Only Brahman is real. We may see a rope at a distance and think it is a snake, but when we view it close-up, we realize our ignorance. Our belief in the ultimate reality of normal waking life is a similar sort of ignorance (Koller and Koller 77). We see these ideas in several scenes. Most fundamentally, Wileys dream self wanders wherever he wills, to quote the Upanishads. He oats in and out of new situations, meeting a wide variety of people in his dream wanderings. We also get a clear sense of how ordinary consciousness puts off communion with the wholeour Atman under normal conditions is unaware of Brahman. In Scene 4, Signier and Signied, Kim Krizan (co-screenwriter of Linklaters earlier lm After Sunrise) argues that words were designed to transcend our alienation from each other but are in reality dead and inert symbols. Yet if we can use them to truly communicate, to achieve spiritual communion, we can free our consciousness. She says that this sense of spiritual communion is what we live for. This could well be the Vedantist notion of turiya, the highest state of consciousness. The animation gives shape to Krizans explanation of how we understand each others words by showing a cartoon of the word love becoming a wisp of smoke and entering the Byzantine conduits of a hearers brain, possibly leading to such a communion. Hints of the unity of Atman with Brahman appear in several other places in the lm. In scene 12, Liminal Experiences, Aklilu Gebrewold speaks of liminal experiences becoming more frequent and of a radical subjectivity opening itself to a vast objectivity, a moment that contains the whole universe, a very Vedantist turn of phrase. In scene 23, One Thousand Years, Ryan Power, an autistic thirteen-year-old, says that 1,000 years is but an instant, implying that time is unreal when seen from some higher perspective. And scene 20, The Holy Moment, although ostensibly about Andr Bazins theory of the cinema, echoes Vedantist ideas: when the camera captures a moment of reality, it is capturing God because God is in all things. We
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actually see Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell become human-shaped clouds in a bright blue sky, as if becoming one with Brahman. If Shankara were a lm director, this is surely something he would have understood. To clinch the connection, in scene 33, The Tango of Yes, Linklater himself says that in his dream of Lady Gregory, she told him that theres only one instant, and its right now, and its eternity: in other words, Atman is Brahman. And there is only one storydo you say no or yes to Gods invitation to enter eternity? Here is yet more evidence for the presence of the Vedantist idea of cosmic monism in the lm. Our second Eastern philosophy, Taoism, is powered by its belief in the Tao, or the Way, which is natural, spontaneous, and balanced. It is a mysterious universal force underlying all of nature that cannot be precisely named. Lao Tzu starts the Tao Te Ching with an attempt at describing it:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery. (Tao Te Ching 1, Feng translation)

Water is an important Taoist metaphor: though soft, it can wear down the hardest rock. The metaphor of water wearing down rock is part of the general Taoist idea that suppleness and not striving can overcome strength over time:
Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water, Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better; It has no equal. (Tao Te Ching 78)

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The softest thing in the universe Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe. (Tao Te Ching 43)

Taoists advocate wu wei, which is literally nonaction, but means more generally spontaneous or natural action. Following this principle allows us to live in peace with nature and to nd tranquillity. The Taoists see the universe as held together by chi: breath or life energy. It is in constant ux, balanced by the Tao. The self has no xed identityas in Buddhism, it is constantly changing, constantly owing. We should live in the moment, and not be overcome by our desires. Too much attachment breeds unhappiness:
He who is attached to things will suffer much. He who saves will suffer heavy loss. A contented man is never disappointed. (Tao Te Ching 44)

Also connected with Taoism is the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, which contains a method of divining the future, and the idea that the universe is balanced between yin and yang, the female and male principles. We see Taoism in several places in Waking Life. In scene 2, Anchors Aweigh, the Boatisattva Bill Wise advises Wiley to go with the ow, a Taoist metaphor rendered into modern language. In fact, the whole oddness of the image of a boat driving down a city street reinforces the watery nature of the start of Wileys journey. The scene also evokes the I Ching when Bill Wise tells Wiley that even if he makes a random choice as to his destination, that choice will determine his fate. Wileys choice is not too natural, for after he debarks from the boat car, he gets run over and wakes into another dream. Scene 7, Collective Memory, nds Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in bed. Delpy says that she sometimes thinks she is observing her life from the perspective of an old woman, looking back on her life. Hawke muses that a second of dream consciousness could be equivalent to whole minutes of waking life. These musings

hint at the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzus paradoxes concerning appearance and reality and his notion that perspective is always relativethe way something appears to you might be quite different from the way it appears to me. He illustrated this idea with a story: he once woke up from a dream of being a buttery but could not decide whether he was a man who dreamed he was a buttery or a buttery dreaming he was a man. Similarly, this scene poses the following riddle: is Delpy the old woman dreaming of her lost youth or the young woman dreaming of some future state? Scene 31, Garden and Portrait, is a wordless one where we see a small waterfall owing over rocks and emptying into a peaceful pool of water. In the pool we see goldsh. A cat prowls around its edge. In this very harmonious Taoist garden, an old woman is drawing portraits, showing Wiley a sketch she has done of him at the end. This brief scene is doubly Taoist: it pictures natural harmony and does so without naming it, without words. The colors of this scene are rich, its style hinting vaguely at the late impressionism of Monet and Seurat, two artists who painted nature with a denite Taoist calm. The main Eastern inuence on Waking Life is Buddhism. The Buddha was the Awakened One. He believed that all life was suffering, but this could be limited by limiting our cravings or desires. We suffer because we are too attached to the past, the future, others, material things, and ourselves as unchanging entities. Buddhism asks us to wake up from our false belief in and attachment to the permanence of things, including the permanence of the individual ego, and to embrace the reality of the now. A key Buddhist concept is interdependent arising, sometimes referred to as dependent origination. It means simply that everything is connected. One of the reasons we experience dukkha, or suffering, is our refusal to see the interconnected and ever-changing nature of things. The self is always in ux. Nothing is permanent: it is empty, sunyata, to borrow Nagarjunas term. Enlightenment, or nirvana, can come only once we let go of our attachment
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to the permanence of the self, at least the self as a xed entity. One way to do this is by practicing mindfulness, by being aware of the reality all around us. This is especially important because our karma is always ebbing and owing, so being mindful of the effects of our actions on others is especially important for the Buddhist. Mahayana Buddhism later introduced the idea of a Bodhisattva, or spiritual guide, to help us reach enlightenment. The Bodhisattva compassionately puts off nirvana so that he or she can remain in the world of the senses and help others. Waking Life starts with a Bodhisattva helping Wiley on his way. In scene 2, Anchors Aweigh, Bill Wise appears in his boat car to act as Wileys boatisattva, his spiritual guide at the start of his lucid dream. Interestingly, Linklater himself is also in the car. Wise says he is in a state of constant departure, always in ux, always ready to ship out. Naturally, the idea of being in a state of constant departure is the Buddhist notion of the self: never xed, always in ux. The boat car is more metaphor than aquatic vehicle, especially given the fact that it is being driven down a highway. In scene 11, Say Yes to Existence, Otto Hoffman, a Quaker, asks us to liberate ourselves from the negative and to say yes to one instant and thus to all existence. In other words, we should live in the now and not be attached to the past or possible futures. This message is delivered in a scene with a gentle painterly style, highlighting its reective quality. Hoffmans point is reinforced in scene 22, The Train Arrives, when David Martinez debarks from a train and tells Wiley not to be bored because this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. The reality of the now comes up a third time in scene 25, The Ongoing Wow, where Timothy Speed Levitch, a wild and wacky New York poet and tour guide, tells Wiley that the ongoing WOW is happening right now and that life understood is life lived. This scene is rotoscoped with psychedelic colors and patterns, stars oating in the air, and an exploding hairdo on Levitch that reminds one of a famous
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1960s Bob Dylan poster. The wow of the now is pictured as a real happening, a truly fun situation, with cartoon clowns and stars magically owing from Levitchs manic gestures like sparkles from a sorcerers wand. It is an important scene because all three of our major themes Buddhism, existentialism, and situationism are mixed together in Levitchs mad rant. Be that as it may, we get repeated reminders from Linklaters characters of the need to be aware of the reality of the present instant, the ongoing wow of the now, a central tenet of Buddhism. Throughout the lm, Wiley is asked to pay attention to and be mindful of the swirl of experience going on around him. The fact that things around him are actually undulating and swirling punctuates the lms ontology with a parallel visual aesthetic. The idea of mindfulness is perhaps indicated by the appearance of a beautiful young woman in the bus station at the beginning of scene 2 and then again in scene 26, when she asks if he remembers her (he says he does not). Her kind face is a reminder to Wiley to focus his compassion on his immediate world and not on distant people and things. Scene 24, The Human Ant Colony, follows up on this theme. Tiana Hux confronts Wiley with the need to be awake to the reality of all encounters, to practice mindfulness. She tells him that she does not want to wander around on ant autopilot all the time, but wants instead some real human moments. Wiley confesses that he has been on zombie autopilot a lot lately, recounting the D. H. Lawrence story of two people meeting on a road and deciding to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls. So the reality of the ongoing wow requires this sort of confrontation, a mindfulness of the existence of the other. This scene also evokes the connectedness of all things as Wiley tries to understand how he, as a supposedly separate individual, can lucidly dream up characters such as Hux and her jarring ideas. This is accentuated by the highly stylized, semi-cubist animation in the scene, which jolts us away from the realm of the real and the everyday. In scene 13, The Aging Paradox, two womenCarol Dawson, a novelist, and Lisa
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Moore, an English professordiscuss the aging paradox. As they get older, they feel they have more time, not being attached to the rigid goals of their youth. As young women they felt an eager desperation to reach a plateau in their lives somewhere in their thirties. Yet when they got there, this desperation evaporated, and they felt a greater freedom. They also discuss how we have to use things such as old photos to construct an identity that links our present to our past selves, even though this identity is essentially a ction. In fact, our cells regenerate every seven years, so we shed off the skin of several selves in the course of a lifetime. Moore and Dawson have seemingly thrown off their attachments to an illusory future and to the xed nature of their selves. We see further Buddhist themes in scene 30, when Mona Lee says that our self is just a logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions, and that in times past, life was raging all around her, and every moment was magical. Lastly, scene 7 makes a brief allusion to the ideas of reincarnation and collective memory found in Tibetan Buddhism. Julie Delpy dismisses reincarnation as a real metaphysical possibility because with so many new people in the world over the last forty years, it is difcult to gure out where all these new souls came from. However, she sees reincarnation as a poetic expression of something that is more substantial: collective memory. Ethan Hawke offers as evidence of collective memory a study that showed when people were given day-old New York Times crossword puzzles, their collective scores went up 20 percent, even though they had never seen the puzzles before. Why? Because others around them had seen these puzzles and had communicated their solutions to the test group via some sort of collective consciousness. So our rst wake-up call ends with the Buddhist notions of the reality of the now, of the changing self, and of the need for mindfulness. Ironically, the Buddhist idea of a self constantly in ux contradicts the much more substantial Vedantist self, which is one with Brahman. Yet Linklater has allowed this contradiction to
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stand in his lm, seemingly embracing both sides of the dialectic at once.

Second Wake-Up Call: Existentialism and the Call to Freedom

The second wake up call in Waking Life comes from existentialism, especially Jean-Paul Sartres notions that we are condemned to be free and that if we try to pretend that we do not have this freedom, we are living in bad faith. Sartre distinguished in-itself physical being, such as that of rocks, which have no consciousness and thus no freedom, from for-itself conscious being, which we human beings have. As for-itself beings, we are fundamentally free to make our own choices, to chart our own course in life. Brute matter may frustrate our plans, yet we always have a choice. We are thrown into this world, and it is up to us to do the best job we can at creating our selves, much as an artist strives to paint an evocative painting or a sculptor chisels away at a mass of rock to create a compelling statue. In fact, in the second scene, Anchors Aweigh, Bill Wise makes this explicit: he tells Wiley that we come to this planet with various crayon boxes, but what really matters is what you do with the crayons, the colors, that youre given. For Sartre, every time we make an excuse for not doing something we desire or feel obligated to do, we are living in bad faith. On the other side, if we blindly follow the dictates of social custom or the commands of others and refuse to take responsibility for our actions, we are once again in bad faith. Because we are responsible for creating our own actions, we are responsible for creating our selves. We need to wake up to the reality of this act of creation, of our personal freedom. So the wake-up call here is to freedom, to the acceptance of a transcendent being-for-itself that is not enchained by the grimy materialism of the body or by the slightly less grimy socialization of our economic and social roles. The key scene here is scene 3, Condemned to Be Free, when Wiley Wiggins, our hero, visits Robert C. Solomon, an important commenjournal of film and video 62. 4 / winter 2010
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tator on and champion of existential thought. He does not like the socially constructed and fragmented self of the postmodernists: this just opens up a whole world of excuses. What we do in our lives does make a difference. In Solomons own words,
[Solomon speaking in the classroom] . . . The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion, or historical curiosity, is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. Im afraid were losing the real virtues of living life passionately, in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if its a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. The one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life, so much as a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it. Its like, your life is yours to create . . . [Solomon and Wiley walking] Ive read the postmodernists with some interest, even admiration. But when I read them, I always have this awful, nagging feeling like something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a conuence of forces, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, hes not talking about something abstract. Hes not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. Its something very concrete; its you and me talking, making decisions, doing things and taking the consequences. (Waking Life, scene 3)

our actions. Given a Whiggish theory of history, one might think that the more recent (historically speaking) postmodernists, with their socially constructed view of the self, would trump the old-fashioned existentialist view of the self as transcendental and fundamentally free. But not so for Solomon and, one would imagine, Linklater. The fat lady has yet to sing in the arena of personal responsibility. Matter and social roles are tests of our freedom: do we transcend them, or do we surrender to in-itself being, becoming moving blobs of esh and bones animated by nothing more than custom and habit? Existentialist freedom arises again in scene 25, when Speed Levitch waves his hands like a magician, excitedly informing Wiley that
[w]e are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing were involved with called the world is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments abbergasted to be in each others presence. The world is an exam, to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test, to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid fainta sudden exhilaration as he realized at last, something was happening to him. (Waking Life, scene 25)

Solomons monologue hints at the idea of everyday life held by most people, including the postmodernist ideological justication of this life: the idea that we are pushed and shoved by large institutions such as corporations and the state or are trapped in our roles as members of a given sex, race, or religion. The existentialists critique this idea as radically underestimating our personal responsibility for

Here are some all too familiar existentialist themes: we write our own lives, the self is made over time through experience, and physical matter is a sort of test for our willingness to live in good faith, to exert our freedom. Of course, Levitchs existentialism is mixed in with some jolly Buddhism and some selfafrming situationism: the gigantic Dostoevsky novel that is our lives stars clowns (which we briey see as cartoons), not Raskalnikov or the

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brothers Karamazov. Yet it is an existentialism all the same. Alienation is exciting and doubt a test of our vitality. Levitchs existentialism is perhaps one-third Sartre, one-third Nietzsche, and one-third Camus in one of his happier moods. As a counterpoint to all this freedom, in scene 9, Free Will and Physics, philosophy professor David Sosa brings up a central criticism of existentialism, the idea that we live in a predetermined universe. He starts by discussing a basic problem faced by such medieval Christian thinkers as St. Thomas: if God is all-powerful and knows everything that will ever happen, how can human action be seen as free? This is the same question posed by modern science, transferring the power to determine events from God to natural laws. In his speech, Sosa in effect asks, How can we have free will if were just bundles of matter and energy determined by physical laws? It doesnt do any good to bring in quantum mechanics with its probabilistic account of the random swerving of atomic particlesthis hardly preserves human dignity. Sosa prefers a deterministic physical machine to such swerving. He concludes without offering a real solution, insisting that we cannot ignore the problems of choice and of freedom, given that our very notions of responsibility and of individuality depend on our understanding this problem. The cartoons we see of Sosas electried brain and muscles, and of dancing molecules and intermeshing gears, make a mini-carnival of his rather static exposition of this ancient philosophical issue. A second major more-or-less existentialist thinker hinted at a number of times in the lm is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche argues that all life is will to power. Yet the will to power of some is weak and dyspepticthey follow a slave morality that celebrates pity, physical illness, and servitude. Those bursting with a more positive will to power can master both themselves and others. They revel in creativity, struggle, and self-mastery. They embrace master morality. Nietzsche was no democrathe saw the greater mass of humanity as bleating
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sheep whose chief preoccupation was avoiding marauding birds of prey. For him, they invent slave morality to enslave their enemies in mind-forged manacles of self-renunciation and self-pity. The true test of the presence of master morality was the amor fati, or love of fate. What if the universe eternally recurred, eventually repeating your life just as it is now? Could you embrace this fate? Live your life over again just as it is now? If you say yes, then you love fate and are indeed a master. We have already seen how in scene 11 Otto Hoffman asks us to say yes to all existence. Seen from this point of view, his claim that the essence of the human quest is to be liberated from the negative parallels Nietzsches own attempt to escape from the nihilism that he saw engulng European civilization all around him. Hoffmans yes to existence can also be seen (in addition to its Buddhist connotations) as evoking Nietzsches amor fati, love of fate. A more aggressive Nietzschean can be seen in scene 15, which I have called The Overman. Here Louis Mackey says that there are two types of people in the world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an over-abundance of life. These roughly parallel Nietzsches master and slave moralities. The mise-en-scne is a dark and wobbly bar. Mackey goes on to suggest that the distance between the average person and Plato or Nietzsche is greater than that between a chimp and an ordinary human. So few of us reach our real potentials or become great artists, saints, or philosophers. Why? Mackey says that the answer to this simple question can be found in anotherwhat is the more universal human characteristic, fear or laziness? However we reply to this second questionone assumes that the true answer is a mixture of both Mackeys short monologue hints strongly at the overman, the higher type of human being who embraces master morality, who overcomes all obstacles to achieving his full potential. Even the most dedicated Nietzsche scholars debate over who are the best examples of Nietzsches overman. He himself seems to suggest Napoleon and Goethe, diverse human types
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to be sure, one a military conqueror, the other a poet. Whichever pole we think more accurately reects Nietzsches overman, we can be sure that most of us are neither Napoleons nor Goethes. At the end of our lives, we are probably closer to being animals than overmenwe eat, sleep, have babies, go to work, and watch television but produce nothing great. Our names are erased from history with the millions of others who have led similarly humdrum if not slavish lives, adding to the futile addition of zeroes to which Mackey alludes. Sadly, most of us are Nietzsches bleating sheep, ever watchful of the circling birds of prey, the truly evil masters of their own fates. Finally, scene 33 returns us to Nietzsches eternal recurrence. Linklater, speaking of his dream of Lady Gregory, talks about how there is only one story, moving from the no to the yes, embracing eternity and the unity of things underneath their phenomenal differences (hinting at Vedantic cosmic monism once again). With a bit of a stretch, we can see this once again as Nietzsches rejection of nihilism and his challenge that we embrace life and fate, even if it eternally recurs. So whether it is Sartres clarion call to freedom or Nietzsches demand that we become masters of our own selves and destinies, Waking Life oozes existentialist ideas out of its many cracks and ssures. There remains one more major philosophical theme on display in the lm, a theme that, historically speaking, was very much a continuation of existentialism.

and consumer goods. Authenticity is swallowed up by the passivity encouraged by absorption in the spectacle. In Debords own words,
[The spectacle] is the sun which never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory. (par. 13) The economic system is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of lonely crowds. (par. 28)

Third Wake-Up Call: Situationism and the Consumer Spectacle

Our third theme is the situationism of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, French thinkers and activists whose work culminated in two major theoretical statements, both published in 1967: Debords The Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigems The Revolution of Everyday Life. The situationists see modern consumer society as a society of the spectacle where our selves are absorbed into the mass entertainments provided by lm, TV, pop music, advertising,
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We live in a world so dominated by consumer goods that even our social relations are commodied. We relate to others through cars, stereos, mass-produced music, T V shows, and vacation packages. We live in a world of illusions created by our endless pursuit of commodities: for Debord, we are literally consumers of illusions (par. 47). The spectacle breeds isolation and alienates us from meaningful work, play, and communities. We are caught up in false choices between spectacles in a society that offers us spectacular abundance yet at the same time separates us from each other and from active resistance to the cultural alienation this society represents. These commodities ght epic battles as vaporous qualities empty of substance, lacking the reality of even mythical heroes such as Achilles and Hector (Debord pars. 62, 66). Yet they easily slip into our emotional lives by means of the Trojan horses of advertising, television, movies, and other agencies of the society of the spectacle. The situationists had a number of interesting ideas about how to deal with the society of the spectacle. They said never work, a solution that many of them acted out in their lives. They proposed creating everyday situations to make everyday life more than a manufactured consumer spectacle; they supported dtournements, the rearranging, mocking, or defacing of important cultural objects to subvert their meaning; and they suggested
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we drift around town (they called these drifts drives), soaking up the atmosphere of each quarter. Their explorations of the contemporary urban environment led them to speculate about its psychogeography, arguing that a revolution in everyday life required a more livable architecture, one that encouraged desire and play. Although much of the situationist program crashed and burned after the failure of the May 1968 anti-Gaullist revolt in France, punk rock and the more recent culture jamming movement, with Kalle Lasn and his magazine Adbusters leading the charge, has kept it alive. Situationism is explicitly referenced in scene 21, Society Is a Fraud, when four young men (including Nicky Katt and Adam Goldberg, Linklater regulars) go on a drive, eventually visiting Mr. Debord (played by Austin shopkeeper and poet Hymie Samuelsonthe real Debord committed suicide in 1993). On the way there, they exchange situationist-style jargon such as wanting to rupture the spell of the ideology of consumer society to open up ourselves to authentic desires, to interrupt the continuum of everyday existence, to pursue intensities of love and hate, and to live as if something actually depended on ones actions. One of them proclaims that society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence. Another wants an afrmation of freedom so reckless and unqualied, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. The visual style of this scene is sketchy, rough, angry, and by no means pretty, paralleling the mood of four wanderers, whose situationism is uttered with an intense earnestness. Yet Linklater throws in some humor at the end of the scene to lighten the situation: they see an older man stuck up a telephone pole who does not know why he is there. One of the situationists comments that just as he is all action and no theory, they are all theory and no action, a chronic problem with the avant-garde left. Scene 4, with Kim Krizan, is about how we can overcome alienation through spiritual communion, understanding each other through
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words such as love. This is evidence of the more poetic, positive side of situationism, of Vaneigems idea that we could build a cathedral of poetry and love in which to carry out our everyday lives. Scene 14, Noise and Silence, hints at the roots of situationism in avant-garde artistic movements such as Dada, surrealism, and Lettrist International (the immediate precursor of the Situationist International, from which it emerged in 1957). The scene is a chaotic jumble of styles. A chimp pronounces a monologue into a microphone as a series of lm clips (including Kurosawas Dreams and a punk rock performance) plays on a screen behind him. He talks about how art can be used to create subversive micro-societies, which open up new possibilities. Anything is still possible, the talking chimp tells us, even though the world seems empty and degraded. True communication is the key. In a true situationist gesture, he eats his script at the end. The difcult path to authenticity is made more specic in scene 20, The Holy Moment, when lmmaker Caveh Zahedi describes Andr Bazins theory that because God is in all reality, lms are really attempts to capture God. When Zahedi and poet David Jewell try to have such a moment, they are partially successful, yet Jewell confesses that he slips in and out of the moment, becoming aware of the layers of reality embedded in such an attempt at real communication. Two scenes in Waking Life speak to the need for direct action to overcome the passivity and isolation of consumer society. Both feature well-dened images with sharp outlines, as if to highlight the dialectical conicts they embrace. In Scene 6, Self-Immolation, journalist J. C. Shakespeare douses himself with gasoline and sets himself on re, just like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam in 1963 who was protesting the treatment of Buddhists by the Diem government. Before doing so, Shakespeare speaks of how the media uses images of death and destruction to turn us into passive observers and of how the only real freedom we are offered is the purely symbolic act of voting. Human bejournal of film and video 62. 4 / winter 2010
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ings want chaos: we want strife, riots, murder, and war. The trick used by the media is to paint a sad face on all these catastrophes, to pretend that they are avoidable tragedies. Yet behind this sad face is an attempt to pacify us, to turn us into puppets of the spectacle. We sit in our living rooms shedding metaphorical tears for the deaths of thousands in Bangladeshi typhoons or massacres in Rwanda, yet ten minutes later, we drive to the shopping mall for our daily x of fast food and maybe a shiny new commodity or two. Radical broadcaster Alex Jones picks up this theme in scene 10, when he rants over a microphone and loudspeaker from the front seat of his car about how corporate and political systems of control turn us into slaves. These systems turn loose greed, hatred, envy, and insecurities to control us. They make us feel pathetic, small, so well willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. Political parties are just different management teams taking turns exercising this control. Jones urges us to realize that we are being conditioned on a mass scale and that we have to start challenging the corporate slave-state. He concludes that we have to get red up about the things that really matter, creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit. As he speaks, Joness face turns from brown to purple to red, symbolizing his growing anger. His rant has a distinctly American avor in its libertarianism and distrust of traditional politics. Yet the connection made between individual freedom and creativity and his suggestion that systems of control use our own insecurities against us are also situationist in spirit. Tentative solutions to the problem of the alienation of consumer society are offered in scenes 24 and 25. In 24, Tiana Hux says that all communication winds up just keeping our ant colony buzzing along in an efcient, polite manner. Mocking everyday babble, she asks Wiley, Paper or plastic? Credit or debit? Do you want ketchup with that? Wiley goes on to refer to the D. H. Lawrence story about two strangers meeting on a road who decide to accept a confrontation between their souls,
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saying that this is like freeing the brave, reckless gods within us all, a comment that seems out of context for the sedate character played by Wiggins (even though it is just a dream!). Huxs solution to our everyday lack of true communication is artistic: she wants to produce a soap opera where the characters are the fantasy alter egos of the actors. As they speak, we see them oating on islands of color over a black void. Yet whatever the potential for such a project to open up avenues of authenticity for more than a handful of literati, Tianas cynicism about the atness of everyday life, coupled with Wileys idea that we actually can have authentic, meaningful encounters with others, is once again situationist in spirit. Everyday life can be a cathedral of our own making, if only we try hard enough. Lastly, in scene 25, Speed Levitch speaks in favor of the ongoing wow and of direct experiences, quoting Thomas Mann to the effect that it is better to participate in life than write a hundred stories. Toward the end of his speech, he says that he wants to make love to the paradoxes that bug him and to go salsa dancing with his confusion on romantic evenings of the self. Indeed, the wild graphics of the scene and Levitchs amboyant manner, not to mention his concrete ideas and the fact that the scene takes place on the Brooklyn Bridge, suggest some heavy psychogeography going on in the background. New York City is to Levitch what the Paris of the 1960s was to Debord and Vaneigem, a city full of exciting possibilities, the site of many a romantic drift. The cartoon stars that explode from his hands only emphasize the fantastic reality of these open roads.

Waking Up to Life
So the nal wake-up call is away from the consumer spectacle, with its passivity and alienation, and toward individual freedom and creative activity (in both art and politics). When we look back over the rst two wake-up calls, we can see how they are all connected: the Vedantist idea of the need to realize the unity of all things, the Taoist call to live naturally and
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spontaneously, the Buddhist sense of mindfulness and rejection of attachments to a hard unchanging ego, and the existentialist reminder that we are responsible, free beings who should live in good faith with our decisions. Natural, mindful, responsible thinking can also help us to dissolve at least in part the spell of the society of the spectacle, to emerge from our immersion in false needs and the spiders web of illusion spun by advertising and the media. Waking Life thus does good service not just as a sort of proto-philosophy class for the faint of heart, but also in presenting us with a triad of wake-up calls for the self and its relation to society and the world as a whole. Its didacticism aside, it reminds us that dreaming is something higher than everyday lifesomething that causes us to emerge from a quotidian common sense into a sharper awareness of the human condition.

references
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin OBrien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print. Cavana, Carlo. Waking Life. AboutFilm.com. Web. 2007. <http://www.aboutlm.com/movies/w/ wakinglife-intro.htm/>. Good resource on the philosophical sources for the lm. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Black and Red, 1967. Web. 2007. <http://library.nothingness .org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4/>. Easwaran, Eknath, trans. The Upsanishads. Berkeley: Nilgiri Press, 1987. Print. Gardiner, Michael E. Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Gray, Christopher. Essays from Leaving the 20th Century. What Is Situationism? A Reader. Ed. Stewart Home. London: AK Press, 1996. Print. Hanh, Thich Nhat. Being Peace. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988. Print. Koller, John M., and Patricia Joyce Koller. Asian Philosophies. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River: PrenticeHall, 1998. Print. Laberge, Stephen, and Howard Rheingold. Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. Print. Lao Tzu. Tao Te-Ching. 25th anniv. ed. Trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Print. Linklater, Richard. Waking Life. 2001. Film. Osborne, Richard. Introducing Eastern Philosophy. Illustrated by Borin van Loon. New York: Totem Books, 2000. Print. Powell, Jim. Eastern Philosophy for Beginners. Illustrated by Joe Lee. New York: Writers and Readers, 2000. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Meridian Books, 1975. Print. Thompson, Mel. Teach Yourself Eastern Philosophy. London: Teach Yourself Books, 1999. Print. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Black and Red, 1967. Web. 2007. <http://library .nothingness.org/articles/SI/all/pub_contents/5/>. Jims Web site: http://www.prism.gatech .edu/~gte484v/wakinglife.html. Retrieved 2007. This Web site is very useful as a source for the structure of the lm and its dialogue.

notes
1. I confess my Canadianness here: if the British are coming, thats just ne. 2. For Eastern philosophy, my basic sources are Koller and Koller, Asian Philosophies; Thompson, Teach Yourself Eastern Philosophy; Osborne, Introducing Eastern Philosophy; and Powell, Eastern Philosophy for Beginners. See the bibliography for details. Interestingly, in scene 19 a button on John Christensens leather jacket changes shape twelve times, appearing as a skull, a happy face, Godzilla, a clown, an eight ball, a bloody eyeball, an atom, Buddha, a light bulb, a yin/yang symbol, a Too Close to Call sign, and nally, a snake eating its own tail. This series of transformations suggests the main themes of the lm: science, life and death, Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism, existentialism, and situationism. 3. Vedanta can refer either generically to all Indian thought based on the Vedas, the sacred poems that go back through the dim mists of time to around 1500 BC, or specically to the school of thought created by Shankara at the end of the eighth century AD. For the most part in this article, I use it in the former, more generic sense.

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