Waking Life

I finally got around to watching it tonight, and I'm...really really surprised, and even a bit delighted with it.

Matt and I have such orthogonal perspectives on life most of the time. I'm so much of a realist; he could be described as a constructivist; I'm so rational, and he's more artsy (in some sense) and careless.

The movie was just incredible, though. (I'm going to talk about it now, if you couldn't tell from the context. So quit reading if you don't like hearing about movies you haven't seen.)

I'm not sure I would even really classify it as a movie or a film - it was more like an hour and a half of some really interesting philosophical perspectives kind of stitched together by one character. The graphics (it's an animated film) were very well done, too. There were some sequences where the figures were drawn the way they might be in a dream, or the way they might be in the memory of a dream. The audio throughout was incredibly realistic, though - it was like having that same sort of inner commentary that makes a dream, however strange, seem cohesive and somewhat related to the real world.

I think that the main purpose of the work was to try and jolt people out of a somewhat complacent existence into a frame of mind more engaged with all those lofty ideals of humanity: freedom, individuality, meaning. I liked it because it did so by being mostly POSITIVE, though. The segments just presented a bunch of interesting thoughts to consider, using some really effective visual and auditory techniques, but it wasn't the sort of assault that one usually experiences from those "get off yo' ass" sorts of works. (There was one clip with a guy driving around in a car ranting about the "control" of the media, government, etc. which bordered a bit on liberal hysteria, but even that wasn't so bad because the character didn't go into specific politics, and so the part gets to stand as a reminder that so much of what we do see and experience has been filtered and constructed that it does take a fair amount of discernment to truly stay engaged with reality, etc.)

There were some parts I really didn't agree with, of course, but those were for mostly scientific and logical reasons. I'd have to do more research to decide where I really stand - but one conversation was about some supposed "collective consciousness" shared by humanity. Not sure about that.

The one purely terrifying (to me) moment in the whole thing - apparently after one's body physically quits (dies), the brain keeps going for 6-12 minutes...and who knows how long those minutes might seem, given how slowly "real" time can go by in comparison to "dream" time? I think the idea of those few mid-death minutes is going to haunt me for awhile - hopefully I'll have the sort of life to make those minutes overflow with wonderful, wonderful memories.

I was mildly bemused (okay, and inspired...) by the bits of Catholic philosophy I kept noticing. There was one clip about the necessity of work to give order and meaning to humanity which could have been taken word for word from some of my theology classes in high school. There was another one about the "new evolution" of mankind and how it's hopefully headed from a paradigm of predation (among humanity) toward one of "individuality, truth, loyalty, justice, and freedom" - which I think is a really succinct statement about the true nature of Christianity, even without the literal Christ figure.

One segment presented an argument regarding free will - namely, the importance of at least considering the question and the concept, and how it's such a fallacy to try to write off the idea as irrelevant to modern time, or unimportant because of its opacity and seeming unanswerability. I appreciated how the film encourages people to really start thinking without seeming to push them in one direction or the other.

Also, the last clip talks about time and how some people would say that time is just an illusion to distract us from the fact that there's only ever been one "time" (moment) and that is now, and now is eternity. More than just distracting us from the fact that we're in the same moment that there's ever been, time serves to lull us into a false sense of security about really living life and how the trick is to start moving from the "no", the "will to nothingness" into this gigantic "yes" where we accept that we are whole individuals with actual intellect, freedom, and even (especially) responsibility. With that initial yes comes a whole "chain of affirmation" that leads us along...

I'm sure that the film makers didn't intend for the film to be a discourse on Catholocism. (One part involved the main character flipping through some channels on TV, and there was a show with a priest on it, only the priest was a puppet...heh) That's part of what makes it so good, though. Somehow someone figured out how to express some extremely important and stimulating (and in my opinion, mostly true and logically sound) ideas in a non self-rightous, nonthreatening, non-elitist manner. Beyond that, it doesn't really matter what labels a person chooses to put on it, does it?