disquiets through a penetrating look into questions of ultimate concern, and reminds us that underneath our societal conventions lies quiet desperation, insubordination, and, most of all, awareness.
The constant cerebral conversation that carries the film takes quite an adjustment for the viewer; only My Dinner with Andre and Mindwalk dare to be more longwinded. From one vantage point the film is didactic, overly preachy, and pretentious but from another viewpoint brilliant and interesting, proving that philosophical discourse—its probing, provocations, and prying—serve a function in life. As the title suggests, Waking Life shocks us into a condition that Plato called anamnesis, literally against amnesia, an illumined condition in which the soul remembers its true self and its immortal essence.
The Uranian stamp is all over the film. The entire stream-of-consciousness monologue that drives the film seems to be coming straight from the center of the archetype itself: "Don't box me in," "Where there is fire we will carry gasoline," "Creation seems to come out of a striving or imperfection." All characters represent the various faces of Uranus: angry rebels; questioning amateur and professional philosophers; the disenfranchised; idealistic youth; idiosyncratic eccentrics; fanatical politicians; wanderers; the worldly wise. Even the interpolated rotoscoping used to create the film—an experimental advance in animation—represents the trademark "groundbreaking development" that is Uranus's signature.
Even though the overall tone is celebratory of the expression of Uranus, Linklater does not shy away from the shadow side of the archetype. Uranus can represent a life of glorious potential, awakenings, and insight, but as one character in the film resigns, this is a life of "all theory without action." An overly-developed Uranus function can come through in the fire starter, the rabel rouser, the hair-splitting theoretician, and the navel gazer, all of whom lack groundedness or staying power to realize their revolutions in concrete, useable terms. Secondly, in what might be the great aphorism in the film, one wise elderly man mourns, "There are two kinds of sufferers in the world: those who suffer from a lack of life, and those who suffer from an overabundance of life." Uranus being chaotic, dynamic, and highly unstable is a force of vitality; it can lead to an overabundance of life. The cure is not to cut off the impulses of life that Uranus can bring, but, as astrologer Caroline Casey suggests, to create "disciplined wildness" in one's life. (2)
Like Ross's Pleasantville, Linklater created and released Waking Life when Uranus opposed natal Uranus. (see chart; solar only) The new, more digestible phrase "middlescence" has now entered the common vernacular to describe the period once (and still) called the "midlife crisis" years. Interestingly, As Linklater entered his middlescence, not only did he choose to explore Uranian themes of awakening, rebellion, and liberation in Waking Life, but he chose to re-visit the time of late adolescence through his protagonist, portrayed by Wiley Wiggins. In astrological terms, this confusing but liberating time is the first Uranus square to the natal position, occurring roughly between 18-22. Much like Wiley's experience, during this time period we usually make the first attempts at leaving our family of origins; are confronted by strange, bizarre, and challenging beliefs and behaviors; and learn that Mom, Dad, and high school didn't necessarily teach us all that there is to know about the world around us. Not only does Waking Life succeed in making a philosophical movie work, but it succeeds in capturing the turbulent, exciting, and somewhat frightening period of growth in both adolescence and mid-life.
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