Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I’m going to include something unconventional at the end of Nordling’s review of Richard Linklater’s rapturous new film WAKING LIFE. Seems the film inspired another of our chat regulars, Vegas, to a rambling discourse of his own, and Nordling wanted it included as an example of what can happen when you ingest this movie.
Consider this a warning...
Nordling, here.
Do you want to know what I like the most about good movies? Why movies that transcend the mundane world are films that I treasure? Well, from a purely economic sense you get more than what you paid for. You take the movie with you when you leave. My friend Vegas and I discussed our existence, the motivations of God, the truth of "free will", if there is such a thing, and, of course, lesbians. Lesbians don't have much to do with the film I saw last night in question, but they're fun to think about. Anyway, all this discussion was due to Richard Linklater's fantastic new film, WAKING LIFE.
WAKING LIFE was filmed in live-action by Linklater and then he handed the film over to Bob Sabiston and his team of artists - and these guys are artists in the highest sense of the word - to animate with a new computer animation program and device called the Wacom Tablet. The result is simply the most beautiful looking film in a long, long time. Backgrounds move, and flow. Characters are animated speaking their own personal truth, and sometimes that truth would be animated right beside them. The audience rides and flies through the film. I haven't seen a film in a long time where blinking, not to mention getting up and going to the bathroom, is ill-advised.
The film's story is much like Linklater's SLACKER, but there is a much deeper meaning under it all than SLACKER had. Wiley Wiggins floats through a world that he isn't quite sure is a dream or not. People talk to him on the street, in bars, in restaurants, about their theories on what life really is, seemingly randomly. (It's nice to see Texans portrayed as unusually deep.) A prisoner rants in his cell at the jury and the judge who put him there. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from BEFORE SUNRISE and talk about reincarnation and collective consciousness. One man talks about nihilism and its attraction, then promptly sets himself on fire. Two guys in a bar talk about a shootout and then the talk moves into a violent reality.
It all seems random, but it isn't. There's an underlying theme to the film. Linklater constantly prompts us to question who we are, and whether this "waking life" is simply a dream in our mind, or reality. At one point Linklater himself explains what he thinks life is - it is a denial to God's invitation to heaven, until we at last say yes to Him - and at times in the film Wiley questions his reality, whether he really is dreaming, or awake, or dead.
My favorite scene, and the centerpiece of the film, is the Holy Moment, where two men discuss film, and how you can take film with you into reality, and create Holy Moments throughout life, as if you're watching a great scene in a movie. The two men stare at each other, trying to create that Moment, and become clouds. If there's a better way to encapsulate why I love movies so much, well, I haven't seen it.
This is a spiritual film, and it requires a lot of work from the audience. The routine Saturday matinee crowd will not get it. But for those requiring more from films, this film fulfills all of those needs and more. You can take the film home with you. Those are the best kind of films ever. WAKING LIFE, next to SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, may be the finest American animated film ever made. This is what animation is supposed to do - test the boundaries of what we think are real. It invites us to question everything. It's the single best film experience I've had this year. I can't wait to see it again.
Nordling, out.
Okay... did you catch that Vegas reference in Nordling’s opening paragraph? Well, here’s what he was talking about:
Perhaps the greatest evidence that science is the dominant religion of the modern age lies within its ability to polarize its followers with its dogma. It has been proven (as well as anything can be proven) that the body functions as a result of an all but infinite number of chemical reactions. These reactions control everything our body does, from the flexing of our muscles to the circulation of our blood to the duration, and possibly even content, of our dreams. Chemical reactions operate according to a complex series of physical laws, based on numbers. The question is this: if a human being is nothing but a series of complex chemical reactions, then does that human being truly possess free will?
As I’ve always been told, an atheist is one who doesn’t believe in God, and an agnostic is one who wants to believe in God but doesn’t believe that any proof of God exists. A friend of mine once said that agnostics were God’s chosen people because they’re the ones who are still looking for Him. Actually, I don’t remember if a friend of mine said that or if I came up with it myself. Sometimes I start things out with “A friend of mine said,” when I don’t want to take credit for something that I actually came up with myself. I don’t think I came up with this myself, but it’s entirely possible.
I’ve always considered myself a pseudo-agnostic, pseudo because I know there is a God, agnostic because I keep looking for Him (or Her, but let’s not get hung up on gender when math operates on a completely different set of Xs and Ys). I see evidence of God in numbers, because numbers are perfect. The laws of physics are just that: laws. They cannot be broken, they are unchanging, and in their solidity lies their perfection. Because the laws of physics are perfect, and because numbers are finitely what they are, and therefore in their own way also perfect, then the laws of physics and numbers to me are not just evidence of God, but an actual physical manifestation of God. They are God because they dominate our lives, and because we have no choice but to bend to what they will have us do. If God is not a number but merely the creator from which those first numbers sprung, then this would explain His omniscience. God knows what’s going to happen before it happens because God invented the pattern. God knows how the pattern works, and we do not. God can devine the entire history of the universe from one grain of sand, because in order for that one grain of sand to be infinitesimally what it is the entire rest of the universe would have to conduct itself in a specific pattern, because both the grain of sand and the rest of the universe are bound by the same set of laws. A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, and you get a hurricane in Miami.
Nordling (not his real name, but real in that it is the name he gave himself, whereas I give him the name given to him originally by his parents, although neither his parents nor I give his real name to you) has problems with my mathematical theories on God, because he believes that an omniscient God contradicts the very nature of free will; that if God knows everything that is going to happen, then we truly have no control over anything that will happen, and therefore no free will. I do not see an omniscient God as a contradiction with the nature of will, because I do not believe freedom and will have anything to do with each other. Free will seems to be a side effect of an American belief that freedom overrules all other things, when in a physical sense this is not the case. We do not have freedom over gravity. We do not have freedom over time. We do not have freedom over chemistry, no matter how much pharmaceutical companies would like us to believe (how do pharmaceutical companies grant us “freedom” over our chemical natures? With chemistry, of course! Thus, our slavery to the electron continues…).
What God gives us, in addition to the mathematical laws that make our lives possible, is a matching will. A matching will is different from a free will in that it removes choice from the equation. When we move our bodies, we are given the will to do so in accordance with our movements, so as not to feel alienated from ourselves. This will matches our chemistry so perfectly that it presents itself as the illusion of freedom, when in fact no choice is ever made. The feeling of making a “choice” may in fact be nothing but the brain’s chemical reaction to accepting the series of reactions that were going to follow regardless as a result of adherence to our bodies’ reliance upon physics and chemistry.
My friend Nordling did not like this theory either, and considered never doing anything again as a personal rebellion against his mathematical destiny. He seemed to believe that a life without free will meant a life without purpose, and that if he lived a life without action that he would gain a true purpose by not fulfilling his mathematical one. However, I posited that perhaps his true purpose was to do nothing, because then he would die in a certain place and be buried in a certain place and become food for a certain worm that would become food for a certain bird that would be shot down by a certain man to feed a certain child that would grow up to cure cancer. Who knows?
The point is that the freedom of will isn’t what’s important, it’s the existence of any will at all. Whether it’s all been preordained or whether it’s all still up in the air is negligible, because the only thing that truly matters is that we still feel our lives happening around us. For this we should be grateful, if not to God then to physics, and if not to physics then to ourselves, or to whomever or whatever we wish to be grateful. After all, I’m not here to tell you what to think, because you’re going to think whatever you’re going to think anyway.
Whether you like it or not.
You see what you did, Richard Linklater?! YOU SEE WHAT YOU AND YOUR WONDERFUL MOVIE WENT AND DID?!?
"Moriarty" out.
