Waking Life film- Modern philosophy

[EllieChu]

I have been recommended the film Waking Life for awhile now and I did watch it recently. I felt the movie lacked direction. I found that the connections the dialogues made, while staying on topic, seemed to just dump philosophy information and not guide the story in any direction. The movie seems to me like a high school philosophy project to me. But many people I know love this movie and enjoy the philosophy dialogue.

 

For others that have seen the film did you enjoy the feel of the movie and/or the modern philosophy?

 

Any recommendations for movies about philosophy or that will at least leave you with existential or profound questions or answers?

[TheRobin]

well, that depends: What property must a question have or what criteria must be true, for it to be called "existential" or "profund"?

[Kevin Beal]

I really disliked the movie actually. Maybe I'm just not as smart as I think I am or something, but the questions didn't seem interesting or important and the conclusions they drew seemed,... psychotic. It left me feeling irritated rather than enlightened.

 

I don't remember what the actual content was that well, just what my experience of it was. That was a few years ago, and it's possible I'd have a different experience of it now.

 

It just reminds me of those people who ask "what if this is all a dream and you aren't actually real?" which (for whatever reason) I find supremely irritating.

 

Did they say what specifically they found enlightening or interesting? Why do you think these people like it so much?

[EllieChu]

I really disliked the movie actually. Maybe I'm just not as smart as I think I am or something, but the questions didn't seem interesting or important and the conclusions they drew seemed,... psychotic. It left me feeling irritated rather than enlightened.

 

I don't remember what the actual content was that well, just what my experience of it was. That was a few years ago, and it's possible I'd have a different experience of it now.

 

It just reminds me of those people who ask "what if this is all a dream and you aren't actually real?" which (for whatever reason) I find supremely irritating.

 

Did they say what specifically they found enlightening or interesting? Why do you think these people like it so much?

 

I agree with you that I didn't find it interesting and I thought maybe I didn't understand it. But after looking at some reviews of the movie I am thinking people felt they were smart if they admitted that they enjoyed the movie. Might be going out on a limp, but that could be why I find it irritating.  They found it deep, thought provoking and would watch it more than once.  I just didn't see that in this film.

[Lowe D]

This movie came out when I was a teenager, and I saw it then.  I watched it again, two or three years ago.  It's difficult to remember my original impression clearly.

 

Weirdly, I remember something my father said about it at the time.  He said the file size of a movie like that would be large, implying the blocky, cartoonish images wouldn't compress well, I suppose.  I am unsure that is true.  Idk whether spatial or temporal redundancy is higher in cartoon or natural video.  I was disappointed at the time, that he didn't have anything more to say about it than that.

 

I do remember I found it entertaining, as a teen, and also later as an adult.  Dreams often involve exchanges reflecting one's waking life, or being drawn from it directly.  I think this is what the movie is intended to be: a series of encounters reflecting the character's life, or the people and ideas in it.  The conversations' content was not as interesting as their emotional import, and the experience of wandering from one strange conversation to another, with little or nothing shown between, lost in a world full of eerie music.

 

I think the movie is absurdist, or existentialist, like the novel Nausea, or the film Breathless.  The main message is a resignation to the impenetrable mystery and seeming pointlessness of life.  The confusion reinforces this, and is part of the genre.  The absurdist playwright Ionesco made a play which consists of everyone being turned into a rhinoceros.

 

The ending is hard to interpret, but I tend to view it as positive.  The character appears to die in the dream, or to surrender himself to death.  In a dream, death is a relief.  A release from the confusion and the danger of the dream world.  Dreams can have monsters in them, and I think that's part of the idea.  The intellectuals he talks to are pretty monstrous, and ideas really do have a danger to them.

 

Maybe not the ideas exactly, but whatever it is that's causing them.  What does it mean about someone, that he spends time thinking about how he has no free will?  Or thinking on the large difference in intelligence between a philosopher and an average person?  Or trying randomly to reach out to strangers, to avoid being an automaton?