CHAPTER FIVE

Dreamstate, USA: The Metaphysics of Animation

Rotoscoping? ‘It was one of those magical marriages of technology and ideas,’ asserts Linklater.¹ Which begs the question of exactly what ideas could best be betrothed by tracing over live action footage, colouring it in and animating it on a computer. Crudely psychedelic and at the same time languorously mundane, rotoscoped imagery evokes a dream whose lucidity insists upon its reality while simultaneously suggesting that its monsters are being barely kept at bay. Its history can be traced by a series of shortcuts through that of screen animation, but perhaps a more telling antecedent might be plate 43 of 80 comprising Los Caprichos produced by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), who is commonly considered the first modern artist ‘because of his fascination with the irrational and his critical rage against church and class’ (Hughes 1989).

Entitled El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters) and etched with aquatint in 1799, the print was intended as the frontispiece of the collection and depicts an artist (self-identified as Goya in an early sketch) asleep at his drawing table. From the darkness that surrounds him arises a huge nocturnal swarm of bats and owls and a tense and pensive big cat. The demonic beasts observe the artist intently with a mix of hunger and awe but these shadowy symbols of superstition, paranoia and threat do not penetrate the light of reason that bathes the dreamer. Thus the imagination is rendered as something macabre and irrational that consumes the artist, who must struggle to fend off fear in order to present the truth. Here is the eternal battle between reason and instinct, between intellect and intuition rendered as the dangerous but essential bipolarity of the creative mind, which must investigate what lies beyond reality in order to return with lessons learned about its truth, while running the risk of never returning. This branch of philosophical enquiry into the nature of reality and the notion of whether the world actually exists outside of the mind is commonly termed metaphysics, which amongst much else incorporates the study of abstraction, determinism, identity, change and mind over matter. And thereto the happy union with rotoscoping, which fuses technology and ideas in order to realise metaphysical enquiries on film in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. As Linklater explains:

The literalness of film was too harsh for the idea of a lucid dream. It would cancel it out, whereas this kind of more ephemeral style that was real and yet was an artifice, that was an artist’s rendering of real – that’s what a dream is! That ‘show’ that your head processes! That was the marriage right there. The ideas found the right form.

Rotoscoping is rather appropriate to the slacker ethos as its ingenuity was fostered by idleness. The technique of tracing over live action frame by frame to create an animated film was first utilised by Jewish émigré Max Fleischer, founder and head of the Fleischer Studios, in the second decade of the twentieth century. Fleischer made Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman into animated film stars and his first experiments with the technique of rotoscoping were on animated shorts that he produced with his brother Dave, who worked as a clown at Coney Island Amusement Park and acted in the footage that would be turned into the animated misadventures of Koko the Clown.2 Fleischer patented the Rotoscope in 1915 as a device that focused a film projector onto an easel covered by a frosted sheet of glass that offered a drawing surface, thereby allowing the animator to trace the image on successive sheets of paper while advancing the film frame by frame. He deployed the process in his innovative series Out of the Inkwell (later renamed Inkwell Imps) that ran from 1919 to 1929. Although an independent filmmaker, Fleischer produced this series under the patronage of Paramount before establishing his own-brand studio in 1923 and hiring Dick Heumer to be Director of Animation. Heumer subsequently weaned the Fleischer brothers off their dependence on merely tracing by forging the interaction of live action footage with rotoscoping and more traditional cel and modelling animation techniques.³ However, because more creative animators were frustrated by having their talent and imagination limited to tracing, rotoscoping fell into relative disuse with only occasional revivals of its unique qualities for such film events as the inclusion of the jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway in three original Betty Boop cartoons – Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow White (1933) and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933) – for which Calloway performed his inimitable dance steps for footage that was later rotoscoped by the animators.⁴

The advantage of rotoscoping was that it reproduced the realistic physical movement of one-offs like Calloways as well as the jobbing actors who modelled for the Superman cartoons (1941–42) and Gulliver’s Travels (1939). Walt Disney employed the technique sparingly in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950) for the delicate movement of the heroines and the more naturalistic ones of the many animals that were featured, but the technique was mostly relegated to preparatory work intended to train and inform the animators in the most basic elements of human and animal physiology. However, the technique was adopted by animators in China and the Soviet Union who deployed it as a way of inserting a sense of social realism into folk tales by the inclusion of realistic human figures. In American cinema, meanwhile, rotoscoping was denigrated to the status of shortcut as evidenced by Ralph Bakshi’s extensive use of the technique for the otherwise unaffordable fantasies of Wizards (1977) and The Lord of the Rings (1978), for which financial limitations demanded time-saving battle scenes rendered in chaotic silhouette. More interesting was Bakshi’s use of rotoscoping in the more personal American Pop (1981), which told of four generations of musicians in an immigrant Russian-Jewish family in America and at least maintained, however inadvertently and infrequently, the peculiar twist on social realism provided by the contrast of rotoscoped humans in an animated world. This same disconcerting juxtaposition of fantasy and realism was apparent in the Canadian film Heavy Metal (1981) produced by Ivan Reitman, but was mostly thereafter consigned to the toolboxes of animators working on conveyor belt animated television series such as Blackstar (1981–82) and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983–85) as well as the emerging video game industry, whose motion capture gadgetry has since largely bypassed the tracing stage altogether.5 Thus, from this undignified history, it is perhaps surprising that a graduate researcher named Bob Sabiston should emerge from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab as the craftsman of a computerised form of rotoscoping and, moreover, that he should pass on his precision tools to Linklater.

Sabiston had worked as a software developer at MIT from 1986 but moved to Austin in 1993 where he set up Flat Black Films and developed a programme for simulating three-dimensional computer animation. For the four-minute Beat Dedication (1988) he synchronised an animated robot drummer to the input of a beat and duly admits to both the influence of Pixar’s short film Luxo Jr. (1986) with its father and son dynamic between two anglepoise lamps and his delight at hearing of head of Pixar John Lasseter’s approval. However, Sabiston subsequently turned down an offer from Pixar to work on Toy Story (1995) to remain in Austin: ‘What a brave little trooper I was!’ (Sabiston 2009a). Thereafter, his company survived on cash prizes for early film attempts such as the nightmarish, Tim Burtonesque two minutes of God’s Little Monkey (1992) and Grinning Evil Death (1990), a six-minute gross and goofy tale of a boy superhero fighting extraterrestrial bugs that was inspired by Frank Miller’s Batman redux The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and which featured prominently on the MTV channel’s Liquid Television show. Sabiston’s concern for reviving and redeveloping rotoscoping began properly with Project Incognito in 1997, a twenty-minute feature that responded to another MTV contest requiring ninety seconds of animation featuring characters talking about themselves to the camera. Inspired this time by Nick Park’s claymation figures in the Creature Comforts (1989, 2003–) series that features a menagerie musing dolefully on mundane concerns, Sabiston sought to both capture the everyday attitudes and embellish the personalities of his vox-pop subjects. Project Incognito therefore has a distinct affinity with Slacker, not only in comparison with its sequential talking heads but in the working practice that engendered it. Sabiston placed an advertisement in The Austin Chronicle asking for volunteer interviewees, who were subsequently selected for the film by an informal audition process based on the interesting qualities of the person rather than any aptitude for performance. While tracing over the live footage of these interviewees, Sabiston realised that the workload would be significantly eased by the invention of a computer programme that he would have to write himself. Instead of copying a projected image, the animator would ‘draw’ with a pen-shaped mouse that could be ‘dipped’ in an electronic palette for any colour, texture, thickness or transparency. The drawing is then created on a computer screen which can be overlaid the original footage to check its veracity or simply embellished and adapted at will. Sabiston developed the programme further to allow for the interpolation of animation between one frame and one a dozen or so later. By these means an animator might trace an image of, say, a face on one frame, then one several frames later and the computer would fill in the movement in between, mostly correctly but sometimes oddly, which only added to the effect. Thus was invented what became known as interpolated rotoscoping, where what is left out by the animator and ‘imagined’ by the computer can often create a shimmering, floating quality and a plate shifting dissonance between the backgrounds and the figures. On Project Incognito the black-and-white imagery is sketchy, but this only aids the characterisation of these vague, impulsive individuals who could so easily have dropped out of Slacker (Sabiston 2009b). Sabiston won second place in the MTV contest with Project Incognito and moved to New York for nine months to develop the software and oversee its use as the medium for a series of brief filler segments or interstitials. However, he fell out with the corporate-ethos and obsession with product and universal branding of MTV and returned once again to Austin.

From the personal and informative website of Flat Black Films offering stills, clips and descriptions of every short and full-length project the company has undertaken, it is clear that Sabiston and his team always saw rotoscoping or Rotoshop (to give the program its name) as very much a developing technology and a dialogic work in progress that suited the team-building exercise of those involved. Like Linklater, Sabiston chose against the corporate-bound production culture on the east and west coasts of America and dedicated himself instead to the ‘third coast’ of southern Texas, where he collaborated with local artists in Austin on developing the software. According to this website:

Despite some appearances to the contrary [rotoscoping] does not use filters, image-processing or any kind of motion capture technology. Rather, it is an advanced program for hand-tracing over frames of video. The program will interpolate between brushstrokes to save time and smooth motion, but the process is user-driven and can be extremely time consuming. (Sabiston 2009c)

The blurb also denies any intention to market the software and claims ‘there isn’t even a manual for it – training just happens on-the-job’ (ibid.). As a collaborative work in progress and, indeed, a collaborative working practice in progress, it was perhaps inevitable that the similar ethos should have captured the interest of fellow Austinite filmmaker Linklater.

On the drive home to Austin from New York with Tommy Pallotta (who had appeared in Slacker as Looking for Missing Friend), Sabiston shot live action footage of interviews with travellers and bystanders that he had in mind to rotoscope for a film called RoadHead (1998) that would be ‘the first “independent” use made of Rotoshop’ (Sabiston 2009d). For its production, Sabiston did what Linklater had done on Slacker and posted flyers inviting volunteer animators from around Austin:

I got about a dozen people to give four hours of their time at a stretch. It was a great way to meet new friends and try out the ‘exquisite corpse’ style of animated filmmaking. Each animator just got a little piece of the film to work on, with each interview subject in the film being drawn by three or four people. (Ibid.)

The result was a hectic collage of scribbled images of talking heads, drive-by sightseeing and road signs with ticker-tape dates and times to plot the route with an overlaid soundtrack of idle chatter and radio music, whose cinéma vérité element is foremost in the rotoscoping of interview subjects fiddling with microphones and querying the format of the piece: ‘What is this? Can I just start over?’ As they would for Waking Life, the animation styles vary greatly, mutating between minimalist broad strokes and Disneyesque outsize features. The subjects discuss God and astrology as well as astronomy, determinism, sociobiology (‘It’s about how we’re hardwired for narrative […] and how we are in a complicated dialogue with reality’) until an animated ‘Tape Out’ warning flashes in the corner of the screen. Seen now, this drifting narrative and ragbag of philosophies makes RoadHead seem like a prescient early draft of Waking Life. It took four months to make and was forestalled when MTV demanded their computer back. As Sabiston recalls, ‘I think the first place we showed it was at the Fringeware Film Festival down on Guadalupe Street next to Mojo’s. They were projecting all kinds of stuff on a big sheet late at night’ (ibid.).

Snack and Drink (1999) was next and marked the move into colour for this three-minute pursuit of Ryan Power, a six foot tall autistic resident of Austin on his way to a local 7–11 convenience store, where he demonstrates and expounds upon his characteristically solipsistic philosophy by mixing bursts and squirts of all the soda drinks into one Big Gulp container. Brash and hasty, the film gives the impression of the animators hurrying to catch up with the determined movement and thought processes of their subject and spinning off into increasingly abstract illustrations of his world view and empirical interactions instead (Sabiston 2009e). Snack and Drink tied for second place with Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton, 1998) in the 1999 Prix Ars Electronica, was selected for inclusion in the video collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and inspired The Independent Television Service (ITVS) to commission twelve short animated documentaries in the same style for a series named Figures of Speech (1999) that again featured subjects drawn from the streets of Austin. This was animated at the Detour Filmproduction studios of Linklater, where the project served to recruit the key team of animators that would work on Waking Life. At liberty to experiment with their rotoscoping of the live action footage, the animators produced work that Sabiston describes as ‘the wildest and weirdest we’ve ever done’ (2009f). Such was the infectious energy of the project that Linklater was drawn into considerations of the potential of the technique and its suitability for a long cherished project of his that had originated in a particularly lucid dream during which the sleeping Linklater had been convinced of both the passage of a substantial period of time and his entrapment, before waking to find that only a few moments had elapsed:

The idea for that narrative came to me as a teenager, before I was a film person. I’d had that kind of lucid dream that the Wiley character seems to be having and I’d always felt that I would deal with that somehow, some way. So I always had this idea of how I can tell the story. Slacker came about in a similar way and what I described in the scene in Slacker where I’m talking about it, that dream, that becomes Waking Life some year later. You know, you make films in your mind for years before you really make them. And the Waking Life idea had just never worked as a film in my mind. I could never wrap my mind around it in my head. It seemed cheesy. It never worked as a film. But then these friends of mine, Tommy [Pallotta] and Bob [Sabiston], were developing this animation technique and the first time I saw it – it was black-and-white lines – they were doing some shorts and when I saw that it was – Wow! Something clicked in my mind – that this ephemeral idea might work in this form. Bob [Sabiston] was still working on the software so I thought about it for about another year I guess, started writing, putting it together, just at the moment where it came together, the colour and all that.

Thus, Waking Life would be a palimpsest of Slacker in which the repeated drift around Austin would be punctuated by all kinds of philosophical dialogues that would be subsequently transformed by rotoscoping into an oneiric, metaphysical exploration of consciousness.

The recurring motif in the cinema of Linklater of a young man or woman daydreaming or nightsleeping with his or her head against the window of a moving bus, car or train features in It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, SubUrbia, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. It is in the limbo between reality and dream that this common point of origin for the consciousness of characters in the cinema of Linklater appears paradoxical, because the traveller is at any moment on his or her journey both departing and arriving. This connects with Bergson and his intuitive sense of time while signalling a concern for the metaphysical musings of adolescents, torn as they often are between what William Blake posited as the freedom of innocence and the burden of experience. Suffering may be countered by heeding Boat Car Guy (Bill Wise) in Waking Life, who advises Main Character that ‘the idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving’. This awareness of limbo constitutes a metaphysical act that is also a philosophical enquiry into the limits of reality and the unreal. As the aforementioned Goya knew well, the Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila, both suffered and craved visions that inspired and motivated them.6 Their metaphysical experiences allowed them to leave reality behind and explore ecstasy in the pursuit of enlightenment before returning to the waking state in which these thoughts would be expressed in poetry and theological writing. Saint Teresa even essayed a structuring of the experience into four stages that began with concentrated prayer and moved onto meditation in which human will surrendered itself to what she identified as God. Thereafter, reason and imagination slipped their bindings with reality and allowed the subject to float into an ecstatic state in which reason is given up to God while memory and imagination are liberated. Finally, the state of devotion is a passive one of acceptance in which the self is wholly absorbed into the trance and during which Saint Teresa was said to have levitated before returning to the ground tearful and weak. Remove God from the equation and one is left with an analogous, oneiric experience that has similarities to the practice of lucid dreaming associated with non-secular meditation, recreational drug use and Waking Life.

Arriving while departing. Main Character (Wiley Wiggins) takes instruction from fellow passenger Richard Linklater and Boat Car Guy (Bill Wise) in Waking Life

Confusing the real and the unreal in this manner can also be a deliberate ploy aimed at questioning the nature of being and the world. Metaphysical enquiry is sometimes referred to as the first philosophy because the first major work to bear the term was a treatise by Aristotle (384–22 BC), although Aristotle himself did not name it thus. Within the field of metaphysical enquiry, however, the key question for characters in the cinema of Linklater appears to be whether the world exists outside the mind. This prompts conceptual musings on the interaction of the mind and the body that gives rise to the monologues and dialogues of Slacker as well as informing those in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. It also inspires the banter and debate of the protagonists of Waking Life and the manic monologues of Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) in A Scanner Darkly. The ingredients of these dialogues include a belief in Dualism as propagated by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) in Meditationes (Meditations, 1641), which tends to locate intelligence in the brain while saving accumulated wisdom, intuition and self-awareness for a non-corporeal ‘soul’ or ‘mind’. Other ingredients include the thoughts of later disciples of this philosophy, such as the Anglo-Irish George Berkeley (1685–1753), who maintained a belief that neither material objects nor ideas exist unless they are perceived by the mind, and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who went so far as to propose that time and space are merely mental constructs that humans utilise in order to structure and classify that which is perceived. Consequently, this once more connects with Bergson and his differentiation between the intellectual measurement of time and its intuitive perception.

The use of rotoscoping for a film such as Waking Life and its relay discussion of metaphysics is apt because the animation adds that extra level of transcendence sought by saints and philosophers alike to the reality of the live action footage. That is to say, the original, mostly hand-held digital footage shot by Linklater and Pallotta is a record of a reality that is rendered dreamlike by the animation process. In so doing, rotoscoping effectively facilitates the displacement of our attention from the real that was advocated by Bergson as essential to metaphysical enquiry: ‘A question of turning this attention aside from the part of the universe which interests us from a practical viewpoint and turning it back toward what serves no practical purpose’ (1992e: 138; emphasis in original). For Bergson, ‘this conversion of the attention would be philosophy itself’ (ibid.). The appropriateness of rotoscoping to the illustration of metaphysical enquiry is that it ‘breaks away from the appearances here below and attaches itself to the realities above’ (Bergson 1992e: 139):

More precisely, for Plato and for all those who understand metaphysics in that way, breaking away from life and converting one’s attention consisted in transporting oneself immediately into a world different from the one we inhabit, in developing other faculties of perception than the senses and consciousness. (Ibid.)

The irony remains, however, that this different world beyond the one we inhabit is merely rendered that way by rotoscoping, which challenges our perception of a familiar world by making it uncanny, at the same time both recognisable and strange. Yet this does not render Waking Life entirely Surrealist because it seeks meaningful relevance as well as incongruous absurdity and the struggle of Main Character, who is crucially gifted knowledge of his somnambulant state, is to learn to control his lucid dream through a somewhat paradoxical surrender to its logic. In a sense, rotoscoping might even invoke Immanuel Kant’s view that ‘if metaphysics is possible, it can be so only through an effort of intuition’ (in Bergson 1992e: 140) because it enables a conflict of sorts between the intellectual force required to ‘think through’ its many dialogues and our more intuitive perception of its imagery. The mind is arguably thus torn between the logic and rationality of arguments as profound as a library full of theses and the bizarre, fantastic illustrations of those thoughts that are as ephemeral as a dope-fiend’s enlightenment. In order to ‘survive’ this we should do as Bergson advises: ‘What is required is that we should break with certain habits of thinking and perceiving that have become natural to us. We must return to the direct perception of change and mobility’ (1992e: 142). This is the function and purpose of rotoscoping, the fluidity of which invites and reminds us to go with the flow, for it is only through our surrender to the imagery that we can intuitively understand what is being discussed.

The spontaneous, unrehearsed nature of several of the discussions filmed by Linklater and Pallotta made up about one third of the finished live action draft of Waking Life. Another third was scripted and the rest was worked up by the cast. After handing over the edited footage, Linklater did not participate in the rotoscoping: ‘There were all these great artists. We hired these great illustrators, but that’s not one of my skills.’ Although he initially instructed the animators to be literal in their animation of the talking heads, they escaped his control and their potential boredom by extrapolating Expressionist digressions out of the speakers and their dialogues. It became a game in which in-jokes, gags, wild transformations and ghost images ganged up on Linklater and forced him to grant amnesty and inclusion to anything that suited the spirit of a scene. Nevertheless, he worked on the music and dialogue tracks, oversaw the casting of the various animators to specific characters and retained editorial control of the conglomeration of animation styles proffered by Sabiston’s team. Recalls Linklater:

I always describe that collaboration as working with a composer or even with an actor. It’s like it’s their skill but you’re overseeing the bigger design. I end up in the position of approving the final design. They draw the character once and I’m like, ‘Eww!’ And they come back and, ‘Okay, let’s go with that!’ You’re kind of in this weird middle position. But that’s kind of what a director does anyway, even with an actor. There’s things you control completely – the shot, the camera – but on everything else you’re collaborating completely with everyone.

To a certain extent in Waking Life, as in the positioning of Mitch Kramer in Dazed and Confused, Main Character played by Wiggins (who also worked as animator on the film) is initially positioned as the dominant subjectivity and thus the perceiver of the objects, events and ideas that surround him. Consequently, by learning to appreciate and even tentatively control his condition, Main Character finds himself transcending reality by adding floating to this uninhibited dérive around Austin, suddenly relocating his consciousness in disparate times and places (such as New York) and even approaching the extracorporeal sexual fulfillment that Guy Talking about Turning the Light on in Dreams (John Christensen) professes to achieve. The rotoscoped animation simply allows for the expression of an experience that is beyond the physical and thus the illustration of metaphysical ideas and philosophies. Because Main Character is aware that he is trapped in an increasingly bizarre succession of scenes, the simmering terror beneath his calm veneer resembles that of the guests in Luis Buñuel’s Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972), who respond with desperate decorum to the evermore bizarre interruptions of their attempts to dine in a film that can also be understood as a series of dreams within dreams. What rotoscoping adds to Main Character’s plight is an immediate Surrealism that plays at the border between the real and unreal, just as, for example, Buñuel’s guests react with strained amusement at discovering their dining room is actually a set on a theatre’s stage. As Linklater explained: ‘What I needed was a way of depicting unreality in a realistic fashion’ (in Arnold 2001).

However, Main Character is not merely a narrative cipher or pawn in Waking Life, for his dilemma increases as the film progresses and he is assailed by all manner of competing explanations for his experience of the kind of fairytale found at the other end of a rainbow or rabbit hole. He repeatedly tries to wake and is frustrated when the dream continues. Sleepwalking towards a cognitive state that allows him to explain his problem to others, Main Character is increasingly rebuked by their self-absorption and resignation towards their own dislocation from reality. The disconnection from those he encounters is exaggerated by Waking Life’s ‘inclusion of a range of animation styles [that] reinforces its presentation of various philosophical perspectives similar to Slacker’ (Speed 2007: 102). Yet, unlike in Slacker where a united sense of community extends beyond the frame, Waking Life accumulates nothing quite as dynamic, offering instead an evasive resignation to what is potentially an ultimately ineffectual and solipsistic existence. As Speed observes, ‘the film’s narrative trajectory through a series of separate, dreamlike episodes implies a perpetual evasion of an unspecified, absolute boundary’ (2007: 105). The film, as One of Four Men (Adam Goldberg) admits, is potentially all talk and no action, which is also a criticism Goldberg’s Mike levels against himself in Dazed and Confused and the proto-activists struggle to disprove in Fast Food Nation. As Old Man (Charles Murdock) in Waking Life contends: ‘As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough’, which is why, as the dreamstate becomes paradoxically more real and more oneiric, Main Character strives to reclaim his human will. Unlike Linklater, who awoke, however, Main Character finally drifts away; heavenwards if one believes the saints.

In addition to the expression of a metaphysical transcendence of reality, rotoscoping is appropriate to the project because it renders the characters in Waking Life so grotesque that it connects with Bakhtin’s views on the carnival:

The fairytale world can be defined as strange and unusual, but it is not a world that has become alienated. In the grotesque, on the contrary, all that was for us familiar and friendly suddenly becomes hostile. It is our own world that undergoes change. (1984a: 48; emphasis in original)

Thus, the metaphysical realm of Waking Life may be understood as a distorting mirror’s image of reality in which ‘the grotesque liberates man from all the forms of inhuman necessity that direct the prevailing concept of the world’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 49). What Waking Life makes explicit is the carnivalesque nature of Slacker, for it is a visual and thematic palimpsest of that film with an additional layer of rotoscoping that renders its protagonists grotesque. Waking Life is also America at the beginning of the new millennium, of course, but distorted as much as the England of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or the Spain of Goya’s Black Paintings (1819–23) and The Disasters of War (1810–20). Remaining in Spain, there is also a great affinity between the manner in which rotoscoping renders its subjects and the work of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1836–1936), whose esperpento was a literary style of distorting reality in the service of irony and satire in which dreams and nightmares are invoked as analogous to the reality of the day. Furthermore, the conclusions drawn from the dreamstate of Waking Life have a marked affinity with the Golden Age play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream, 1635) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81). Like Waking Life, La vida es sueño is an allegorical illustration of philosophical enquiry into the meaning of life and the perception of reality. Its most celebrated passage is spoken by an imprisoned character called Segismundo, who questions whether he dreamt a brief period of liberty and extrapolates this to posit that all of life (and so all the lives he perceives therein) are also dreams: ‘And in all the world, I see, / Man dreams whatever he be, / And his own dream no man knows’ (1961: 65).7 The conclusion of this soliloquy is even more convinced and convincing and warrants the status of Hamlet’s soliloquy in Spanish literature as well as direct comparison with the resolution of Waking Life:

What is life? A frenzy;

What is life? An illusion,

a shadow, a fiction;

and the greatest good is small,

for all of life is a dream,

and dreams, dreams is all they are. (Ibid.)⁸

Here is ‘the transience of life, the illusion of the material and the reality of the spiritual, the liberty of the individual and the frustration of the will’ that Sloman writes of in his introduction to La vida es sueño (1961: xxii) and that, in a sense, rotoscoping revives and illustrates. It does so by locating all the dissenting and competing philosophies and belief systems of its contemporary characters in an alternative America to that of 2001. In other words, as did Slacker a decade earlier, the transformation of Austin, Texas into this ‘Dreamstate, USA’ effects both a refuge and a stronghold for ideas of non-conformity, spirituality and freedom that were perhaps subdued, even defeated, in the reality of the year 2001, in which the 46th Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, was elected the 43rd president of the USA. As Old Man exclaims: ‘Man, this must be like parallel universe night!’

Although Waking Life received its premiere in the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001 it was not released until 19 October 2001 following screenings at the Austin Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, little more than a month after the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center. In this context, Linklater was described as formulating a ‘diplomatic response’ (Arnold 2001) to questions about what was incorrectly perceived on its release (for the film had been completed long before 9/11) as Waking Life’s peculiarly evasive or palliative response to the recent tragedy and trauma:

‘I feel weird thinking about it’, he says. ‘I don’t want to find myself thinking, “Oh, God, the country has been forced by this great calamity into being in a friendly frame of mind for my new film”’. He does admit the film ‘very consciously brings up fundamental questions about reality, unreality, existence, free will – all the stuff that you realize will elude simple answers but you still need to ask, since the questions are always worth thinking about.’ (Ibid.)

Interestingly, the fundamental questioning of reality that dominates Waking Life coincided with the academic and mediatic uptake of the French cultural theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s denomination of the Gulf War as a non-event in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (2001). His denial of the physical conflict as anything more than a media event that was ‘a masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image, the image of an unintelligible distress’ (2001: 40) illustrated and invoked kindred doubts about reality itself. In addition, Baudrillard’s 2001 essay The Spirit of Terrorism posited the destruction of the World Trade Center as ‘the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened [which] through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination which – unknowingly – inhabits us all’ (2009). This ‘terrorist imagination’ was even oneiric, claimed Baudrillard, when he stated ‘that we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree’ (Ibid.).

The notion that 9/11 was in some way a metaphysical experience whose ocurrence in reality could only be assimilated by those who witnessed it live and on television by reference to the unreality of disaster movies and science fiction, aids more than a conspiracy theory, for it adds momentously to the debate about whether or not the world exists outside the mind. When confronted by this shock to the system, this slap to the side of the face that was the footage of the planes hitting the towers and the edifices crumbling into dust, the mind resorted to the refuge of unreality as practised by the artist in Goya’s etching. That is to say, the monstrous event was removed from its frozen grip on the intellect and consigned to dreams or at least dreamlike imagery that was remembered from disaster films instead. Denial also played its part when the world expressed disbelief, thereby subscribing to George Berkeley’s notion that the event could be erased from reality by the mind’s inability to perceive of its magnitude. If it could not be received, contained or expressed within the mind, then it might be judged never to have happened. Thus, our consciousness needed to be raised or expanded in order for the event of 9/11 to have taken place. New structures and classifications for the scale of the event had to be mapped and, whereas news media took almost no time at all to reduce the event to a repetitive, emotionless cliché in its edited loop of the planes impacting the towers from various angles, our minds struggled to recall the impact of that impact and situate it within reconstructed parameters of time and space in which it actually happened and we actually experienced it as something real. Linklater would literally revisit Ground Zero in Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor, whereas in Waking Life there is only a premonition of the imminent cataclysm. This is because rotoscoping, as practised by Sabiston and his team, had progressed far beyond its time-saving and realism-adding functions to allow for deviations and stylisation that made for an accumulation of layers or sur-realities whose malleability was ideal for representing and expressing metaphysical thought. If Linklater had completed Waking Life after 9/11, for instance, it is possible that the destruction of the World Trade Center would have been fittingly rotoscoped into a metaphysical experience for Main Character, whereby its unreality would not have jarred with that of any other of his unreal experiences. This would conceivably have managed what news media and the personal endeavour of millions had failed to do: the assimilation of the event within the collective consciousness through the medium of a lucid dream or (which is the next best thing) the experience of watching Waking Life.

Nevertheless, merely communicating ideas such as these outside of literature, academic conferences, broadsheet newspapers, televised and streaming debate was, said Linklater, a major challenge for film culture, which he clamed ‘had no room for ideas’:

There’s no way to communicate it in a wide way. The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is a weird place, due to its mass nature. It’s diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics. So this movie is really challenging in that way. I thought it was sort of a conduit to a lot of ideas and energies and I honestly spit it back out in an interesting way. One of the themes of the movie is that we’re all connected on some psychic level: we come back to that a lot of times in the movie. And so, I think humans really feel that and they explain it in different ways. (In Kaufman 2001)

Waking Life thus raises a plethora of questions without answers in a manner that is playfully begun by Linklater’s own daughter, Lorelei, appearing as Young Girl Playing Paper Game in the opening scene, in which ‘Dream is Destinie’ (sic.) can be seen scribbled on the inside of the origami paper contraption (a cootie-catcher), and concluded by Linklater himself playing the ultimate respondent to Main Character’s questions. As Pinball Playing Man, Linklater recounts an anecdote of Philip K. Dick’s that not only connects with A Scanner Darkly but also dismisses the now obsessive quest for meaning of Main Character: ‘You know, just … wake up!’

If rotoscoping had worked commercially in the sense of connecting with a broad and youthful audience, Hollywood would doubtless have acquired Sabiston’s programme (or developed a variation thereof) and deployed it for a summer blockbuster; but the minor cult status of Waking Life only supports Justin Wyatt’s assertion that Hollywood’s assimilation of avant-garde styles ‘depends on the extent to which artists are interested in engaging with narrative in their creative projects’ (1994: 199). Critical response to the film was divided between the nonplussed and the enchanted. Senses of Cinema christened Linklater ‘the poet of American freedom’ while also catching the contradiction by noting ‘the scary question at the heart of Waking Life: in the end, how important is the distinction between our perception and the world we perceive?’ (Jones K. 2002). Freedom, in other words, might just be an illusion, while the metaphysical return journey from reality to unreality is not necessarily one of guaranteed enlightenment but always liable to veer away from transcendence towards terror. Metaphysics cannot define ‘being’, only describe it. Metaphysical enquiry is thus not a destination but a journey through prayer, reflection, dialogue and debate that is always ripe and relevant in the cinema of Linklater, who might thus be placed alongside a small band of metaphysical filmmakers whose works are not limited to the avant-garde but possessed of political and philosophical resonance.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Terrence Malick and Julio Medem, for example, are phenomenologically-minded filmmakers whose most metaphysical films make what appears local or personal into something more universally relevant. As for Linklater, each of these filmmakers has made places in Russia, Poland, America and Spain respectively into the setting for characters stumbling between chaos and order towards an eternally elusive explanation of time and its meaning. Each of them combines oneiric imagery with realism in a manner that questions the veracity of both, although it is Linklater who plays closest to the borders with mainstream, genre-based cinema and so his insistence on daydreaming appears all the more rebellious. He is, after all, a citizen of a country that withholds the ‘American dream’ in lieu of profit and results. As a counterplot philosophy to focus, drive, conformity and acceptance, Linklater’s musing in Slacker that ‘every thought you have creates its own reality. The thing you choose not to do fractions off and becomes its own reality’, effects a potent rebuke to any demand to put all one’s energy into one single reality defined by a government and ruling class that otherwise ignores you. Thus, there is daydreaming to be actively pursued as a survivalist technique or there is its flipside: death in life. This paradox is thrown into relief in Waking Life by the counter-paradox of what appear to be spontaneous moments of animation that make it seem as if the film itself is daydreaming. As characters talk seriously about great themes, the backgrounds morph and bud witty details that punctuate their dialogue: characters float, their ringlets curl and unfurl, creatures in an aquarium noticeably evolve and lightning bolts shoot from the hands of Caveh Zahedi as he attempts to explain Bazinian principles of realism by means of animation (another paradox). In sum, rotoscoping is not employed to represent unreality but to express the reality of the imagination.

The fact that dreaming features as a topic of conversation in so many of the films directed by Linklater points to their respondent fluidity and the dialogic nature of them all, wherein the walking and talking follows an endless stream of thoughts, ideas, tales and suppositions that creates an oneiric, sublime dialogue that approaches eroticism. Hand-held camera, long takes and time-images are thus well complemented by rotoscoping, which, with all its colours, movement and amoebic forms appears organic, growing atop characters that assume hallucinatory forms that evolve with an immediacy provided by the digital technology. Nevertheless, as with much of the cinema of Linklater, Waking Life posits loneliness as a theme, as the sad result of so much introspective disassociation from reality. Even the miracle of meeting one’s soulmate (twice) as illustrated by Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is tainted by the loneliness that otherwise devours Jesse and Céline, although no protagonist is quite as isolated as the ironically named Main Character. From the lolloping individuals and tense couples of Slacker to the stilted activists, illegal immigrants and wilfully ignorant company men of Fast Food Nation, loneliness is the common consequence of thinking differently and thinking too much that plagues the protagonists of the cinema of Linklater. Walking and talking may temporarily alleviate the loneliness, as well as the symptoms of paranoia, depression and incipient madness, but there is always too the fear that this time, this youthfulness, this life will end. The fact that by committing to each other either Jesse or Céline will one day suffer the other’s death is perhaps the only morbid thought missing from their dialogue.

Main Character also approaches intimations of his own mortality that the dreamstate may actually have supplanted with a purposeless purgatory, identified as such by one of the ‘oneironauts’ who warns him ‘the worst mistake you can make is to think you are alive when really you’re asleep in life’s waiting room’. By way of comparison, the same situation and emotion envelops the childlike Ray (Colin Farrell) in In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008). A hitman in hiding after accidentally killing a child, Ray is sent to the Belgian town that he soon realises (following clues from Hieronymous Bosch’s painting of The Last Judgement [c.1482]) is a kind of purgatory fashioned with Surrealist imagery that he is also incapable of escaping:

Prison … death … didn’t matter. Because at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realised, fuck, man, maybe that’s what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges. And I really, really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really, really hoped I wouldn’t die.

Does Main Character die in Waking Life or does he just never wake up? And what, pray, is the difference? Because, as Sabiston states, ‘the software has become a tool for blurring the lines between reality and the imagined’ (Ward P. 2006: 42), the quivering, shape-shifting, flowing imagery of rotoscoping effects the expression of this fearfully conscious somnambulism. However, as Main Character passes through a second, third and fourth false awakening, he is dulled rather than revived by the experiences. Thus a final paradox emerges: for all the dreamlike dérive (drift) and unmeasured durée (duration) of Waking Life, it is arguably the most plot-driven, suspenseful and linear of all Linklater’s films. Main Character struggles towards nirvana: the realisation that if reality (waking life) is a dream, then dreams must be reality. But he also drifts inexorably towards a death that, in opposition to all the walking and talking, is hastened by his increasing solipsism. Consequently, the cure offered to him by Linklater as Pinball Playing Man to ‘you know, just … wake up!’ is also extended to an audience that might as well be exhorted to ‘you know, just … turn off the film!’ In sum, if we take as given that reality is a dream and dreams are reality, and then correlate the dreamstate with the experience of watching a film, we end up with a particularly cinematic philosophy that sees life, dream and film in a state of constantly becoming each other. Watching a film, in other words, can be a metaphysical act.

Such debate is irresolute but must end somewhere. Thus, after the exhaustion of its illustration, Sabiston sought ‘a good break from the endless parade of human faces that was Waking Life’ (2009g) and made a three-minute short called Leaves (2001) about Austin’s summer chorus of cicadas followed by a series of documentary shorts for the PBS television show Life 360 (2001). Then in 2002 his gadgetry was featured in De Fem benspænd (The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier, 2003), an examination of film authorship in which von Trier challenges his old teacher Jørgen Leth to remake his short film Det perfekte menneske (The Perfect Human, 1967) five times with different sets of obstructions. As punishment for an infraction of one rule, von Trier threatens Leth with the commission to make an animated version, which prompts a comical exchange between the two as they take turns accentuating the stress on the phrase ‘I hate cartoons’. The reason for their hatred and Leth’s fear of the challenge is that animation supposedly removes every possibility of chance from the production process. Everything is premeditated, calibrated, revised and approved, which von Trier and Leth assume prohibits spontaneity and accident and so elides any semblance of realism and interest. However, Leth rises to the challenge by passing it on to Sabiston, who appears in the film presenting a catalogue of sketches and images for Leth’s approval. In fact, as Sabiston recalls, the call came from Leth’s son: ‘They didn’t pay us very much … but it was the ultimate in creative freedom. It was cool also to appear in the film and have our Austin office-house pop up all out-of-place in this erudite, multicultural piece of “cinema”’ (2009h; emphasis in original). Leth and von Trier ultimately admire the rotoscoped short without much enthusiasm, but the platform for rotoscoping provided by De Fem benspænd was a remarkable boon to the recognition of its status as something other than a plaything or shortcut. In 2004 Sabiston reunited with Linklater to make A Scanner Darkly ‘the best-looking animated movie ever made’ (Sabiston 2009i).

While making Waking Life, Linklater recalls ‘thinking about other films that would work in that style. You could do it with any movie technically – but why?’ He first considered an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969) about psychic warfare, time shifts, decomposition and the customary confusion of reality and unreality, but the rights were ‘a mess, whereas A Scanner Darkly was available’. A Scanner Darkly is a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1977 in which Dick asserts, ‘I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though was our entire nation at this time’ (2006: 218–19), and it ends with a dedication to those of his acquaintance who were killed or brain damaged by drugs. It was optioned for Linklater to direct by Steven Soderbergh’s Section Eight production company (with Soderbergh and George Clooney credited as executive producers). ‘We had a meeting and they worked really fast,’ remembers Linklater, although in order to convince the daughters of Philip K. Dick to grant the rights he had to swear he ‘would not do the typical thing. Take the core idea, get rid of the rest and make a Hollywood narrative out of it’. Instead, he promised ‘to just take those characters and go all the way with the story’:

His daughters responded to that. I had to get their rights and blessing and get them to take a discount. When I first met with Isa [Dick-Hackett], she said: ‘Just so you know, the little dedication at the end, this is my dad and this is my mom, she’s on the list too.’ And I’m like: ‘Oh, you’re one of the little girls in the house that went away?’ She goes: ‘Yeah, we went away and those guys moved in.’ So I was like: ‘I really want to make this!’

Thereafter, Linklater approached Keanu Reeves about taking the main role and found him ‘intrigued but unavailable, and then nobody wanted to do it for a couple of years’. The project simmered, however, and was gradually reduced to a less risky budget that was covered by Warner Independent Pictures in association with Thousand Words (which had also produced Waking Life), Section Eight, Detour Filmproduction and 3 Arts Entertainment, which went on to have a hand in the science fiction epics I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (Scott Derrickson, 2008). Linklater insisted that he ‘wanted it to be faithful’ and therefore claims the low cost ‘actually helped, because it was low-budget, six million dollars, no one got paid anything and with that budget I thought I could make a faithful film, leave in all the digressive humour’. Unfortunately, as Sabiston recalls: ‘The studio allotted only $2 million dollars and five months to animate an entire Hollywood feature film, and then treated us like criminals when we said it could not be done’ (2009i). As for Waking Life, Sabiston had hired local aspirational animators with the promise of hands-on training in Rotoshop, but these five teams exhibited uneven commitment to the project and little in the way of completed footage with which to calm the increasingly frustrated Mark Gill of Warner Independent Pictures or Linklater, who was busy filming Bad News Bears. Seeing Sabiston’s animation team and schedule faltering, producer Tommy Pallotta locked Sabiston out of the studio and replaced his amateur animators with a more Disneyfied production line of experienced artists (see La Franco 2006). Recalls Sabiston: ‘In the end we left, and they finished it without us (spending another two, three, four million?). But the movie turned out okay, and if we’d had the resources allotted to say, two episodes of Family Guy, I think we could have done it’ (2009i).

Linklater’s quite faithful adaptation of A Scanner Darkly recounts the California drug culture of Philip K. Dick’s day but films it in Austin and sets it in the ‘neon ooze’ (Dick 2006: 22) of a dystopian police state of 1994 in which paranoia is rife and, as Dick describes, time has become wholly subjective:

The illumination for the room came from a pole lamp into which he had screwed nothing but spot lamps, which shone day and night, so as to abolish time for him and his friends. He liked that; he liked to get rid of time. By doing that he could concentrate on important things without interruption. (2006: 3)

Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) lives a double-life as a junkie and as a police agent named Fred who is not only obliged to report on his housemates, the befuddled Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and the paranoid, deceitful James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), but to spy on himself as well in order not to arouse suspicion. Themes of duality are thus central to the plot and emphasised in an eminently Cubist manner by the scramble suit that agents like Fred must wear. Dick writes that this mutating shroud means that agents like Arctor ‘cannot be identified by voice, or even by technological voiceprint, or by appearance’ (2006: 15):

He looks, does he not, like a vague blur and nothing more? Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroud-like membrane large enough to fit around an average human. As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure – the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, and then switched to the next. […] In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him – or her – was meaningless. (2006: 15)

The scramble suit, which largely inspired the decision to deploy rotoscoping as the means of its representation, so clearly evokes the Cubist aesthetic and meaning that it is described by Dick as having been invented by a man who ‘for about six hours, entranced […] had watched thousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flash-cut speed’ (2006: 16). As Anna Powell describes in relation to the theory of Bergson, the scramble suit is a ‘dynamic and multi-faceted model [that] stresses change and multiplicity’ (2008: 121). However, because Arctor is increasingly addicted to the psychoactive Substance D or ‘Death’ his ability to distinguish between reality and unreality is diminished. Thus, the scramble suit both illustrates and exacerbates his mental fragmentation, for, as Dick states, it is something like a canvas for a Cubist portrait of an Everyman that complies with Bergsonian notions of time in being constantly shifting and evolving. ‘You will notice that you can barely see the man,’ says the Brown Bear Lodge Host (Mitch Baker) somewhat paradoxically when introducing the suited Arctor as guest speaker to his audience: ‘Let’s hear it for the vague blur!’ Because of the millions of fragments of human features and clothing that are replaced at a maddening rate, the scramble suit is both perpetually arriving and departing to the effect that ‘Fred, Robert Arctor, whatever’ (Dick 2006: 18) fragments into ‘a composite of all sorts of guys at their desks’ (Dick 2006: 21). This thus illustrates what Bergson called ‘this indivisible continuity of change [that] is precisely what constitutes true duration’ (1992e: 149). The perpetual Cubist fragmentation of Arctor’s persona and appearance culminates in the dissolution of any single vantage point from which to ascertain the truth: ‘What is identity? He asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows’ (Dick 2006: 21).

The mental and physical fragmentation of the scramble suit in A Scanner Darkly

Like Main Character in Waking Life, the rotoscoped Arctor is forced into a questioning of time, reality and the mind’s ability to construct a meta-reality that results in self-induced paranoia:

To himself, Bob Arctor thought, How many Bob Arctors are there? A weird and fucked-up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I’m the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me? (Dick 2006: 74–75; emphasis in original)

Arctor/Fred’s dilemma may be partly explained by reference to Bergson, who defined this dual topography of the psyche in Time and Free Will (2003 [1889]) as an outer surface that functions in spatial and social contexts and an inner sense of self that experiences the durée or ‘durational process of perpetual becoming’ (Powell 2008: 121). As described by Dick, when Arctor is dressed in the suit (which briefly resembles Philip K. Dick in its very first appearance in the film), his exterior appearance allows him to pass unobserved through these ‘spatial and social contexts’ while his shrouded inner self experiences the suit’s constant flux as an arduous state of ‘perpetual becoming’ because it will never, ever resemble the man inside. Bergson and Dick therefore seem to concur in their convictions that there are two selves to each Everyman: the one that is projected externally and which allows us to adapt and function in society (but which may not be wholly truthful), and the other which simmers within and whose relationship with the outer self is complicated by deep introspection. Each Everyman is thus both performer and audience, obliged to achieve and maintain this split personality in order to observe or ‘spy on’ himself and thus ensure his or her anonymity. Interestingly, this duality is actively advocated by some psychologists as a decentering of the self by which a subject may step outside restricted perceptions of behaviour and appearance by accessing those areas of the mind that are not prisoner of negative assumptions. The aim, which is illustrated so frequently in the cinema of Linklater, is to think about one’s thinking. Termed metacognition by psychologists, the practice is essential to the enabling of perceptual shifts. For example, just as someone suffering from anorexia might undergo cognitive behavioural therapy in order to challenge and overcome the negativity that springs from an ingrained neural pattern connecting any intake of food with the exacerbation of feelings of being unloved, so Main Character in Waking Life must ‘think about his thinking’ in order to shift his perception of a traditional distinction between wakefulness and the dreamstate.

Thinking about one’s thinking is, of course, also a common theme and subject in Slacker, Before Sunrise, SubUrbia and Before Sunset, where it feeds off both a European cult of Rohmeresque introspection and an American exuberance for Altmanesque self-expression. The caveat of A Scanner Darkly, however, is that Arctor’s ‘thinking about his thinking’ results in the conflict between the two hemispheres of a divided mind. His perceptive and cognitive areas split and oppose each other, offering only exhausting ‘cross-chatter’ between the intellect and intuition, which are polarised to the point of stasis, resulting in Arctor’s final conversion into the stupefied Bruce, who seems as somnolent as Main Character in Waking Life and as lobotomised as R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975). The very similar endings of A Scanner Darkly and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which both Bruce and McMurphy are lobotomised, signals a congruent backlash against all the rebellious youths played by Nicholson and his peers in the films of the new American cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, when, as Dick writes in the novel’s final dedication/epigraph, ‘some people […] were punished entirely too much for what they did’ (2006: 218). Normally, there is some dialogue between the intellect and intuition that allows for adaptation and evolution as new neural paths are mapped, but in cases of mental illness, drug use, paranoia, bipolarity or all of the above as experienced by Arctor, neural paths stagnate in obsession and psychosis, fragmentation occurs and multiple personality disorders may result. The scramble suit perfectly illustrates this movement from a single, stable personality to a shifting, unstable multiple personality disorder, while the finally unsuited ‘Bruce’ signifies the erasure of all personality that results. Because putting on and taking off the suit is also a metaphysical gambit of moving from the real to the unreal and back again (with all the risks that this involves), so it is apt that it should illustrate and express this in its Cubist representation of an Everyman who is constantly arriving and departing. It was the potential of rotoscoping to express this Cubist rendering of the suit that so enthused Linklater, who admits that the inspiration for the film was ‘the scramble suit, but also the mindset of the whole movie’:

[Arctor]’s losing his mind and there’s the ultimate Philip K. Dick question of how do you know what is real and what isn’t – ultimately the picture puts you in the headspace. Waking Life puts you 100 per cent in the headspace too, but this movie has various headspaces: the perspective of the person being watched and the perspective of the government that’s doing the watching and I’d always wanted to feel as if you’re in Bob Arctor’s mind. And I knew for that to work the same way that [rotoscoping] works on your brain will be the way to take in this particular story.

As a Cubist work, the scramble suit’s constantly changing form expresses the limitless duration of its own event, making it possible to appreciate an analogous relationship between the suit and the form of Linklater’s films. For example, the structure of Slacker is itself a kind of scramble suit in which the constant flux of protagonists creates a Cubist expression of the slacker community in Austin. Like the suit, Slacker is a collage of human expressions whose figures are constantly arriving and departing, to the extent that its detractors might describe this seemingly formless, aimless film as a vague blur. The multi-character collages of Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, Waking Life and Fast Food Nation might also function in the light of Bakhtin’s theories of carnival as costumes that are appropriately and ironically grotesque. As a costume, the scramble suit is both clown and demon. Its appearance is both foolish and terrifying. As Bakhtin writes of the Harlequin figure from the Italian Commedia dell’arte, who may have originated with one of the devils named Alichino in Dante’s Inferno (1321) and who also wears a mask and multi-coloured suit, he ‘represented a certain form of life, which was real and ideal at the same time. [He] stood on the borderline between life and art, in a peculiar midzone as it were’ (1984a: 8). The suit, which both requires and inspires rotoscoping, rarely has two eyes the same colour. Its hair sprouts, recedes, curls, falls and recoils. Its clothing sags, bunches, clings and flows through an endless catalogue of styles and colours. This quivering being has features that exist in a constant blur of gender, race and age. However, the irony of the suit’s grotesqueness is that it is only projecting elements of normal human physiognomy back at ‘normal’ humans. Finally, therefore, this ironic twist to its grotesqueness refers A Scanner Darkly back to the cinema of Linklater and the aforementioned affront to conformity offered by Slacker, whose ‘scrambled’ narrative and its protagonists so oppose the dominant, conformist, materialist society of Republican America that they are accused of being lazy, even degenerate, and thereby labelled grotesque. Thus, as suggested by Nick Bradshaw, A Scanner Darkly ‘suggests the pitfalls awaiting the post-beatnik heroes of Slacker should they stray from the path of principled resistance to the bourgeois orthodoxy’ (2006: 41).

For all the layered meanings of rotoscoping, the animation also gave the tale what Linklater describes as ‘a certain pulpy feel’ that was further required of the actors, who were encouraged to exaggerate their gestures and expressions for the eventual animators. It may even have helped that several of the main cast were associated with drug use: Downey Jr. had passed through several rehabilitation programmes, Harrelson is a keen activist for the legalisation of marijuana, Winona Ryder, whose godfather was drugs guru Timothy Leary, was accused of using non-prescription drugs during her 2002 trial for shoplifting for which she was ordered to attend drug counselling, and Rory Cochrane, of course, played the permanently stoned Slater in Dazed and Confused. Of the live action filming Linklater recalls ‘the actors were intrigued: “So I’m a cartoon character?” “Yeah, everyone’s a cartoon character.” I always used to want to be a cartoon character when I was a kid.’ Cochrane, Downey Jr. and Harrelson duly comply with cartoonish behaviour, whereas Reeves and Ryder, who both worked for the Screen Actors Guild scale rate, are more reserved in their playing of their multiple roles of Arctor/Fred/Bruce and Donna/Hank/Audrey respectively. Although unnecessary to both the animation process and the overdubbing of Fred and Hank’s voices by other actors, they also performed these characters in the scenes when the characters were supposedly wearing scramble suits. Thus the film constantly points to a layering of reality and unreality that the audience is challenged to map, which begins in the opening sequence of Freck’s (Cochrane) attack by phantom aphids, which are animated instead of just imagined by the character and thus indicative that the audience shares his hallucination due to that fact that, like taking Substance D, the audience has effectively chosen to watch a film whose rotoscoping replicates the psychedelic experience of a drug trip. Thought bubbles appear above characters’ heads and at one point the film itself is fast-forwarded with resultant lines of interference as in Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden, 2005), as if agent Fred is watching the surveillance footage. Otherwise, however, a contrasting context of reality is maintained by the familiar streets of Austin standing in for the low-tech representation of ‘seven years from now’ in Anaheim, California, which Linklater filmed separately and gave to the animators with instructions to create composite landscapes. After two weeks of rehearsal there was a six week shoot on digital video with little care for visible film equipment such as boom mikes which could all be erased during animation. Consequently, rotoscoping retains its reputation for enabling the kind of thrifty short cuts that allowed Linklater to spend/save the film’s tiny budget on basic local sets that could be embellished in the animation process.

Subsequently, when Linklater handed the footage over to the animators he convinced his departing cast that the rotoscoping process was ‘just another interpretation of an actor: another layer. You bring in an actor, dress them, put make-up on them: this is just another layer.’ For the team of thirty-five animators, however, this was a much less creative process than their forebears had enjoyed on Waking Life. They were equipped with Wacom graphics tablets connected to Power Mac G5 towers but instead of experimentation with animation styles they were restricted to a slim range of permissible tones of hair and skin colour, the precise shape of the actors’ features from every possible angle and a limited palette of colours with which to render Austin as California. ‘It was very different from Waking Life in the design,’ recalls Linklater:

It kind of put off a lot of the animators who had worked on both films. On Waking Life we thought that every character could have a different style, because the styles were by scenes, whereas with A Scanner Darkly I wanted it to be more like an illustrated novel, to have that constant look. The characters had to have the same look throughout. They couldn’t just change styles. The animators were more restricted. There were style-sheets, old-style style-sheets: ‘Here’s how you draw Keanu!’ ‘Here’s how you do his nose!’ ‘Here’s how you do Winona!’ A little less creative all round. Yet there was still so much to do; so much detail. It was really tough.

Again, the paradox of hard work as indication of a slacker ethos finds its expression in the cinema of Linklater, in which slacking is a unique, dignified and proto-metaphysical form of political activism. Moreover, A Scanner Darkly responds to a common question in the works of Dick, that of asking what counts as real, because it is a science fiction adventure that posits inactivity as a valid revolutionary act in a society in which invasive surveillance and the propagation of crippling paranoia force or inspire many citizens to retreat from the world. In other words, the best way to oppose a surveillance state is to do nothing. Like the time-image, these characters oppose by inaction. Instead of violent revolution, citizens concentrate on breaking down their own ‘external’ selves into the kind of atomised consciousness allowed by drug use or the kind of reflective, imaginative, creative activities of Austin’s slacker community in the 1980s. To this extent, Barris, Luckman, Freck and Arctor are not just the science fiction descendants of the protagonists of Slacker but also of the verbose but inactive young proto-revolutionaries in Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), whose legacy of inactivity remains a peculiar kind of protest.

Instead of shiny futurism, A Scanner Darkly presents ‘seven years from now’ as ‘a second-generation of planned communities that mask their sprawling replication with simulated-organic winding roads and cul-de-sacs [.] Cloned homes for human propagation, flanked by identikit malls’ (Bradshaw 2006: 42). This is the same landscape that sprawls behind the credits to SubUrbia as well as the one traversed in Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Waking Life, while, if Jesse and Céline had met in Anaheim they would surely have walked and talked around these streets too; for the future world of A Scanner Darkly is but a multi-level palimpsest of our own. Scratch away the rotoscoping and, like Arctor/Fred, we see ourselves as through a scanner darkly: ‘What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? I hope it sees better than me, because I see only darkly.’ The title of the novel is a reference to St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians (c.56 A.D.) in which he writes ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’ in a missive that is a call to unity and understanding found in ‘things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard […] combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). That is to say, it is the metaphysical plane where understanding is found. However, in response to any religion’s ‘ownership’ of such transcendental experiences or claims to own the wisdom found therein, A Scanner Darkly ultimately posits metaphysical experience ironically, as the reduction of discourse and experience to the kind of panacean banality that is particularly evident in the verbiage of Barris. As rendered by Downey Jr., these monologues express a wholly faithful embodiment of the rich vein of black humour in Dick’s writing: ‘That’s the D talking!’

In her analysis of A Scanner Darkly in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Powell explores the element of transcendence offered by the flux of the scramble suit, which she reads as sympathetic to ‘a new map of the body and psyche’ (2008: 118). For Powell, ‘fluid and shifting, this body in process draws on the pre-subjective mental and emotional forces of the “orphan unconscious”’ (ibid.) that was delineated by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari. Focussing on the face as ‘the site of socially projected identity’ (2008: 127), she notes that ‘identity is radically destabilized [because] the scramble suit has been cynically invented to produce false multiplicity in order to enforce conformity by pushing deviation’ (ibid.). In relation to wider considerations of the cinema of Linklater therefore, the scramble suit is revealed to be emblematic of its most persistent themes. In sum, because the suit effects a Cubist expression of a human in a state of constant becoming it also represents Bergson’s notion of real time as ‘flux, the continuity of transition’ (1992b: 16). For Bergson as for the scramble suit ‘it is change itself that is real’ (ibid.). The suit thus embodies Bergson’s definition of time as a thing whose ‘essence being to flow, not one of its parts is still there when another part comes along’ (1992b: 12). The irony is that the suit actually mimics the efforts to fit in of ‘unsuitable’ humans who are constantly adapting in order to survive in society, even at the risk of anonymity. The struggle is such that schizophrenia may result, however, which Deleuze and Guattari nonetheless claim in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) is capable of resisting the ‘normalisation’ of conformist Western society in which citizens are trained to desire their own repression. At least the schizophrenic may have half a mind to revolution. It may not be enough to take up arms, but sufficient introspection might still engender enough resistance to conformity to posit stubborn inactivism as a revolutionary act that might be objectively identified as slacking.

In contrast, the film does examine the perception of change in society and the individual, which, as exemplified by those who view the scramble suit, becomes a subject of philosophical contest. Bergson typically questions whether anything is ever stable:

We say, for example, that an object changes colour, and that change here consists in a series of shades which would be the constitutive elements of change and which, themselves, would not change. But in the first place, if each shade has any objective existence at all, it is an infinitely rapid oscillation, it is change. (1992e: 146)

Perhaps the suit does not really have to scramble itself because the subjective, intuitive perception of its observers does all the work for it? However, as Bergson states:

The perception we have of [change], to the extent that it is subjective, is only an isolated, abstract aspect of the general state of our person, and this state as a whole is constantly changing and causing this so-called invariable perception to participate in its change. (Ibid.)

That is to say, it is not just the suit (the form) that changes but the man (the content) inside it. Unfortunately, because Arctor must spy upon himself in order not to give away his true identity, his deliberate schizophrenia degenerates into oxymoronic duality. Writes Dick: ‘He had a peculiar air about him: tense and bummed out both at once, a sort of dulled urgency’ (2006: 151). When the condition deteriorates, Dick has Fred/Arctor visit the police psychology testing lab for a diagnosis:

‘Competition,’ the other psychologist said, ‘between the left and right hemispheres in your brain. It’s not so much a single signal, defective or contaminated; it’s more like two signals that interfere with each other by carrying conflicting information. [F]or you neither hemisphere is dominant and they do not act in a compensatory fashion, each to the other. One tells you one thing, the other another.’

[…]

‘The two hemispheres of my brain are competing?’ Fred said. (2006: 168)

The problem of ‘cross-chatter’ resulting from ‘split-brain phenomena’ (ibid.) is attributed to Fred/Arctor’s illegal intake of Substance D while operating undercover. The red pills chugged by Arctor recall the one offered to Neo (Keanu Reeves) by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in The Matrix (Andy Wachowski & Larry [now Lana] Wachowski, 1999): ‘After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.’ Here, however, there is no cure or even the possibility to go cold turkey. For Arctor/Fred there is only a final half-life as the somnolent Bruce, who Dick describes as receiving only ‘partial impressions – incoming sense data – for the rest of his life. Instead of two signals, he gets half a signal’ (2006: 168; emphasis in original). Moreover, because the notion of live action footage beneath the rotoscoping is arguably gradually forgotten, so the film ends up as a ‘cartoon’ that poignantly underlines Arctor’s complete disassociation from reality. As Dick writes: ‘Time ceased as the eyes gazed and the universe jelled along with him, at least for him, froze over with him and his understanding, as its inertness became complete’ (2006: 216). Arctor’s last act as Bruce is to pick the blue flower from which is extracted Substance D and is a primary symbol of Romanticism, symbolising desire and the ultimately hopeless metaphysical struggle of reaching for the unreachable infinite.9 By these means, the novel and the film conclude the theme of what is meant by freedom of choice and the loss of it due to addiction.

In his editor’s note, Dick reflects that ‘drug use is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car’ (2006: 218). He describes addiction as ‘a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence [that inspires the refrain] “be happy now because tomorrow you are dying”, but the dying begins almost at once’ (ibid.). The vicious juxtaposition of choice and its lack is what befalls a person whose decision to use drugs obliterates from life all the other options he or she might ever have. As Barris says, Substance D boils all of life’s options down to just one choice: ‘You’re either on it or you’re not.’ This fragile duality is evoked in A Scanner Darkly by references to other choices that must be made between good and evil, and between reality and unreality, but are mostly fumbled under the influence of drug-induced paranoia. In relation to the context of the novel’s writing, moreover, it is important to note that Philip K. Dick believed himself to have been identified as an enemy of ‘the establishment’, which he was convinced had him under surveillance, although following the Freedom of Information Act, which allowed people access to their own FBI files, his was found to be almost empty. Nevertheless, the paranoia that infused the writing of A Scanner Darkly was not just fed by drugs but justified by the same post-Watergate period that inspired several of the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s such as The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974) and Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979). Correlatively, the production of A Scanner Darkly during the second tenure of President George W. Bush points to a resurgence of paranoia amongst those left disturbed and disenfranchised by government policy both at home and abroad during his presidency. Says Linklater: ‘Post 9/11 I re-read [A Scanner Darkly] and saw it in a whole new way. The way power works and surveillance and government control. All those elements make it more relevant than ever. What was paranoid then is our reality’ (in Russell 2006).

Like Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), which was very loosely adapted from Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), A Scanner Darkly may be understood in terms compiled by Bradshaw as ‘the ultimate postmodern detective noir’ (2006: 42). Like Blade Runner it is also possible that A Scanner Darkly’s dystopian view of the near future put off audiences and studios that would nevertheless continue to raid Dick’s short stories for the ideas upon which more adventure-filled but less adventurous science fiction films such as Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) and Paycheck (John Woo, 2003) could be based. Rotoscoping may also be blamed for the film’s poor box-office return because it confused any potential core and/or crossover audience. Nevertheless, what had always and uniquely inspired Linklater to attempt a faithful adaptation of A Scanner Darkly was his conviction that he could ‘tell the story the way I thought [Dick] saw it, which was just about people hanging out’ (in Russell 2006). The scenes of the disaffected characters lounging around, bullshitting about a repressive social order, goofing off and obsessing about the number of gears on a bicycle could, like any from Waking Life, have easily come from Slacker. In addition, such meandering scenes as that with the bicycle were only made possible because, the film’s budget was so low that it allowed for a degree of creative freedom. Thus the main theme of A Scanner Darkly asserts itself in its familiar production process too, as does its affinity with Slacker, Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, Waking Life, The School of Rock and the rest of the cinema of Linklater, which in turn, perhaps, finds its prophet in Philip K. Dick, whose 1972 essay on The Android and the Human contains this defence of ‘unreliable’ slackers:

Either through laziness, short attention span, perversity, criminal tendencies – whatever label you wish to pin on the kid to explain his unreliability is fine. Each merely means We can tell him and tell him what to do, but when the time comes for him to perform, all the subliminal instruction, all the ideological briefing, all the tranquilizing drugs, all the psychotherapy are a waste. He just plain will not jump when the whip is cracked. (1995: 191)

The fusion of slacking with the filmmaking process meant that it was perhaps inevitable that the slow craftsmanship of rotoscoping should have frustrated the film’s producers at Warners. ‘Some people were just extremely upset with the realities of how long it takes’ (Ward P. 2006: 42) remembers Sabiston, whose disillusionment was somewhat shared by Linklater:

A Scanner Darkly made me not want to do another animated film. I didn’t really have any more ideas. Even as I did it I thought I’m not an animator, I’m a storyteller and I’m using this technology to tell a particular story but it’s not a particular passion or anything.

Furthermore, the lack of support experienced during production was compounded by the attitude of Warners to its distribution and its $5.48 million gross at the American box-office and £561,707 in the UK was a paltry return on an estimated $8.5 million budget. ‘They dumped it,’ says Linklater: ‘Good news is Warners made it as a little film; bad news is that internationally: “Here’s our slate: Harry Potter and A Scanner Darkly. Let’s just go straight to video with this title”’. Thus, despite a Cannes screening for which A Scanner Darkly was awkwardly positioned as an auteurist, generic, star-driven curio, Linklater remembers:

It didn’t really get a theatrical release. Nevertheless, I figured it would find its audience though. You know, have its life. I knew this film was going to be seen on a screen at three in the morning. It’s been downloaded by BitTorrent like a million times, so yeah, what the hell! I was never going to see any money on it. You’re just glad people watch it. It just proves that there was an audience out there for it. A lot of films find their audience that way. You never know.

Ultimately, if there was an ideal audience for A Scanner Darkly it was the daughters of Philip K. Dick, who visited the set during production and, says Linklater, ‘really liked it. I was sitting at a screening when they first saw the film and saw some tears’. In turn, Linklater claims that he ‘was just proud to be able to do Dick authentically. He’s a good enough writer to have his whole narrative recreated’.

Alas, rotoscoping may not have much future. Sabiston has since worked on sound-synchronised animation for the videos of the Austin-based psychedelic rock band The Black Angels, a short film entitled The Even More Fun Trip (2007) that reacquainted him with Ryan Power (‘star’ of Snack and Drink), thirty commercials (some in Hi-Definition) for Charles Schwab and eighteen episodes of a comic series called Get Your War On (2008) that was based on the recycling of five minutes of stock live action footage with the mouths reanimated for new dialogue on every episode. Despite their growing cult success, the perception of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly as financial failures is inextricably linked to the animation process. Rotoscoping does look decidedly low-rent in comparison with the more sophisticated and infinitely more expensive filmmaking technologies developed by Robert Zemeckis, with his motion capture and IMAX 3-D ‘experiences’ Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009), and James Cameron, whose Avatar (2009) based its plot and marketing on the Waking Life-like promise of its hero Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) that ‘everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world and in here is the dream’. Nevertheless, the ideas that rotoscoping expresses are uniquely appropriate to the inexpensive, independent, experimental, and collaborative cinema of Linklater because metaphysical concerns are the everyday obstacles encountered by slackers, who, like Bruce, ‘looked forward inside [their] mind[s], where no one could see’ (Dick 2006: 217). Thus, although it is likely to remain a minor footnote in animation history, rotoscoping adds a vital layer of extroversion to the often introverted cinema of Linklater.

Notes

1    All quotations from Richard Linklater, unless otherwise attributed, are from interviews with the author in Austin, Texas, 30 July–1 August 2009.

2    This may be viewed online at http://www.inkwellimagesink.com/pages/cartoons/MaxFleischer-OutOfTheInkwell3.shtml.

3    Several of these short films can be viewed online at http://www.inkwellimagesink.com/pages/cartoons/MaxFleischer-OutOfTheInkwell1.shtml.

4    The rotoscoped footage of Cab Calloway is also re-used in the compilation film Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame (Dave Fleischer, 1934).

5    Rotoscoping was notably revived to popular effect in the video that illustrated the song ‘Take on Me’ (1985) by the Norwegian synth-pop group a-ha.

6    See St Teresa of Avila (2007) El castillo interior / Interior Castle. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Also St John of the Cross (2003) La noche oscura / Dark Night of the Soul. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

7    The original Spanish: ‘y en el mundo, en conclusión, / todos sueñan lo que son, / aunque ninguno lo entiende.’

8    Author’s translation. The original Spanish: ‘¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí; / ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, / una sombra, una ficción, / y el mayor bien es pequeño; / que toda la vida es sueño, / y los sueños, sueños son.’

9    Blue flowers are especially common in German literature. Its symbolism originates in Novalis’s unfinished Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1876) and extends to Werner Helwig’s Die Blaue Blume des Wandervogels (The Blue Flower of the Wandervogel, 1998), a history of the German youth movement of the 1960s. Blue flowers are also the prime ingredient of a hallucinogenic drug in Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005).