A man without a job has a shitload of time for the cinema, sitting in the dark and letting his worries about money and the disapproval of his wife get drowned out by Dolby Digital sound. I am a man without a job. Don, the manager of the Wheatridge TerrorDome for one month a year and jackass car-parts clerk at Autozone for the other eleven, got on his high horse and fired me. He fired me even though I was doing more to scare those little kids than any of the lazy teenagers in the TerrorDome. Those assholes just sat around and talked about shitty vampire novels and put black nail polish on. Our customers were an inconvenience to them. I was the only one who cared about the quality of our “scare experience”, who made the little girls cry and the little boys cry harder. I was the only one who had the balls to lock the exits until the kids screamed in real terror and begged not to die. I was the only one who would stalk them into the employee washroom and shut off the lights.
In short, I was the only one who cared enough to take the bus to work with a snootful. With enough $1 drafts in me, I wasn’t worried about what my goth teen co-workers thought. I wasn’t too inhibited to show the little kids my kidney scar or my dead toenails or how I can pop my collar bone where it broke and didn’t heal right or tell the gruesome story of how the Harelip lost her finger.
And typical of how this fucking world keeps people like me down, having the initiative to go the extra mile is what got me canned. It wasn’t, “Filthy, great job there getting that kid so scared he had the seizure.” No “Filthy, you’re the only person who cares enough to bring in real blood.” Instead, all Don could say was “Is that alcohol on your breath?” or “were you drinking on your break?” Well, fuck me, but if you can’t be drunk working at a haunted house, where can you?
What the fuck has happened to this country when carnies and other low-wage earners in the thrill industry have to submit to urinalysis? Where are we supposed to turn for employment if we can’t run the Tilt-a-Whirl or work the haunted house while juiced to the gills? Wasn’t part of the thrill putting your lives into the hands of a man operating heavy machinery while he could barely stand or stoned out of his gourd on angel dust? Didn’t the story of the drunk carnie who ran the Gravitron 2000 until the passengers’ nasal cavities shattered make you want to buy an all-day ride pass? If you were eight years old, wouldn’t you want to the go to the haunted house where the creepy drunk guy shows you his scars? Of course!
Look, I’m sorry to go off on this tangent, but this is an issue I feel very strongly about. I’m going to write my congressman about it. I’ve got time because I’m fucking broke and bored. I had twelve bucks, but I went to see Waking Life and 13 Ghosts. Now here’s two extremes: one movie with too many ideas and one without the faintest whiff of one. Like me when I have too many ideas, Waking Life doesn’t get it right. Without any ideas, 13 Ghosts is a bust, duller than a sober frat boy and not as scary.
Waking Life is by Richard Linklater, a Texan who writes and directs his own stories with some success. He made the fabulous Slacker many years ago, and he also made one of the few romantic movies that doesn’t make me wants to jab a fork into my eye, Before Sunrise. Waking Life is mostly getting notice because of how it looks. It was originally filmed and then a bunch of stoner artists painted over the footage with some big computer. It’s very fluid and primitive animation using a palette of primary colors. The intent was to give the story a dreamy quality and it succeeds. Holy fuck does it succeed. It’s hard to describe it without sounding like some pompous asshole who is way too impressed with himself for knowing how a movie is made, even though it’s knowledge he’ll never have any use for (and I get a shitload of e-mail from people like that — so knock it off, especially if you’re one of the assholes who is just about to e-mail me to say it was shot on digital video or that the animation process is called rotoscoping — get a fucking life). The movie floats, its objects and people shift and swell and the animation achieves a fluidity that real life never does.
Wiley Wiggins is sleeping, and no matter what he does, he can’t wake up. He tries to rise but only finds himself deeper in slumber, aware he’s dreaming but not able to escape. He wanders the streets of Austin encountering people who tell him various theories about dreams, self-determination, individuality and a few general crackpot ideas. If this sounds like deep stuff, well, yeah, the bullshit gets pretty thick. It’s not because Linklater is trying to impress the fucking nitwit Jetta drivers in their turtlenecks, it’s because Linklater is genuinely in love with these ideas. That much is clear.
Anyway, before Wiggins realizes he’s dreaming, he absorbs what’s being said. As his situation becomes clear, he struggles to control and understand his dream. It’s a plot as loose as a Tijuana hooker’s vagina, but there is a narrative and there is an ending.
Like I said, this movie is pretty fucking amazing to look at, it’s a moving art gallery full of impressionist, surreal and pop art paintings. But, the problem is with all that beauty, Linklater’s like a cripple in a jungle gym; able to see it but not do anything. He presents all these people, some are interesting, some are boring, all talk, talk, talk. But the power of movies is to illustrate ideas. I mean, isn’t that what a great movie is: a great idea played out as fictitious social experiment? Waking Life doesn’t. Rather than use the medium to dramatize ideas, Linklater uses it to show us people speaking them. Yeah, it looks nice, but all that gorgeous animation could have been used so much more profoundly by digging deeper.
I would love to see some of Waking Life‘s monologues turned into stories: played out with car chases, naked women and an unemployed former gas jockey who gets laid a lot. For example, porn reminds us that three-ways and hot lesbian action are terrific fun by graphically illustrating them with silicone-enhanced women and slightly overweight men. If porn were just an animated image telling me that women having sex is fun to watch, I would have much lower Internet bills. The imagination of movies is to let filmmakers run their make-believe experiments and see what happens, not to just throw hypotheses out there and let them slide down the screen like hot, wet shit.
Three Fingers for Waking Life. It’s worth seeing, it’s fan-fucking-tastic to look at. But it’s a God damn shame Linklater didn’t have enough imagination to see the ideas come to life.