‘There is an old proverb which says: Don’t try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both’, are the words Sherlock, Jr. opens by throwing on screen, calling my ass out. Yes, this week I'm covering what you might call a thoughtless double feature. There are only so many posts in the year to cover things and there is so much that I want to cover, so here we are. Although I found there may actually be more thematic syncing from Buster Keaton's goof and stunt spectacular and Richard Linklater's psuedo-philosophy dump than I originally imagined.
Sherlock, Jr. is considered one of the great Buster Keaton directed-acted silent films. It's essentially just a little rom-com which then turns into an incredible extended dream sequence. It's like 45 minutes long, you can watch it by clicking the video above, and I don't think there's any subject I've covered (or that I'll ever cover, maybe) that you could have less of an excuse to not watch. Just do that instead of reading any of this, I will forgive you.
Anyway, the plot, such as it is, is about Buster who works in a theater and is studying to be a detective. He scrounges up some money to be his crush some candy, he gets framed for theft, and then he, uh, goes back to work. Falling asleep at the projector, he inserts himself and the people in his life into the film1 which (after an insanely impressive sequence of Buster seamlessly jumping around random snippets of different films) turns from detective story (where Buster is dubbed the titular Sherlock to action movie. In the end, Buster solves the case and rescues the girl, of course.
Meanwhile, the actual real life girl had been doing some investigating and figures out that Buster was framed. They reunite as Buster wakes up at the end of the dream movie. Buster repeatedly looks to the final moments of the movie to coach him through making his moves with his girl, all the way to the dramatic kiss. The last moment is a genuinely hilarious bit where it cuts to the couple years later, with children, and all Buster can do is scratch his head.
It could be argued that this is in the category of things I was trying to avoid in Head Space, i.e. things that just have a lot of dream stuff in them. That might be true, but I think there's a lot more interesting than that and there's a lot more under the hood that gets at what I'm digging into. The dream sequence isn't the whole movie nor is it a minor part of the movie, it's actually the most important part of the movie. Reality has essentially failed Buster, so he takes refuge in his dreams to see the ending he's really looking for.
The metaphor of movies as dreams is impossible to ignore, since his dream is literally inserting himself into a movie showing. It's pretty wild to think that in 1920s movies were already reckoning with their psychological and cultural effects like this when Paprika and Inception are still hitting the same notes 80 years later. Buster makes it clear that dreams, and movies by extension, are fantasies giving us the chance to escape from, process, and learn how to handle reality, even if they're obviously just silly nonsense and that's obviously a ridiculous way to live. We put our life into our dreams and then put our dreams back into our life. And he manages all this with some of the craziest stuntwork you'll ever see2 and the silliest gags he can throw at you.
Now for Waking Life, a movie that makes Sherlock, Jr. look like it has a very dense and layered plot. Waking Life is a movie entirely about a guy listening to what is essentially a series of monologues and conversations in his dreams. That is, by and large, it.
To be fair, it actually has more plot than I remembered. As the film goes on our Main Character (the actual name he's credited with) becomes less passive, starts acknowledging that he's in a dream and talking to people about it, gets increasingly concerned that he can't wake up, and begins to worry that he's dead. This isn't resolved, at least not definitively. The film ends with MC seemingly having gravity be reversed and flying up into the sky, a replay of the opening scene where MC's child self (at least I've always assumed) nearly floating away but managing to anchor himself into a door handle.
I'm not really sure how to talk about this movie beyond considering its choices. It's one of those rotoscoped-animation-over-top-of-reality deals, which fluctuates from close to photorealistic to hyper abstracted, usually landing somewhere in the middle with a pretty impressionistic vibe. It transitions haphazardly, sometimes with MC walking from one scene to another, but more often jumping more abruptly or taking a birds eye view and travelling around the town. Usually MC is depicted, even if he's silent, as a participant, but often times it jumps to scenes where it reads as though we're just a camera observing random people. The most extreme version of this being a scene where Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke are chatting in bed (presumably reprising their Before trilogy roles), a scene where it's pretty impossible to imagine why MC would ever be there. Usually the conversations last a while and are clear, but sometimes they can be very brief and hard to follow.
What to make of all of that? I don't know. I imagine many people would find Waking Life insufferable. I haven't watched it in many years but I still find it pretty incredible. It's a film of words and images, as most all films are, but one in which the images and words have almost no connection or concern for each other. I find some segments of it fascinating, some stirring, some puzzling, and some just bemusing3. It glides around and makes you feel some and makes you think more and then it's over. Just because I have the chance to do it, here's the final monologue of the movie, delivered by Linklater himself, which I must think about all the time.
I'm not sure what to make of it on a Head Space level. I don't think my dreams have ever felt like this. I never remember them well, so who really knows, but I never remember much in the way of talking happening in them, nor do I recall feeling like such a passive participant. There's an argument to be made that the movie is a record of who MC is. All these characters are facets of his identity and his mind, however large or small. He's walking through himself and trying to work through what the world is and his ideas about it. Maybe that was the intent, and maybe it wasn't.
Mostly I think Linklater had a bunch of thoughts that he was working through and wanted to express, so he packaged them this way because it worked. So this is his dream, which becomes our movie. Which we'll take into our dreams and then bring back out into life again.
Programming Note: I will be abstaining from an Anyhoo during June and July due to the fact that is summer and I have fun things I'd like to do outside.
Coming up next time, I learn to dream a little bigger, darling, with the divisive and inevitable... Inception!
I am required to report that after Buster's sleep soul emerges from his napping body (impressive effects!) he makes sure to grab the soul of his ghost hat from his hat's... body(?).
Obligatory mention of the fact Buster fractured his neck doing the train/water tower stunt, an injury which wasn't discovered until years later.
There is a bit where Alex Jones has a car with a loudspeaker on it and he's going around doing his whole bit. I have to imagine all the words are Linklater's though, because even given that it is very much a sweaty-man-rant, it does have a more humanistic and optimistic quality than you'd expect from him.