"They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

I'm presently making a huge mistake:

I'm attempting to multi-task while watching Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Bad move. Most of the film is dialogue/discourse, and most of the discourse is thick with philosophy and heavy ideas. A lot of the people are speaking quickly and I'm having trouble keeping up, since I'm not devoting my full attention to it. What I'm catching, though, I love. It's giving me a much clearer sense of Linklater and his aims in film.

Now that I've seen Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, A Scanner Darkly (which I really didn't like), and this, I guess I have to go back to the beginning of his filmography and see Slacker and Dazed and Confused. And I want to find subUrbia on VHS still, since I really enjoyed reading the play.

As far as I can tell, 1990s Linklater seems to be preoccupied with Gen X angst and 20-somethings coming of age. One thing I love about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is that in seeing how Jesse and Celine grow and mature between 1995 and 2004, you consequently see how Linklater's grown. I also like that about Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites and Before Sunrise is not the same as Ethan Hawke 10 years later.

A lot of people don't like him. I do. The more interviews I read with him, the more I respect him. Gen X-ers came of age in the mid-'90s and he had to do it on film for an international audience. It seems like he had to endure condemnation for that for so long, that looking back, he has a different kind of an attitude that seems to say, "I'm doing what I want, I'm looking for fulfillment, and if you don't like what I'm doing, fuck you." Very Jersey, haha. He did, if I recall, go to high school here. This is from an interview that came out right after he did Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

EW: Do you feel more in the zone creatively now than you did at the peak of your infamy as a Gen-X icon 10 years ago?
Hawke: Absolutely. We as a culture love to celebrate people in their early 20s. But it's not a comfortable place to be in your mid-20s. You don't know who you are as a person. You're screwing up left and right. It's very awkward. I've found that the older I get, the easier it is to be the person you want to be. Self-importance has a stranglehold on people in their early 20s. That's the razor's edge you need to walk: to take yourself seriously but not too seriously.

Did it make you feel vulnerable to revisit [your] novel [when adapting it for film] after being so criticized for its self-absorption?
If you're me, there's a lot of advantages that come with it and a lot of disadvantages that come with it. People never hesitate to tell me when they think I'm an asshole.

So aren't you tempted to bury that part of yourself and hope people forget?
I can't. I buck at that. I was too young to be held accountable for how you felt about me when I was 23. I enjoy life too much to let myself be defined by that.

Are you happy with how it turned out?
It was a weird opportunity to get to make such a personal film in such a corporate age. To use cinema for self-expression in an age when everything is supposed to be a commodity for sale, I felt so privileged, and all of that was such a luxury. People who don't like my film don't like it passionately because they get this idea that self-reflective art is an act of egregious narcissism. And if that is true, what do we say to Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, to Proust to Whitman? You start to take a certain pride in their hatred of it. But the truth is, I'm really not only interested in self-reflective art. There's also a bunch of other stuff I'd rather do.

That's encouraging.

I understand why people denounce anything that even hints at self-importance and -involvement--I do it too. But part of me thinks, what is art for, if not for expression? And what's wrong with a little self-reflection, when so many people go through life without ever stepping back and really looking at themselves? Or without anyone ever really looking at them?

I'll probably look back at this some day and laugh at how self-involved and self-reflecting I was. I kind of am already. I'm okay with that. Everything is absurd, and sometimes all you can do is laugh at it all.