So I fell asleep watching A Scanner Darkly the other night, and maybe it was that I was tired, that it was Friday, that I should really just go straight to bed instead of making a big dinner and watching a movie or a week's worth of television, which is what I normally do. Maybe I just can't get as much out of a Friday night as I used to, or once thought I could, or incorrectly remember myself doing for all those years. Or maybe it's that Richard Linklater's movies, no matter how interesting or odd or likable, no matter how well put together and original and mind-blowing, just simply put me to sleep.
The thing I remember most about Slacker is waking up in the theater, at about 2 a.m., wondering what happened to those guys who were talking about Madonna's pap smear or whatever was happening when I fell zonked out after, I do admit, a long day of drinking. Waking Life, I napped through the middle third, and that was on a Saturday, maybe even in the afternoon. School of Rock and Dazed and Confused, however, you had my full attention. As far as I can remember.
I was enjoying Scanner Darkly, too, especially Robert Downey Jr.'s excellently lucid paranoid, a la Hunter S. Thompson, and I was laughing, or trying to, or dreaming I was, at the scene with the stolen bike. And blinking in and out of consciousness, eyes half open, the rotoscope animation looked live-action, crisp and real and washed out by the sun, like pretty much any day in Orange County. An even cooler effect than he intended, I think.
Maybe there's something about the pacing, the motion of his movies, that lulls me to sleep. The back and forth and back and forth conversations that don't really go anywhere, the evenly paced cuts between two people who barely move, rocking in their own personal inertia grooves. Whatever it is, it's not unpleasant, it's a movie experience unlike others, and I wonder if I could capture, repeat it, rely on it. Put it in a bottle, take it whenever I need it, like a little Linklater pill.
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