Directed by - Richard Linklater
Writing credits - Richard Linklater
Trevor Jack Brooks .... Young Boy Playing Paper Game
Lorelie Linklater .... Young Girl Playing Paper Game
Wiley Wiggins.... Main Character
Glover Gill .... Accordion Player
Lara Hicks .... Violin Player
Ames Asbell .... Violin Player
Leigh Mahoney .... Violin Player
Sara Nelson .... Cello Player
Jeanine Attaway .... Piano Player
Erik Grostic .... Bass Player
Bill Wise .... Boat Car Guy
Robert C. Solomon .... Philosophy Professor
Kim Krizan .... Herself
Eamonn Healy .... Shape-Shifting Man
J.C. Shakespeare .... Self-Burning Man
Opening scene of the movie, two children playing with a
'cootie-catcher'. The message on one of the inside flaps reads -
Dream is destiny.
Boat Car Guy - Ahoy there matey, you in for the long haul? You
need a little hitch in your get along, a little lift on down the line?
Wiley Wiggins - Oh yeah, actually I was waiting for a cab or
something but, uh, if you want to...
Boat Car Guy - Alright, don't miss the boat.
Wiley Wiggins - Hey, thanks.
Boat Car Guy - Not a problem. Anchors away! So what do you think
of my little vessel? She's what we call see-worthy. S-E-E,
see with your eyes. I feel like my transport should be an extension of
my personality. Voila. And this, this is like my little window to the
world and every minute's a different show. Now, I may not understand
it, I may not necessarily agree with it, but I'll tell you what, I
accept it, just sort of glide along. You want to keep things on an even
keel, I guess it's what I'm saying, you want to go with the flow. The
sea refuses no river. The idea is to remain in a state of constant
departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good byes.
The ride does not require an explanation, just occupants, that's where
you guys come in. It's like you come onto this planet with a crayon
box. Now you may get the eight pack, you may get the sixteen pack, but
it's all in what you do with the crayons, the colors that you're given.
And don't worry about drawing within the lines or coloring outside the
lines, I say color outside the lines, you know what I mean? Color right
off the page. Don't box me in. We're in motion to the ocean. We are not
landlocked, I'll tell you that. So, where do you want out?
Wiley Wiggins - Uh, who me? Am I first? Uh, I don't know really.
Anywhere is fine.
Boat Car Guy - Well, just, just, give me an address or something
okay?
Wiley Wiggins - Uhhhh...
Other Guy in Car - Tell you what, go up three more streets, take
a right, go two more blocks, drop this guy off on the next corner.
Wiley Wiggins - Where's that?
Boat Car Guy - Well, I don't know either but it's somewhere and
it's going to determine the course of the rest of your life. All ashore
that's going ashore. Ha, ha, ha. Dooo dooo!
Philosophy Professor - The reason I refuse to take
existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity
is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new
century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life
passionately, a sense of taking responsibility for who you are. The
ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life.
Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair
but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed
said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing
that comes out from reading these guys, is not a sense of anguish about
life so much as a real kind of exuberance, a feeling on top of it, it's
like your life is yours to create. I've read the post modernists with
some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this
awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting
left out. The more you talk about a person as a social construction or
as confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do
is you open up a whole new world of excuses, and when Sartre talks
about responsibility he's not talking about something abstract. He's
not talking about the kind of self or soul the theologians would argue
about. It's something very concrete, it's you and me talking, making
decisions, doing things and taking the consequences. It might be true
that there's six billion people in the world and counting,
nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference
first of all in material terms, it makes a difference to other people
and sets an example. In short I think the message here is that we
should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim
of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.
Self-Burning Man - Self destructive man feels completely
alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community. He
thinks to himself, I must be insane. What he fails to realize is that
society, has just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses
and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet
well-defined needs. Man wants chaos, in fact he's got to have it.
Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread, we're irresistibly
drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and
destruction. It's in all of us, we reveal in it. Sure the media tries
to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human
tragedies, but we all know the function of the media has never been to
eliminate the evils of the world - no - their job is to persuade us to
accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be
want us to be passive observers. Hey, got a match? And they haven't
given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic
participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the
puppet on the left? I feel that the time has come to project my own
inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the sociopolitical and
scientific schemes. Let my own lack of a voice be heard. (pours
gasoline on himself and sets himself on fire)
Free Will Man - In a way, in our contemporary worldview, it's
easy to think that science has come to take the place of God, but some
philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of
free will. This problem has been around for a long time, since before
Aristotle and 350 BC Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, these guys
all worried about how we can be free, if God already knows in advance
everything you're going to do. Nowadays, we know that the world
operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws
govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now... these laws
because they are so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological
achievements, but look at yourself, we're just physical systems too,
right, we're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules or mostly
water and our behavior isn't going to be an exception to these basic
physical laws. So, it starts to look like whether it's God setting
things up in advance, and knowing everything you're going to do, or
whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything, there's
not a lot of room left for freedom. So I'm like tempted to just ignore
the question, just ignore the mystery of free will. Say, oh well, it's
just a historical antidote, it's sophomoric, it's a question with no
answers, you know, just forget about it but the question keeps staring
you right in the face. Think about individuality for example, who you
are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices you make or
take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be
found guilty, or you can only be admired or respected, for things you
did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back and we
don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all your
decisions are really just a charade. Think about how it happens,
there's some electrical activity in your brain, your neurons fire, they
send a signal down into your nervous system, it passes along down into
your muscle fibers, they twitch, you might say reach out your arm.
Looks like it's a free action on your part, but every one of those,
every part of that process, is actually governed by physical law,
chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on. So now it just looks like
the big bang set up the initial conditions and the whole rest of our
history, the whole rest of human history and even before, is just sort
of playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic
fundamental physical laws. We think we're special, we think we have
some kind of special dignity but that now comes under threat. I mean,
that's really challenged by this picture. So you might be saying well
wait a minute what about quantum mechanics. I know enough contemporary
physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's... it's really
a probabilistic theory. There's room... it's loose... it's not
deterministic and that's going to enable us to understand free will.
But if you look at the details, it's not really going to help because
what happens is you have some very small quantum particles. Their
behavior is apparently a bit random. They sort of swerve. Their
behavior is absurd in the sense it's unpredictable and we can't
understand it based on anything that came before. It just does
something out of the blue according to probabilistic framework. But is
that going to help with freedom. I mean should our freedom just be a
matter of probabilities? Just some random swerving in a chaotic system?
That starts to seem like it's worse. I'd rather be a gear in a big
deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving. So we
can't just ignore the problem, we have to find room in our contemporary
world view for persons with all that entails, not just bodies, but
persons and that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding
room for choice and responsibility and try to understand individuality.
Man in Bar - The quest is to be liberated from the negative,
which is really our own will to a nothingness. And once having said yes
to the instant, the affirmation is contagious, it bursts into a chain
of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant, is to
say yes to all of existence.
Man in Bar - There are two kinds of sufferers in this world,
those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an
overabundance of life. I've always found myself in the second category.
When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is
not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advance
technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super
chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between say, Plato or Nietzsche and
the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and
the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the
Saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world
history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless
and futile addition of zeros. No greater values have developed. Hell,
the Greeks three thousand years ago just as advanced as we are. So what
are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their
real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and
that's this - which is the most universal human characteristic? Fear or
laziness?
Contact: sily@silywily.com
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