So what is this movie really about?

I take it at face value. He is dreaming. Each little vignette is a different dream that he is drifting among, and along the way he reaches a lucid dream state.

I don't buy your idea that this is an afterlife, or a pre-life, or anything like that. The entire movie takes place in the subconscious dreaming mind of one man. One young man who is a thinker and a dreamer, who asks himself all of life's big questions but hasn't figured out the answers yet. And at night, he dreams of these conversations, but they're really conversations he's having with himself.

In the end, when Linklater - the writer and director - tells him that he can "just wake up," that's what the protagonist does. He wakes up. When we watch him float away, becoming smaller and smaller until he disappears, we are watching him return to conscious state. He is waking up.

You expected to see him entering a baby. I was expecting to see him wake up in his bed, read the digital clock clearly, and turn on the lights with the light switch.

I do agree with you on one thing ... great film, loved it.

I thought he was embracing eternity and joining God.

Assuming Direct Control

The film itself is purely up for interpretation. Is it a dream? Is it purgatory? Is it a drug trip? Lol

The film is about dreams but how would one dream up so many characters with such vast ideas on life's big questions?

In the beginning our protagonist is a child. He is being sucked up above yet remains where he is for now by grabbing a car door handle. Could it be that he is about to wake up but he doesn't? Perhaps as his dream begins he was almost interrupted in his sleep and was going to wake up. And in the end of the movie he actually does wake up into the real world?

The two scenes can also represent death. Is he dead and waiting in purgatory? In the beginning is he afraid of letting go and at the end he accepts and floats up to the heavens?

Also in the beginning we see musicians practicing. They are preparing for something just as our protagonist is preparing for his journey. The music carries us from person to person, and just before his last encounter with Richard Linklater the band is there. They have been preparing for this moment just like he has. They are performing what they practiced, this is their moment, this is what it all has been leading to. And our protagonist sees Linklater playing pinball and has his last talk.

If it is all a dream then everything Linklater says is a product of his own subconscious. But if not then Linklater's speech on death and resisting God's invitation to heaven might be the entire film's true purpose. What if everyone he has met thus far is dead? Himself included.

What we know is the entire movie is a dream. There is not one scene where he is conscious in waking life. Whether it's a dream-like purgatory or not depends on your interpretation. But the entire movie exists outside of waking life. It is only when he leaves this dream or this purgatory that the films ends.



JGL is my boyfriend, he just doesn't know yet.

Pretty much nothing. It's an interesting concept, but his movie is nothing more than a series of pretentious, moronic psychobabble. I can't remember when I've been so BORED by a movie. Yikes!

Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar, or doesn't.

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My interpretation is that the guy dies, possibly run over by the car, and then everything that happens to him are the 12~ minutes that Ethan Hawk and Julie Delpy were talking about in their scene together. Then, we see the guy's brain death when he elevates to the sky.

But that is not the important thing about this film. Almost each vignette is absolutely brilliant and full of content to think and discuss for long.

Brilliant film!