Early in Examined Life writer/director Astra Taylor appears onscreen to address the problem of approaching philosophy in a movie as opposed to a book. With a book we’re able to set our own pace, to comb over the material at will. Ideas receive more exhaustive treatment than can be granted in a movie, especially one in which eight subjects receive only ten minutes each to speak. Taylor’s wise to confess from the outset her awareness of her project’s limitations, that she can perhaps strive to, above all, as Samuel Beckett would have had it, fail better. Yet even within the constraints imposed upon Examined Life, one can’t help but consider how much more dynamically this movie could have failed.
As with Taylor’s Zizek!, what makes Examined Life a sympathetic and engaging yet finally frustrating experience is a sensibility that feels star-struck and easily sated. The problem with Taylor’s subjects—which include of course the flamboyant Slavoj Zizek—isn’t so much that they’re only given ten minutes as they’re too often speaking so generally as to provide only superficial impressions of their individual philosophical proposals. Avital Ronell for example, charged with kicking things off, gives us a good taste of her personality—she makes a cheeky comment about the injustice of her not being allowed more screen-time that her colleagues—but conveys almost nothing of the particularity of her insights or arguments. Likewise, Cornel West, a self-described “bluesman of the life of the mind,” is a rant-master flash whose championing of dissatisfaction and contagious enthusiasm for music, art and literature is hugely entertaining. But he leaves us with little more than a blur of references, and really, what the hell is a “Chekhovian Christian”?
Peter Singer by contrast turns his ten minutes into a concise mini-lecture, yet the way he addresses applied ethics, questioning consumer choices while strolling along New York’s Fifth Avenue, feels facile, using pretty flimsy analogies aimed at stimulating our guilt rather than our critical faculties while working under the assumption that what constitutes the common good is unambiguous. Zizek’s segment works much better, partly because of his knack for provocative one-liners—“We should become more artificial!” he declares, sweating furiously before a backdrop of towering trash—yet he still has a hard time approaching something like full coherence.
Examined Life is handicapped by its paucity of dialogue. Everyone’s given their podium but, with one exception, no one to interact with. Taylor appears fleetingly but, opening statement aside, is literally just smiling and nodding. For this reason, the segment featuring Judith Butler and activist Sunaura Taylor is in many regards the most successful. They wander through San Francisco, discussing body difference and interdependency, at one point entering a thrift store to buy a sweater for Sunaura—the very act of doing so going some distance to elucidating their subject. Sunaura, the director’s sister, is a high-functioning disabled person, confronted daily with the discomforts and limitations of her community.
The movie that Examined Life reminded me of most wasn’t another documentary but rather Richard Linklater’s animated feature Waking Life, and I have to say that Waking Life is in some ways more philosophically engaging for inviting not only monologues and dialogues about ideas, but also fantasy sequences that embody and dramatize these ideas. Let me say that I really love how Taylor had her subjects walking as they spoke—except for West, who does his thing in the backseat of Taylor’s car, and Michael Hardt, who rows a little boat in Central Park—evoking the timeless relationship between walking and thought. But walking also implies movement and exploration, and, for all the critical heavyweights onscreen, by the time Examined Life is over we’re left feeling like we should have gotten a little farther.
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