Home

Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) is an experimental dramatic film that follows a boy and his family growing up over a 12-year period of time. This deeply affective film received widespread critical acclaim and industry recognition. Boyhood was the recipient of six Academy Award nominations, five Golden Globe Award nominations, nearly perfect scores from movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic and ranked fifth on the BBC’s list of the best films of the 21st Century.1 When a highly innovative and exceptionally well-regarded film like Boyhood comes along, we should try to understand not only what the film has to say about the process of growing up, but also what it shows us about the limits and the possibilities of the art of filmmaking itself. In order to appreciate what makes Boyhood special, we need to start by analysing the movie in the context of conventional portrayals of adults and children aging on film. This article begins by asking what this cinematic experiment shows us about how adults and children age on film and the connection between the aging of characters and the aging of actors playing those characters. This leads to an exploration of three interrelated aspects of the cinematic experiment in Boyhood. First, the film poses interesting questions about whether individuals can preserve their childhood identity when they grow up. Second, and perhaps somewhat overlooked by viewers and critics, the film examines how individuals cope with finding and losing father figures in their lives. Third, the failure of viewers to acknowledge that actors are aging in front of their eyes reveals something essential about the relationship between the ontology of film and how viewers relate to issues of mortality and immortality. It is important to add that each of these themes has deep personal significance to me and that discussing my own responses (or lack of response) to these elements in the film is an integral part of my investigation.

Aging on film: childhood rediscovered

Texas native Richard Linklater, who wrote, produced and directed Boyhood, is a self-taught filmmaker who rose to prominence during the independent film renaissance of the early 1990s. He is widely admired for his innovative and experimental approach to filmmaking. He structured several films around long conversations (the “Before Trilogy”) and he used rotoscoping to mix live action and animation in Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Exploring the relationship between cinematic time experienced by the audience and time as experienced by the characters in his films is an especially important theme in many Linklater films.2 The action in several of his films takes place in a single day. These include Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Tape (2001), Before Sunrise (1995), and Before Sunset (2004), which appears to take place in real time. Confining the timeframe of a dramatic film to a 24-hour period is an unusual method of cinematic storytelling, though it has become more common recently. In such films, character growth and plot development are highly compressed relative to the timeframe of the story. In stark contrast, Linklater’s “Before Trilogy” examines the development of a romantic relationship over nine-year intervals portrayed by the same two actors, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

Boyhood is Linklater’s most recent film that explores aging in the cinematic medium. In an interview Linklater says that experiencing the intensity of being a new dad himself was the catalyst for him wanting to make a film about childhood.3 When he first contemplated the project, telling a story about childhood in the medium of film presented a huge artistic challenge.4 For the director, the period of time called “childhood” cannot be captured by a single representative dramatic stretch. Instead, he believes that childhood gains meaning across many years and many disparate moments.5 Eventually he hit upon the idea of filming the movie a little bit each year, an unprecedented cinematic technique in the genre of dramatic films.In choosing to make an experimental film about childhood, Linklater was aware of some key limitations in showing how children age on film. It is important to make explicit what those limitations are, not only to understand more clearly the artistic challenges that Linklater faced, but also to gain some new insights into how the medium of film addresses the issue of growing up.

There are two sets of standard cinematic conventions used to show aging on film, one for adult characters and one for child characters. When adult characters age ten to twenty years in a film we readily accept the use of makeup, lighting, weight gain or other techniques to make the actors playing those parts look the right age. For example, actors playing a young couple in their early 20s at the beginning of a film can be made to look like thirtysomethings who have two grade school children later in the film. When there is a very large age gap for an adult character portrayed in a film, different actors will play the younger and older versions of the character. For example, In Steven Spielberg’s World War II drama, Saving Private Ryan (1998), Matt Damon plays the young James Francis Ryan character during the Allied invasion of France and Harrison Young plays the elderly James Francis Ryan character visiting a military cemetery in contemporary France with his family at the end of the film.

The dynamic of aging on film is quite different for children. The standard cinematic procedure for showing a child aging on film is to have a different actor play the child at an older age or as an adult. For example, in the 2005 film Walk the Line, directed by James Mangold, Joaquin Phoenix plays the Johnny Cash character and Ridge Canipe plays the “young” Johnny Cash. Typically, the younger and older actor bear some physical resemblance to each other in order to help viewers suspend their disbelief about two different people playing the same character. The replacement of an actor may be done more than once depending on the particular film. That is, a character shown at ages seven, 12 and 20 may need three different actors to play these parts. As film viewers we readily understand and accept the use of this procedure. It is virtually impossible for the same actor to play the part of both a seven-year old child and a 12 year-old child or a 12 year-old child and a 20 year-old young man because the physical and psychological differences between characters of these ages are simply too great to satisfy the accepted conventions of a dramatic film.

In Boyhood, of course, Linklater did not need to use the standard cinematic conventions of character aging. The two main child actors are not replaced when they get older and viewers do not have to suspend their disbelief about different actors playing the same role as they would in a conventional filmmaking. Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater play the parts of Mason and Samantha throughout the film and the two main adult characters do not have to be made up to look the right age. For Linklater, filming the same child actors over 12 years solves the problem of showing childhood as a series of disparate moments. It also reveals how difficult it is for conventional films to assure viewers that childhood identity can be maintained onscreen.

Boyhood is a creative response to a particular kind of scepticism or uncertainty about children growing up that is inherent in film. The replacement of a child actor by an older one using standard cinematic conventions creates the possibility that viewers might have some doubts about whether the identity of the character on film is maintained in the transition from one actor to another. That is, the replacement of child actors on film raises the question of whether those characters can hold on to their childhood identity. Linklater’s cinematic experiment in Boyhood attempts to overcome this sense of doubt. By not replacing his child actors, Linklater shows the audience that it is possible to preserve a child’s identity on film when she or he grows up. It is as if Linklater wants to assure us, contrary to everything we have previously seen on film, that we can indeed hold on to our childhood memories and experiences when we grow up.

Linklater’s cinematic experiment demonstrates a second way that we can preserve our childhood identity on film. In a conventional film in which older actors replace child actors, child characters often appear to grow up all at once. In consecutive scenes, for example, a 12-year-old suddenly becomes a 20-year-old and growing up is not shown as a slow process that occurs over time. When a child grows up too fast, the person misses out on some part of her childhood innocence, which presumably can never be recovered. When a child grows up all at once on film, this loss of childhood innocence seems all but certain.

The essence of the conventional portrayal of a child who grows up on film is a sense of something that is mostly lost. Childhood is lost either because we have doubts about the child’s identity when he grows up or because it goes by too fast. All that remains from our childhood in conventional films that show the same character as a child and an adult is the memory of a formative event or symbolic object. In a sense, every portrayal of a child who has grown up on film is a variation on the “Rosebud” theme from Citizen Kane. In his dying moments Charles Foster Kane remembered what it felt like to be an innocent child playing in the snow, but no one else in the film could figure out what “Rosebud” meant to him. Viewers who know the meaning of Rosebud, on the other hand, see that Kane’s memory of childhood innocence was lost forever when the flames consumed his sleigh at the end of the film.

In Boyhood, Linklater restores the growing up process to the two main child characters. Growing up proceeds slowly in Boyhood and the children have ample opportunities to experience both the innocence of childhood as well as some of the growing pains. Knowing that Mason and Samantha are not growing up too fast undoubtedly provides a great deal of comfort to viewers who are used to seeing a more abrupt ending to childhood innocence on film.

What is lost when a child misses out on the growing up process on film? Each of us has our own ideas about the kinds of things that are worth preserving from childhood. For Linklater in this film it is clearly creativity.  Beginning with the very first shots in the film and continuing right up to the end, Boyhood portrays children growing up as a struggle between creativity and responsibility. In the film’s very first shot, Mason looks up at the sky, contemplating the wonders of the heavens. In the next scene his sister Samantha finds him playing outside so that she can tell him that it is time for him to come home for dinner. The struggle between creativity and responsibility is repeated throughout the movie as one adult figure after another tells Mason that he has to learn to become more responsible, whether it is his parents, his high school photography teacher or his manager at the restaurant where he works. Mason resists the pressure to become more responsible and eventually starts developing his creative talents as a photographer in high school. From Mason’s point of view and from the point of view of the film as a whole, the adult role models in the film do little to reassure him as a character in the film and us as viewers that becoming a responsible adult is a path that he or anyone else would want to follow.

This question of preserving your childhood identity struck a responsive chord with me when I first saw Boyhood in 2015. My younger son Isaac was starting his last semester of high school and, as I watched him living through his last vestiges of “boyhood,” I wondered how much of his childhood identity he would carry into his young adult life and beyond. As an adult I have always been very conscious of keeping my inner child alive, not just as a memory of things that happened to me when I was young, but as a part of my lived experience in the present. I wanted this to be true for my son as well, but I didn’t know how to share this piece of wisdom with him. Perhaps seeing Boyhood and reading this piece will inspire him to become more conscious of preserving the parts of his inner child that matter most to him.

Aging on film: finding and losing fathers

In a film that is purportedly focused on the problems of children growing up, it is important to note that all four of the main characters struggle with the process of growth and maturation. In addition to Mason’s effort to maintain his creativity and Samantha’s more generic problems associated with becoming a young woman, both parents, each in their own way, struggle mightily with accepting parental responsibility in their lives, which we also think of as a kind of growing up process.

Throughout most of the movie, Mason Sr. has difficulty settling down and accepting his parental obligations. He does not see his young children for some time when he moves away to Alaska and when he comes back to Texas, he is portrayed as a rather immature adult. We might say that he has trouble growing up. Eventually, he remarries, has a child with his new wife and tries to become a more responsible father to Mason and Samantha. For Olivia growing up involves a trade-off between assuming parental responsibilities and being happy. Olivia is portrayed as a responsible parent who works very hard to develop a successful career for herself and to provide financial security for her family. Unfortunately, she fails miserably in her efforts to find long-term happiness in her relationships with men. She separates from her boyfriend early in the film because he resents the attention she gives to her children. Her second husband Bill is a domineering and physically abusive alcoholic and her third husband, Jim, is an Iraqi war veteran who also has a drinking problem. When Olivia helps Mason pack for college in her last scene in the film, she worries that her life has virtually ended now that she has fulfilled her parental tasks and says about her current state and future prospects, “I just thought there would be more.” For Olivia, personal growth in her career and being a successful parent do not feel satisfying without a suitable mate to share the rest of her life. She experiences growing up as a false promise of happiness.

Olivia thought there would be more to life

The parenting struggles of Mason Sr. and Olivia play a useful structural role in Boyhood. In showing both the children and their parents going through a process of growing up, Linklater creates thematic unity in a film that, as many critics and reviewers have noted, is not plot driven. That is, growing up is the kind of game that the whole family can play. More importantly, the struggles of their parents raise deeper questions about the role of fatherhood in the lives of Mason and Samantha. Simply put, they must cope with the experience of losing and finding father figures in their lives. As I noted above, Mason Sr. is not around much early in their lives and takes a long time to become a trustworthy parent. While Mason and Samantha are waiting for their father to mature, boyfriends and stepfathers enter and leave their lives.

The issues about fatherhood that Mason and Samantha face in Boyhood have notable biographical similarities to Linklater’s own experience. Linklater is the child of divorced parents and lived with his mother who remarried when he was a child. His biological father lived about an hour away in Houston and also remarried. What Linklater remembers most vividly from his own childhood is the feeling of not having a father living at home and being embarrassed to be the only kid he knew who had divorced parents.6  Like Mason and Samantha, Linklater also had to cope with the experience of losing and finding fathers. Based on his comments about the autobiographical nature of many parts of the film, Boyhood can be interpreted as a vehicle for Linklater to reflect on and reimagine his own relationship with the various father figures in his life (later in this section I will return to this point in relation to a discussion of Linklater as a filmmaker).

Throughout the film viewers see surrogate father figures primarily in relation to Olivia’s ongoing struggle to find a suitable mate. There are two interesting points about Olivia’s relationships. First, there is almost a complete absence of visible romance and intimacy. Stepfathers just suddenly arrive on the scene and then exert unpleasant and unwanted parental authority over the children.7 In sharp contrast, when Mason is a teenager we do see him romantically involved with his girlfriend.

There are a number of ways to interpret this contrast. First, we could say that the film shows this dynamic from the child’s point of view, which is what Linklater himself claims.8 Perhaps because Mason/Linklater resents the various surrogate father figures in his life, he doesn’t see them as capable of having an intimate relationship with his mother. Alternatively, we could say that we don’t see intimacy between Olivia and her partners because they don’t really love each other. The second point concerns how Linklater frames the beginnings and endings of Olivia’s relationships. Mason is present as a witness in every scene in which Olivia is starting or ending a relationship. Early in the movie when Olivia and her boyfriend Ted are arguing about her parental responsibilities, Mason is watching as their relationship disintegrates before his eyes. A few scenes later, Mason witnesses the spark between his mother and her college professor, Bill, who will soon become his first stepfather. Mason and Samantha are on hand later in the film when Olivia walks out on Bill. Finally, Mason watches as his mom and Jim talk on the porch just prior to his becoming Mason’s second stepfather.

Mason watches his mom & Ted argue about parental responsibilities

Mason watches his mom and Bill flirting

Mason watches his mom and Jim flirting

Mason’s presence at these moments is unexpected. We tend to think of beginnings and endings of romantic relationships as private moments that mostly involve the couple themselves. These private moments are usually not shared with other people and especially not with children. In these scenes the camera shows Mason’s face in close up shots trying to make sense of what he is watching. That is, he is trying to understand how and why father figures are entering and leaving his life. In this sense Boyhood is a film about a boy and his sister trying to “find” their father.

As viewers, we are never really sure whether Mason understands the mystery of fathers entering and leaving his life. For most of the film he is probably too young to comprehend the vagaries of adult relationships. Mason, like Linklater when he was growing up, wants to have a regular father in his life, someone who is around everyday who can be both a buddy and a parental authority figure. None of the various father figures in the film is capable of giving him that. For example, Mason Sr. is portrayed as more of a buddy than an authority figure. His stepfather Bill, on the other hand, abuses his parental authority by his rigid approach to household chores and later in the film when he forces Mason to cut his long hair very short. The film itself provides an ambiguous message about whether children can find their lost fathers and ultimately, Mason’s desire to find his father is, at best, only partially satisfied.

(The problem of finding lost fathers in this film resonated deeply with me when I watched it. Jokingly, I like to say that I come from a series of broken homes – my mother was married three times and my father was married five times. My brother and I lived with our mother and her three husbands before we moved out on our own and our biological father entered and exited our lives several times over the years. This parade of fathers and stepfathers entering and exiting my life has certainly had a large impact on how I think and feel about fatherhood. In particular, it has made me wonder whether, in trying to be a good father to my children in the context of a long and stable marriage, I could somehow become a substitute father to myself and replace, to a certain extent, my own lost father or fathers.)

I now want to return to the question of how Linklater uses Boyhood to reinterpret his own relationship with fatherhood. I noted earlier in this essay that the original impetus for making this film, according to Linklater, was the intensity of being a new dad. Like me when I was growing up, Linklater did not have a stable personal model of fatherhood, so to a certain extent, he had to create his own model of fatherhood in the process of making this film. This model of fatherhood is built on two pillars. First, you need to recognize the limits of your authority as a parent. This involves both accepting a large degree of uncertainty about how things will turn out and not trying to control too many aspects of the growing up process. Second, to be a good father you have to stay in touch with your own inner child. In other words, the two overarching themes of missing childhoods and lost fathers that I have discussed in this essay are intertwined in this film.

In order to see how these issues play out in the film, we have to look at some of the challenges that Linklater faced in making Boyhood. Linklater had to give up a certain amount of directorial control normally associated with the filmmaking process. First, the length of the project made it impractical to use a completed script before he started filming. Instead, he worked on the script each year as the film took shape. He also collaborated closely with his four main actors to develop the characters and the story lines in the film. Second, making a film over 12 years obviously introduces a number of uncertainties into the production process. Similar concerns about completing the film would apply to adult actors Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette. In addition, there was even more uncertainty about the child stars of the film in terms of both completing their roles and their acting competence. The acting demands placed on a child actor are much more modest than the demands placed on a teenaged actor. When he started the project, Linklater did not know whether his daughter, Lorelei, and Ellar Coltrane would even be interested in acting when they became teenagers or that they would have the skills needed to play their increasingly more demanding roles as they grew up. No doubt Linklater had tremendous confidence in his ability to pick actors who could complete their roles and his ability to coax the necessary performances from the child actors. Nonetheless, in undertaking the project, he had to accept a much greater level of uncertainty than in a conventional dramatic film.

What does the film tell us about the role of the director in making an experimental film about preserving childhood identity and learning how to be a good father? It tells us that you have to relinquish full control over the artistic process in order to make it possible for viewers to realize that they can maintain their childhood identity. Linklater acknowledges this point about artistic control explicitly in an interview.9 As the filmmaker, Linklater only has a very general idea of how he wanted Boyhood to turn out or whether he will be able to complete it at all. That is, the entire film project is grounded in a sense of incompleteness and uncertainty. So, in order to realize the full potential of the cinematic medium to portray the growing up process, to create and nurture the film as a father would create and nurture his child, Linklater has to unleash the creativity of his own inner child, just like the character Mason. We might say that after many years of making films about aging and personal development, Linklater himself grows up considerably as a filmmaker and a father in the process of making this extraordinary experimental film.

Aging on film: confronting/avoiding mortality

In an interview, Richard Linklater says that “time is sort of a lead character” in Boyhood.10 What does this mean? I think it refers to the fact that the four main characters in the film are affected by time quite literally; time “acts” on them because the actors playing those characters are aging right in front of our eyes. That is, the mortality of the actors is on full display for viewers to see. The display of human mortality in a dramatic film tends to undermine the normal experience of viewers. That is, at the heart of Boyhood there is a deep inner tension between the ontological nature of film as a medium that confronts people with their own immortality and the manifest mortality of the actors who visibly age on screen. For the most part, viewers resolve this tension by not acknowledging that this film is confronting them with their own mortality. Before I discuss these philosophical issues in more detail, I want to say a few words about how Linklater approaches mortality in the film.

In an interview with Variety after the film was released, Linklater says, “to me, an issue like mortality is always there.” 11 But in another interview discussing the film he says that movies are an area of life that can cause time to stop.12 That is, Linklater wants to evoke both mortality and a sense of timelessness or immortality in Boyhood. On the one hand, most viewers seeing the film for the first time know because of advertising, film reviews or word of mouth that it is about a child or children growing up and time passing by. And if they don’t know it before they watch the film, it becomes clear enough at some point during the film that children are actually growing up on the screen. On the other hand, Linklater goes out of his way to disguise the passage of time in the film on a scene-by-scene basis. Linklater does not provide prominent visual clues or other filmic devices such as title cards to mark the passage of time in the film. When a scene changes in the movie, it is often difficult for the viewer to discern whether the new scene is one day later or one year later than the previous scene. Not marking the passage of time in obvious ways contributes to a sense of timelessness in the film.

I want to return now to the broader philosophical questions about the relationship between film and mortality. At one level, actors on screen possess a sense of immortality in part because films themselves and performances in those films are preserved or recorded for an indefinite period of time. When I was a young adult, for example, I enjoyed watching Humphrey Bogart films long after the Hollywood star and icon, “Bogart,” had died. Bogart could “come alive for me” anytime I went to a revival theatre and watched The Maltese Falcon (1941) or To Have and Have Not (1944). But the sense of immortality on film is deeper than the preservation of a roll of film. It concerns the ontological status of what the screen image preserves.

Philosopher and film theorist Stanley Cavell articulates his view of the relationship between the ontology of film and immortality in The World Viewed. According to Cavell “in a motion picture no live human being is up there. But a human something is. . . in our presence while we are not in his.” 13 This human something that appears on film is virtually immortal: it persists over time as long as there is a way to view a film. Cavell claims that the ontology of film places viewers in a situation in which they must acknowledge their own sense of immortality. As he puts it, “A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality.”14 When we watch movies we are driven to disavow the passage of time and the possibility of our own mortality. A sense of immortality is an essential part of the human experience of watching films; as Linklater says above, it is an area of life where time stops.

Boyhood is a film that tends to undermine both the sense of immortality of actors on film and our own sense of immortality as viewers of films. When we watch actors who are aging in Boyhood, the human something that we see on film is fully mortal.We might expect that seeing the mortality of actors on screen would be somewhat disconcerting to viewers, but quite the opposite seems to be true based on comments by reviewers and critics and the favourable ratings by moviegoers. When mortality is presented to viewers in this film, we fail to acknowledge it in certain key respects. Instead, viewers and critics alike applaud the realism of the film. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of viewing this experimental film is how utterly normal it feels. The story unfolds over a lengthy period of time during which Mason and his family deal with a variety of familiar problems concerning parenting, personal relationships and stepfamilies. As we watch the movie, none of this feels strange or surprising to us even though this is the first time that any of us have seen the lead actors in a major dramatic film actually age during the course of this two hour and 46-minute movie.

In reflecting on the meaning of the film, I also experienced the avoidance of mortality in a very personal way. After I watched Boyhood and wrote the first draft of this essay, I failed to acknowledge that mortality is an important element in the film. Most likely I failed to acknowledge mortality in the film because it was such a painful reality in my own life at the time. A number of people that I am close to have died in the last few years and in the early stages of writing this essay, I was unable to confront intellectually and philosophically the sense of loss that I have been feeling. Now, a few years removed from these deaths, I am perhaps readier to acknowledge the presence of mortality in my life and in the film.

Our individual and collective failure to acknowledge our beliefs is an important theme in Cavell’s aesthetic philosophy. In daily life we sometimes waver between acknowledging and suppressing our thoughts, feelings, interests and desires. According to Cavell, works of art and especially great works of art help us to acknowledge thoughts, feelings, interests and desires that we might ordinarily suppress, including acknowledging our own mortality. Boyhood is a work of art, perhaps even a great work of art, that has helped me to acknowledge my grief and sense of loss during a challenging time in my life.

Endnotes:

  1. Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 97% with an average rating of 9.2/10 and Metacritic 100% as of January 2019. The BBC List is at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160819-the-21st-centurys-100-greatest-films.
  2. This idea is explored extensively in David T. Johnson’s study of Linklater’s films, Richard Linklater (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). In his introductory chapter, “Time is a Lie,” Johnson summarizes Linklater’s work as “the exploration of temporality, particularly one that celebrates an attendance to the present,” p. 9.
  3. Marlow Stern, “The Making of ‘Boyhood’: Richard Linklater’s 12-Year Journey to Create an American Masterpiece” in The Daily Beast, July 10, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-making-of-boyhood-richard-linklaters-12-year-journey-to-create-an-american-masterpiece.
  4. Telling a story about childhood would not present any special problems, for example, in the medium of literature, which allows the author complete freedom to write about different junctures in the growing up process.
  5. Comments by Linklater in Nathan Heller, “Moment to Moment” New Yorker, June 30, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/moment-to-moment.
  6. Michael Cavna, “Richard Linklater’s Career Has All Been Leading Up to His ‘Boyhood’ Masterpiece” in The Washington Post, 7-17-14, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/richard-linklaters-career-has-all-been-leading-up-to-his-boyhood-masterpiece/2014/07/17/5715a2ca-0dc4-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html.
  7. Linklater claims that this dynamic in the movie was drawn from his own experience of resenting his stepfather exerting authority over him, Ibid.
  8. Ibid.
  9. David Gritten, “Boyhood: Richard Linklater interview,” The Telegraph, Feb. 9, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/10944351/Boyhood-Richard-Linklater-interview.html.
  10. Ann Hornaday, “Boyhood – Experimental Film at its Best,” Dawn, July 18, 2014, http://www.standard.net/Entertainment/2014/08/02/Boyhood-Experimental-film-at-its-best.
  11. Thelma Adams, ‘Boyhood’ Screenplay: Linklater’s Subtle Exploration of Mortality,” Variety, Feb. 5, 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/awards/boyhood-screenplay-linklaters-subtle-exploration-of-mortality-1201422850/.
  12. Steven Zeitchik, ‘Boyhood’ director Richard Linklater versus time: the big stare-down,” Los Angeles Time, July 3, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-ca-richard-linklater-20140706-story.html.
  13. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). p. 26.
  14. Ibid., p. 160.