If you're up on your Hollywood gossip, you may have heard the story. A 40 something male studio executive left his wife of 15 years to live with his new lover: a 20 something Cuban man, a lawyer he met on a plane. When the story first broke, everyone seemed baffled. "Why did he do it?" "How could someone keep such a secret for such a long time?" "Why now?"

And the answer, which has become the catch-all explanation for most everything these days, is September 11. At parties or on phone conversations, people are talking about how "life is too short" and "we could go any day now." And then I hear about how my friend is going to quit his job and live in South America or another friend is going to dump her boyfriend. It's like we've all been given ecstasy and somehow it is just oh so clear how flawed our lives are. But is anyone actually changing? To date, none of my friends have quit their job, no one has gotten married or divorced, things just seem to plod along the same as always.

Every now and then, a movie comes along that somehow finds a strangely perfect synchronicity with its time. In the 1970s, it was The Conversation; in the 1980s, it was Risky Business — movies that anticipated an event or cultural shift. For me, Richard Linklater's new film, Waking Life, perfectly reflects this current post-terrorist-attack malaise — the ponderous need to do something differently, but not know what.

But the mass movie audiences haven't ventured out of the multiplexes to see Waking Life. Something more definite — a hero to tell them that, yes, the appropriate response to a drastic world event is a drastic change in lifestyle — is what the crowd wants. Film history is filled with these types of feel-good stories where, inspired by a cataclysmic event, the hero abandons his life of drudgery to pursue a lifelong passion. It's movie romance, and with planes crashing into skyscrapers and crazy foreign-looking people running around killing Americans, our lives suddenly feel more and more like the movies — so why shouldn't we, as a society of heroes, act in turn? Why shouldn't we finally put away our briefcases, pick up the easel, and paint apples for the rest of our days?

This year, Hollywood has provided a perfect allegory. If you aren't living in Osama bin Laden's cave, you know that Harry Potter made an incredible amount of money. Is it simply because it is "great, wholesome family entertainment"? I believe that movies that find this level of success have tapped into something deeper. Harry is the ideal post-terrorist-attack hero — after all, he abandons the angst-ridden world of the muggles to pursue a much more exciting life goal: to become a wizard. How many of us wouldn't like to walk out of our offices on the 23rd floor and fly off to play quidditch and cast spells? Harry's epiphany is strikingly contemporary: Life is too short to not follow your dream.

It is this kind of fantasy that gives people hope. If Harry can do it, so can I.

Yes, people are talking the rhetoric of change. But the truth is, we crave normalcy. I had drinks with a friend of mine who is considering giving up the craziness of the entertainment industry for something more stable - becoming a doctor. There's a lot of chatter about bucking the system, of some great phantom social movement that will inevitably occur as a result of the attacks. But more often than not, people I know are seeking refuge in the most familiar and comfortable surroundings they can find. The movies are pretty much the same also; we've got the Ali biopic, and a Disney animated family movie. Standard fare. Has our pop culture been at all rocked? It seems the answer is no. We live in the shadow of the 1960s, when war revolutionized everything — in civil rights, culture, sexual and political thought. But nobody wants to revisit the '60s: Those questions have already been asked, and the hippies and counter-culture were a failed experiment. If we live in a Harry Potter world, the muggles are happy to be muggles.

I think we distrust the type of giddy radicalism that was the '60s. We say that "life is too short" — but really, what people mean is that "life is too short to not start a nuclear family and have a steady job and live in a society that rewards the status quo." And for me, I actually find it a little disturbing that things are so much the same. When you turn on the television and Dave Letterman is giving his nightly monologue, and VH-1 is playing a Behind the Music, and every other station is pushing some brand of shampoo or fast food, it feels a little creepy. Almost as if things are too much the same — so much the same that they're not quite right.

Doesn't it all seem a little surreal — trying to continue life in a normal way, laughing at Dave's jokes and watching young Harry Potter escape to Hogwarts? Each person copes in his own way, I suppose — considering switching jobs or lovers or apartments — but the truth is, nobody really knows what living a "fuller" life means. So we continue on, and it nags the back of our minds — "I should change something, this should shake me up. Yes, life is too short! But now what?"

I suppose this is why I connected so deeply with Waking Life. In the film, we follow our hero through a series of conversations with teachers, students, street people, and television personalities — all spouting their various viewpoints on life, religion, consciousness, politics. If you've seen Linklater's earlier film Slacker you recognize the trick — we never remain with one person too long, just enough time to learn of his personal philosophy.

Characters ask questions such as: "Which is the most human characteristic, fear or laziness?" while others say, "Your life is yours to create," and another character says, "I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving." It's an endless series of questions and riddles. The aesthetic of the movie is just as abstract as the questions it is asking: It was shot on digital video, and then animated, the effect being a constant battle between fantasy and reality. And we learn, as the story unfolds, that the character is stuck in a dream, unable to wake up to the "real world" of consciousness.

And waking up is what we are all trying to do — trying to wake up to the problems in our work and personal lives. Something ought to change, but we don't know what. The beauty of Waking Life is that it doesn't say "quit your job and join the circus" (or, "leave your abusive family and run off to wizard school"). Instead, it wanders around for an hour and half, and leaves us longing for answers.

It's the same longing that makes people say, "life is too short," and wonder whether a life in South America, or a chance meeting with a lawyer on a plane, might make it better. The question nags us, like trying to remember a dream once you are awake.

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