"Slacker" - Richard Linklater, 1990

Call it premature separation anxiety, but I've been seeking out resonant portraits of sub/urban malaise (tedium, more accurately) lately. I've been everywhere from Green Day'sAmerican Idiot (still in my car) to Titus Andronicus's The Monitor (never has been) to a Daniel Clowes graphic novel, Caricature. I think in Slacker, I've finally found the perfect fit. It might be all in the timing, but this is one of the most splendid films I've seen, and the fact that Linklater films keep getting that feeling out of me makes me think I need to keep on this stuff. It's mainly the blase nature of the interaction: there's a big discussion to be had about how "stagey" dialogue can get, and in a picture driven by dialogue almost exclusively, it's great to see it never get too melodramatic. That goes for all of his films that I've seen to this point.

This is his first picture, and what a mind-blower. I would say I can only imagine how this would have felt when it came out, but 23 years on, it still holds a similar punch: a completely shocking piece of cinema emerging from God-knows-where to fulfill anyone looking for a place to rest their mental space. The film is a series of fragmentary encounters and chance glances ranging from a man fixated on string theory (played by the debuting auteur) to a car-implementing killer to one person to the next, all-in-all covering what feels like the breadth of American weirdos and freaks.  

Unlike perhaps the most obvious touchstone for this kind of picture, Gummo, Linklater has a genuine passion for the people he shoots, all of them amateurs, and the characters they portray in his fucked up universe of Austin, Texas. There is a genuine softness and good nature around the film, and the subjects are endlessly fascinating. I feel that the three minutes of exposition most are afforded is more than enough to want me craving more, and Linklater is wise not to indulge. There's an understanding of human nature (ha!) here that is uncanny: the surface, first impression one has of a person can only sour over time as they become more and more ordinary. Instead, Linklater opts to keep us interested and a bit mystified by these characters for short bits. Early in the film, one conspiracy theorist blabbers about the CIA inducing amnesia. He claims the people walking about Austin with this neurosis all exist without history. What he doesn't realize in his potentially schizophrenic insight is that all the people around him are similarly divorced from history. This is in sharp contrast to my other favorite Linklater production(s), the Before trilogy, wherein he allows for two characters to be explored in so much depth as to make them old friends. The breadth of his talent is staggering, but I have to admit that I find these concise, (pseudo-)intellectual encounters more appealing at this point, perhaps because I'm young. 

Getting away from the emotional impacts of the film for a moment, the structure of the film is dizzying to say the least. Further viewings will surely illuminate this more and perhaps find a deeper reason for these sequences, but Linklater is wise to break up the slew of interactions and missed connections with occasional diversions into different camera techniques: VHS tape, pixelated camera, and, in the final sequence, Super 8, serve to keep the film aesthetically fresh. Speaking of which, Austin looks great, here. This is no Woody Allen city porn. The touches are much more intimate, frequently showing the distance that most of these characters have from the actual cityscape to which they are connected. Instead, secluded homes, weathered bars, and other such spectacles dot the landscape of the film. 

This plays into what is ultimately a sort of message for the film. The canvas of Austin is filled with a bunch of people lost in their own minds. It is rare to have a character fill the screen for some amount of time without devolving into monologue. Everyone is either very self-assured or a completely passive listener to someone who is. Though it helps an audience to absorb information quickly about characters, it also serves to paint them in a light of misguided-ness. Perhaps actual conversations and not just self-righteous performance would help to assuage the severe alienation that all of these characters share. Its unclear whether Linklater's position is that it is up to these people to change their ways, if he sees it as a systemic problem that is more difficult to overcome than that, or if he is completely uninterested in finding an answer for the question as he, too, is a bit of a slacker.

★★★★