Slacker (1990)

‘This story was based on fact. Any similarity with fictional events or characters is entirely coincidental.’ (Copyright notice at the end of Slacker)

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

A day with the aimless 20-somethings of Austin, Texas in 1989. There is no plot and, seemingly, no point. We follow various artists, hipsters and other low-energy low-lives, eavesdropping on their conversations for a moment, before becoming bored and following someone else instead. This happens repeatedly as morning becomes afternoon, and afternoon becomes night, and nothing continues to happen.

The story of Slacker – that is, the story of the artefact itself – belongs firmly to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It was shot on 16mm film for $23,000; the crew was fed on peanut butter sandwiches made by the director, Richard Linklater, who had previously made exactly one experimental feature-length movie. Then, Orion acquired the distribution rights and paid for it to be re-edited and blown up to 35mm for cinematic release, which enabled Linklater to take it to the Sundance Film Festival, at which point Slacker stopped being a no-hope passion project and became a cult classic.

It’s now seen as one of the trailblazers of the ‘90s explosion of independent film-making: the movement that gave us Tarantino, the reinvention of US cinema, and that habit that Marvel movies has of recruiting promising indie directors and then not letting them do anything interesting.

The action within the film is also very much of its time, and of interest almost exclusively to its fleshy geographic contemporaries. Its premise – the choice paralysis of being in your ‘20s, when so much seems possible while simultaneously evading your grasp – is widely applicable to young adults in relatively affluent societies. But Slacker is rooted both in 1989 and in the US; a time and a place in which entertainment and connection were not available at the tap of a screen, the means of expression were expensive and hard to come by, and the mainstream culture was stultifying and conservative. The day-to-day life it portrays is full of empty moments. There is little to do; what there is to do is boring.

It’s one of the first post-Cold War movies, shot in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A generation that has grown up expecting to be vapourised by mad old generals at any moment has suddenly been given a reprieve, and demonstrably does not know what to do with their wild and previous lives (as we absolutely did not refer to them, or indeed think of them). Capitalism has won; history, as Sellars and Yeatman say of the Second World War, has come to a .¹ (Slacker’s premier at Sundance in January 1991 coincided with the beginning of Operation Desert Storm; or, as we now call it — while sounding like some visionary crone giving exposition in a sci-fi film — the First Gulf War.)

One of the repeated themes of Slacker is conspiracy theory. In one early sequence a man waiting for a friend is waylaid by a man in a Batman t-shirt who babbles about people trafficking. When he tries to escape Batman follows him home, outlining an increasingly baroque theory involving Mars bases, Nazi anti-gravity drives, CIA-sponsored abductions, and the creation of a pliant extra-terrestrial workforce via ‘psycho-surgery’. Later there’s a JFK shooting aficionado (this is Texas, after all) and a TV-obsessed media jammer who is convinced that broadcasts are being censored.

Conspiracy theories were a consistent theme of the period; this was, after all, the decade of the X-Files. To some extent they were the inevitable product of Cold War paranoia and actual political subterfuges such as Watergate. But these are pre-internet conspiracies, which now seem slower and more arduous and kind of cute, the product of boredom rather than self-reinforcing industrial-scale madness spreading at sub-atomic speeds. Their function was to lend an enchantment to the mundane, promising a world full of strangeness and mystery rather than just dead-end jobs and McDonald’s franchises.

Linklater mostly plays these scenes for laughs. All of this, indeed a lot of the film, looks a good deal less amusing now. It’s kind of shaming, looking back, to notice that no one in Slacker appears to have a full-time job. Coasting on grants and parental gifts and bar work, they are nevertheless comfortable enough to spend their time discussing the morality of charity rather than worrying about how much of the world’s land surface is literally on fire.

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Delights

There is a lot of skill on display in the structure and direction of the film. It pulls together many different elements, collaging and collecting the overlooked and the undervalued to create a gestalt of a culture. Linklater’s camera is quiet and removed, but nevertheless exerts a strong editorial presence. It intentionally imitates a documentary camera, and anticipates the performatively still and passively ironic viewpoint of ‘90s quasi-documentaries like Patrick Keillor’s London (1994) and TV shows such as From A to B.

But the chief delight, inevitably, is seeing my own youth again.

The trailer gives the dictionary definition of ‘slacker’: ‘Someone who evades duties and responsibilities.’ When you’re an over-educated and over-indulged 20-something, that sounds pretty good: duties are cultural constructs enforced by imperialist patriarchies, and responsibilities are social shackles. (Some of this gets a little too close to home. One sequence in which two guys discuss how The Smurfs indoctrinates kids with images of conformist family life reminded me slightly too much of the piece I wrote about The Clangers.) Having stormed the barricades, the ‘anti-authoritarian’ Boomers were now in the executive suites, up to their ears in cocaine and on the phone to their estate agents. What was there left for us to do? We knew (we thought) everything, and believed very little.

We weren’t yet called Gen X in 1990; Douglas Coupland’s book came out a year later. But finally, we had a name for ourselves. Among my friends at least, ‘slacker’ felt like a perfect self-descriptor: perfectly sardonic, perfectly self-deprecating, perfectly self-protecting, perfectly true.

The movie catches that moment of cultural freefall. It starts with a perfect little plot in which a woman is killed in a hit-and-run by a mystery driver. But the mystery is immediately resolved: the driver was her son, and the police arrive and arrest him. And then we’re off, following a busker who witnesses the arrest. I could show you a conventional plot, it says, but I’ve decided to do something less interesting instead.

The subsequent vignettes are heavily self-aware. Characters constantly discuss the difficulty of doing nothing: ‘Who's ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?’ We watch actors give performances of self-consciously performing members of the most self-consciously performative generation. It’s as perfectly meta as any slacker could hope for.

Discomforts

All these conversations about boredom and pointlessness can get, well, boring and pointless. Being young is often boring and pointless, but one is not usually anxious to recreate that experience.

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Can we show the kids?

You can show it to them, sure. You can tell them it’s educational, like one of those living history experiences in which kids get to work the till in a Victorian sweetshop or watch a Bronze Age farmer's wife grind millet.

They’ll probably give up on it pretty quickly though. The problem with being performatively boring is that other people tend to lose interest.

There is a sequence about halfway through in which a group of young kids demonstrate a trick for getting free cans from a soda machine. They then sell the cans to a lumpen group of aimless slackers who dismiss them as ‘budding capitalist youth’. It’s kind of painful to realise that these kids are Millennials.

Is it as good as you remember?

Even if you find the whole thing self-indulgent and dull, Slacker is an extraordinary and unique piece of work. I don’t know of anything else that uses quite the same fictional documentary approach, collected into a free-flowing, narrative-free experience. Thirty-five years after its release, it still feels innovative.

And anyway, I don’t find it self-indulgent and dull at all.

In the summer of 1999 I was on a road trip across the States with some friends. I was by far the least interesting and intelligent person in that car, and was very much a bystander to my own life. We passed through Austin, where we slept on someone’s floor; I have no idea whose. The whole world had become a blur of indistinguishable artists, hipsters and low-energy low-lives. At some point, the decision was made to go and watch a new film that everyone was talking about. That film was Slacker.

As we came out of the cinema afterwards, the actual conspiracy theorist in the Batman t-shirt walked by, monologuing at his companion, just as he had in the movie. We went home and stayed up all night talking about it: talking about the talking, analysing its analysis, discussing how self-referential we were being in discussing how self-referential it was. And when I watch it now, my own youth is playing back at me: self-referential to the last.

It is as difficult for me to be objective about Slacker as it is for me to be objective about myself; slightly harder, if anything, because Slacker doesn’t have twenty-something me in it, and so is a great deal more enjoyable.

I had a Super 8 camera with me on that trip, filming odds and ends across the States. Back at university the following term, I borrowed a video camera from someone to make a documentary about my friends and associates, very much in thrall to Slacker. But I didn’t go on to do anything much with my film-making ambitions. I read Slacker as a valorisation and endorsement; what I failed to notice was that to make it, Linklater and his friends had scrounged equipment, maxxed out credit cards, found solutions, turned on a dime. They had worked incredibly hard to capture the aimless and the bone-idle.

On the other hand, another way to read the movie is as a portrait of ‘scenius’, a word Brian Eno coined as an antidote to the myth of the lone genius. As Eno points out, most of the people we think of as creative individuals are part of a ‘scene’, a group whose members all contribute something to resulting innovation, even if that’s ‘only’ discussion and imaginative involvement. As the artist Austin Kleon pointed out: ‘Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute — the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.’

Linklater’s movie is a portrait of the Austin scenius at a particular moment. And if you look very hard, you’ll notice a wandering gormless Englishman in the background, contributing something. Maybe. Just a little bit.

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For more on the exquisite tedium and horror of being young in the ‘90s:

1. Give us some credit for not invoking Francis Fukuyama, at least.