Friday Night Flicks: Slacker
In the world of slow-burn cinema, dialogue is king. And few modern filmmakers do it with greater wit and intellect than Richard Linklater.
Seriously, have you seen Before Sunrise? Why that film doesn’t sit beside The Godfather and Annie Hall in the screenwriter’s hall of fame is beyond me. The script for that must’ve read like a novel. A damn good one at that.
But everyone’s seen The Sunrise Trilogy. Everyone’s seen Dazed and Confused. And I’d probably give myself a migraine trying to explain Waking Life. So tonight we’re revisiting an origin flick from Linklater, his first film of any real consequence: Slacker.
Slacker isn’t about any one event or person in particular. There’s no unifying storyline or plot, no hero or heroine, no quests or character arcs etc... Instead, Slacker is composed of a series of vignettes that - in true Linklater fashion - sort of just wander into each other, exhibiting the lifestyles of around twenty different “slacker” types as they mill about in a neighborhood outside the University of Texas Austin.
Among the notable “slackers” we meet are a UFO-truther, a few self-righteous philosophy students, some Tolstoy-quoting english majors, an anarchist, a JFK conspiracist, and - perhaps most memorably - a street rat (played by Teresa Taylor of the Butthole Surfers) toting a “Madonna pap smear” of questionable authenticity.
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Slacker is everything that’s great about Linklater wrapped up into a single package: that trademark aloofness, those ten-minute plus long-player scenes, the interplay of multiple storylines, the overall eccentricity… it’s all there.
You’ve come this far, why not let yourself wander a bit further? —Jackson Todd
