Going Nowhere

[Greetings! Have now watched (and enjoyed) Slacker and can continue the 'freshman' section. The previous post represented the end of the 'prologue' section, while this section picks up where this passage left off. Yeah, sorry about jumping around, but then I'm not sure anyone's seriously reading this stuff anyway.]

The surprising success of the movie Slacker, while not nearly as large as Nirvana’s, nonetheless had a huge impact on both future filmmakers and generational perceptions. Linklater’s characters exist in a kind of suspended animation and have menial jobs at best. They are an artsy and funky bunch, dotted with would-be artists, musicians, filmmakers, authors and pop philosophers.

Covering around 24 hours of life in Austin, Slackers brims with characters who embody the Generation X stereotypes who would later bear the names of the film’s title. One character in a café ponders “the immense effort required in order not to create.” Another, asked what he does with his time, says he spends his days “just lollygagging around, still an unemployed … sleeping a lot” and in a band called “The Ultimate Losers.” One woman says she “graduated a couple years back” and is “pretty much hanging out.” The aimlessness of the characters is best explained in autobiographical postcards left behind by a man who suddenly and inexplicably leaves a boarding house he shares with other directionless twentysomethings:

He tried college for a while but it consumed too much time so now he’s looking for a job that doesn’t involve much work. … All his days are about the same. He wakes up at 11 or 12, eats cereal or toast, reads the newspaper, looks out the front door, takes a walk, goes to a movie matinee, listens to the radio, watches sitcom reruns ‘til 1, and usually falls asleep about 2. He likes to sleep.

Shot for a mere $23,000, the film resonated first with the audiences in Austin before finding wide distribution. Yet Linklater showed he was savvy that his film was on the cusp of a coming trend. In July 1990, he sent a copy of the movie to independent film impresario John Pierson with a copy of the Time magazine “Proceed with Caution” article. “When the national release via Orion Classics followed another full year later in the summer of 1991, the audience was ready to identify with and the media was primed to analyze Generation X,” Pierson later wrote.

The film unintentionally parallels a charge of the “Proceed With Caution” article about twentysomethings developing nothing on their own, but instead relying on hand-me-down sources. In one scene, a young lady accuses her apparent boyfriend of only mimicking great thoughts instead of having them:

When you start talking like this, like you’re just pulling those things from the shit you read. You haven’t thought it out for yourself … no bearing on the world around us and totally unoriginal. It’s like you’re just pasted together, these bits and pieces from your authoritative sources. … I’m beginning to suspect that maybe there’s nothing really there.

Like later movies by GenX directors, the film draws upon bits of pop culture (albeit not as much as the later likes of Quentin Tarantino) and real-life memes. One scene involves a creepy type of celebrity worship with a young woman trying to sell what she claims is Madonna’s pap smear. Different scenes show characters spouting conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination and moon landings. Perhaps most notable is a scene in a café where an unhinged woman incorporates a line from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon -- “I own a mansion and a yacht” -- into her otherwise senseless ramblings. It’s an obscure reference, but any young filmgoer who recognizes it will instantly feel cool or like an “insider” from knowing it. The recycling of pop culture -- and winking at audiences for comprehending even obscure pop-culture references -- is a tactic that Xer filmmakers, TV writers, authors and musicians increasingly took on as a generational marker. The movie even ends with a postmodern touch typical of its generation’s filmmakers: The final sequence is a collage of scenes shot on handheld cameras by people in the movie. It’s a film within a film, recycled in nearly real time.