I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

[The Freshman section, continued ...]

Yet sometimes lost in the analysis of the movie is a key facet: Many characters were indeed searching for something, sometimes as nominal as another cigarette or a quick hookup, but often for a greater philosophical concept, an overturning of the social order or merely their place in the universe. In this way, Linklater resembles his contemporary Generation X filmmakers whose movies ask the question “Who am I and where do I belong?” Peter Hanson wrote in The Cinema of Generation X. While Linklater’s camera never focuses long on any one character, one could argue his film falls into Hanson’s argument that “nearly every protagonist in a notable Gen-X movie is on a quest to understand the meaning of his or her existence.”

In reviewing the movie, Hanson well encapsulated a popular critique that the media sometimes misinterprets GenX disengagement for laziness. Slacker’s “pseudo-existentialists were different from commonplace layabouts, the stereotype established, because they extracted themselves from mainstream society not out of laziness but to stay true to a philosophical idea,” he wrote. One character in Slacker, a bitter ex-con, tells an interviewer that he thinks regular work only feeds corporate corruption and degrades the average worker. “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it,” he says, adding that he won’t get a job “until he gets the true call.” Another character draws a card from a deck of philosophical sayings, and it reads: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”
Against this backdrop, some pop-culture precursors begin to come into focus as Generation X stereotypes begin to solidify. The ex-con in Slacker has a message to all workers that “every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.”

Isn’t this, in its own way, a more violent and cynical reiteration of Lloyd’s dinner-party nonconformist speech from Say Anything …? With the benefit of hindsight, wrote author and critic Johnathan Bernstein, the latter scene was ahead of its time:

Wasn’t Lloyd Dobler a sweeter-natured precursor of the ragamuffins from the same region who would soon rail against corporate rock whores? Wasn’t his ‘bought, sold or processed’ speech a manifesto of befuddled rejection predating the work-shy ethic of the yet-to-be-detected slacker species?

Jenn X and her friends probably enjoyed that scene and identified with, if not envied, Lloyd’s carefree and romantic spirit. But their parents would have looked upon Lloyd as a fool and a lout whose refusal to attend college or pursue a reasonable career path would make him not worthy of their little Diane Courts.