Slacker

SLACKER   ***1/2

Richard Linklater

1991

IDEA:  In Austin, Texas near the UT campus, a succession of variously eccentric individuals discuss politics, philosophy, history, popular culture, relationships, and much more.

BLURB:  The characters of Slacker are trapped in discourse. Just as the camera roves digressively from place to place, failing to sustain narrative momentum, the assortment of bored, garrulous misfits who populate those places amble through conversations and speeches before hitting rhetorical dead-ends. A large portion of them simply pontificate to the nearest set of ears, hardly expecting a response; their thoughts and ideas, although often expressed with enthusiasm and eloquence, are discharged into space with nowhere in particular to go. For Linklater, this is the burden of a certain breed of intellect, the putatively indolent but really over-qualified and restless who struggle to find productive outlets for their passions and knowledges within the labor economies of late capitalism. The young adults of Slacker seem to have internalized the deflated countercultural dreams of their Boomer parents; the Boomers, too, run on the fumes of hoary government conspiracies and unrealized revolutions, uniting Linklater’s various layabouts in a trans-generational, ideologically Leftist condition of disillusionment and anomie. At the same time, Slacker palpably marks a series of inflection points for its specific era, at once capturing a fading way of bohemian living in Austin, Texas; embodying, by example, the efflorescing American independent film scene; and auguring the forthcoming explosion of the Internet, seen most presciently in the film’s proto-hyperlink-cinema structure. For all of Slacker’s foreboding - and for all the past and present historical traumas that lurk around its margins - Linklater ends the film on an invigorating note of optimism in the form of a kinetic 8mm film shot by a group of amateur media-makers. As the camera is tossed over a cliff, the image dissolving into an abstract whirl of light and color, the discursive inertia of Slacker is supplanted by an ecstatic release into an unwritten future of possibility.