The Disjointed Ephemerality of Slacker: The Visual Experience You Need

The best glimpse of the driving motif underpinning the disjointed encounters of Slacker comes courtesy of a Dostoevsky acolyte cum bowling alley navel gazer: “whose ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create? Intensity without mastery. The obsessiveness of the utterly passive. And could it be, in that passivity i’ll find my freedom?”

Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) is a languid visionary exposition of Austin: a measured, sparse, confrontingly intimate invitation into the beautiful banality of the everyday. Slacker is an effectively disjointed series of whimsical and eccentric vignettes. The plot is delightfully aimless, wandering, a series of tenuously related fragments of dialogues and monologues. Through the camera we see the city as though through the distortion of a quartz: the refracted light revealing and concealing in turn.

Esoteric and endearingly philosophical, Slacker introduces us to the apathy, vitality, eccentricities of a city on the fringe. There’s an existentialist tenor to Slacker; a sun-dappled Sunday morning nihilism.

Dialogue is the common thread that weaves the fragmented lives of our myriad protagonists into one tangible artistic statement. The characters reveal themselves through their words, all are chief curators of their own ideas, ideologies, and paranoias. The audience revels in the daring eccentricities and improbable avenues through which our characters flesh out their own sense of self, delimiting the contours of their relationship to the world; oftentimes, reacting to a social order that feels alien.

Oversharing abounds in Linklater’s Austin: whether it be on moon landing conspiracies, anti-capitalistic implorations, or the joys of passivity, everyone here has a pet theory, an idiosyncratic raison d’etre. Beneath the veneer of indifference are some biting political and social ideas. For all its breeziness and whimsy, Slacker is not silent on vital issues of the time. Ambiguous: yes. Apolitical: no.

Slacker shines a light on a world apart. An underclass of freethinkers, anarchists, and idealists. Big ideas often foreclose the possibility of effective action: young dreamers are often rendered completely ineffectual by apathy. Society, capitalism, the military-industrial complex: what’s a Gen-X’er to do? Take a trip and enjoy the 24 reasons that Slacker is the ephemeral, eccentric visual experience you need.