RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER FOR FREE
RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER HOW TO
RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER FULL

No cell phones, no texting, no internet - actual real-time conversations with friends and strangers. Linklater’s “Slacker Culture” builds on this idea: “… slackers are generally not in the market for what most people are selling and are more interested in preferences than they are in cash or social mobility… A slacker could be anyone, regardless of age, who is striving to attain a realm of activity that runs parallel to their desires.”

They belong to themselves - or at least they try to. The older characters prove that the slacker-ethic endures. The hitchhiker waiting for his true call, the anarchist who says he fought in the Spanish civil war, the old man with the tape recorder - these characters show how slacker culture can’t be claimed by one generation.Īnother non-generational aspect is how Slacker explores the role of government and capitalism, as well as other systems and institutions, and the ways they often take over individual identity. Most of the characters are in their 20s, but not all of them.

Maybe because I’m turning 40 or because I’m in recovery or because I just finished reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (the book that is read when the typewriter is thrown off the bridge, and one that Linklater cites as an influence on his film) - but after 20 years, I can finally appreciate Slacker. For 20 years, Slacker stayed unknown and unknowable to me - a whatever film, completely forgotten. Alcohol and pot affected some of my memory, yet this first assessment of Slacker could have also contributed to the blur. I hated not fully knowing the characters and their stories, not knowing what happened to them. Plus, I hated the experimental plot and the lack of character development. My low self-esteem didn’t need that kind of encouragement, so I came to Slacker with a closed mind. Or maybe not - I could have just been more resistant to Linklater’s ideas - slacker that I am.Īll I had was the hype - the media’s idea of “Generation X” as apathetic do-nothings. If I had read this essay then, maybe I could have been more self-actualized or empowered in who I was trying to be. Most would scoff at the notion of daydreaming as productive activity, but slackers know that this is the place where all the new situations, narratives, and acts originate.

RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER HOW TO

The “true call” can appear in a sudden flash or take decades to find, but the intention is to be constantly discovering your own path, what you truly love, and how to outwit everything that stands in your way to it. Linklater discusses several issues, including work, education, politics, and the concept of the true call: Slackers feel the urgent personal obligation to make sure what they’re doing with is worthwhile. One of the extras on the DVD is a Linklater essay, “Slacker Culture”, that defines slackers as individuals who “pay little attention to labels or categories, especially if they feel themselves being included in the evaluation… Most slackers would deny being a slacker.” I didn’t realize this made me even more of a slacker. Even if I didn’t know how to define myself - I would rather be someone who is always questioning, instead of someone who takes their ethos from a movie. Wary of the hype, I wasn’t (and I’m still not) into being defined by anything outside of myself. I am such a slacker that I had forgotten I had actually seen Slacker.īut I also remembered something else: I didn’t like the film in the ’90s.īy the time I saw Slacker, I had probably heard all of the critical renown - “film of its generation”, etc. It all came back to me: the JFK Conspiracy-A-Go-Go author, the Madonna pap smear, the girl with sunglasses and a black eye. I took it home, ready to see it for the first time. But recently, I went to the library and found the Criterion Collection tenth anniversary edition of the film on DVD. This year is the 20th anniversary of the release of Slacker. Slacker could have just as well have been Clerks. For all I knew, the ’90s could have all been filmed in black and white.

RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER FOR FREE

Character development lasts as long as a scene, then it’s on to someone else, somewhere else - a couple in a bedroom, kids kicking a vending machine for free sodas, three college boys throwing a typewriter off a bridge.īut I was 20 years old in 1991 - I had started drinking at 15, and I hadn’t even started on my decade of at-least-once-a-day smoking pot. Set in Austin, Texas, the events in Slacker take place in one day, but there is no traditional sense of plot. You would think the innovative story structure would have stayed with me.

RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER FULL

Slacker, in full color, blurred in my memory with the black and white films of the late ’80s, early ’90s - Clerks, Go Fish, Under the Cherry Moon, Truth or Dare - you know, all the classics. A few years ago, someone asked me if I had seen Richard Linklater’s 1991 indie film Slacker.

Richard linklater slacker