Further 'Slacker' thoughts

Roger Ebert has often written that good movies remain what they are, while great movies grow with you. So it has been thus, for me, with Slacker. When I first saw the film in the summer of 1991, I was twenty-six and living on $1,200 a month as a teaching assistant and an additional $700 as an adjunct instructor for Houston Community College. In the summer, during abbreviated semesters, I would receive $2,000 around the Fourth of July, the same amount the tenth of August, then nothing--zero--until the first of October. Especially during the summer months, with a mountain of books to read for the doctoral exams I would take three years hence, I was drawn, like many in my situation, to coffee houses and used bookstores, to clubs with no cover charge and three-dollar matinees. In other words, I was (almost by necessity) living the life I saw Richard Linklater portray onscreen, the life of the over-educated under-employed, the mopes you would see hours on end through the front window of a diner and wonder, Christ, don't they have jobs?

What work I had seemed to guarantee that lifestyle. I taught from eight until ten in the morning, then eight until ten in the evening. So for about nine hours in the middle of the day, my time was my own. Time seemed to be the one thing my friends and I had in abundance--time, plus the ability to talk the most trivial subjects to death. I saw in this film the life I would lead for approximately the next decade, the world of conspiracy theorists, of the chubbby guy in glasses complaining that the first George Bush "really" only received eighteen percent of the vote, the girl just back from a high-priced sanitorium, and the late-night pick-up: the girl who stands as proof that, in some cases, casual sex is merely the logical outcome of a half-decent evening.

Looking at Slacker from a distance of fifteen years, I am struck by the changes in the world that have rendered much of the behavior in the film obsolete. The world is moving in two directions at once on almost every front, beginning with the fact that we are becoming simultaneously both more connected and more isolated. Today the paranoid at Quackenbush with his talk of the "Medal-in" cartel wouldn't be accosting people one at a time on street corners; he'd be home, posting his wackiness on Moveon.org to an unseen audience of thousands.

There is one technological change that Linklater anticipated, made clear in the film, and could barely contain himself in sharing. Three times in the movie, Slackers becomes a film of a filming: the hitchiker searching for the true calling, the pixel camera at the bar, and the final Super-8 filming of the group that travels to the cliff overlooking the river. These scenes recall Francis Coppola's words to Ebert as far back as 1968, that one day "A man will walk with a movie studio on his shoulder." Ebert spotted the wisdom of Coppola's statement at about the time Slackers came out, noting that "America's Funniest Home Videos" was the number one show in the country--and what was this, but clip after clip from hand-held video cameras?

Linklater shared Coppola's vision, so much so that there is almost a direct line from his pixel camera and Super-8 filming to now, where it costs almost nothing to put something online (Youtube or whatever), and quality will out. Linklater's film came out at the midpoint of the great first-wave independent explosion (Spike Lee, Robert Townshend, and Steven Soderbergh had already made their first marks; Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were still to come), and his film was not only an exemplar but also an indication of the great democratization of filmmaking. For a century, film was the province of those with a ton of money; nowadays, anyone with about a thousand bucks for the equipment could make their wares available. And quality will out.