Last thoughts on 'Slacker'

A few weeks ago, thinking about my annual screening of Slacker, here and here. The first posting dealt with the experience of seeing the film, the second how it affected me at the time, and then now.

I had one other thought, having to do with the notion of the film's capturing not only a lifestyle but a time in which the film's concepts could be thought of as purely theoretical. There is a booklet which accompanies the Criterion edition of the DVD. On the cover is a black-and-white photo of Teresa Taylor, identified as "Pap smear pusher" in the liner notes (and who, by the way, plays, in speech and behavior, an unintentional letter-perfect imitation of a friend and softball teammate I knew in graduate school). Aside from Linklater's original notes describing his intentions with the film ("Environment: suggests documentary"), the most interesting essay is Ron Rosenbaum's, a piece that originally appeared in the New York Observer. Rosenbaum makes the case (which seems clearer now, perhaps not so much then) that Linklater's is a film of ideas to an extent you could almost call Dostoyevskian.

As Rosenbaum points out, Linklater presents (one must think he wryly presents) the subculture of over-educated, underemployed university-area Austin as embodying not only a lifestyle but a life's philosophy, one defined by inaction and a negation verging on nihilism.

Occasionally the strategy is revealed whimsically, as when Linklater himself plays "Should have stayed at the bus station," with his spiel of dreams and alternate realities--symbolized, he says, by the two roads which present themselves to Dorothy and Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Or the young man, fueled by too many lattes at Quackenbush, who talks of the "immense effort required not to create." Or the fellow in the bathrobe whose outdoor existence seems defined by the walk to and from the neighborhood coffee shop, and is disdainful of any other activity his much-younger girlfriend might suggest. (Though we never know these two by as much as their names, I remain firmly convinced with every viewing that "Bathrobe recluse" is a teaching assistant at UT living hand-to-mouth until the first of October, and "Shut in Girlfriend" a former student of his, and the allure has worn off.) Or the "Anti-Artist" who likes to "destroy other people's art."

Beneath al the whimsy, however, there is something darker at work, something which, in 1991, we could dismiss as just a few more slices from the same pound of baloney. A street vendor talks of bombs falling and then says, "Remember--terrorism is the surgical strike capability of the oppressed." "Looking for the True Calling" Guy speaks into a video camera: "Remember: every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death." Toward the end of the film, a revolutionary drives through a neighborhood and informs the locals through a mounted speaker about the forthcoming distribution of guns and knives to the general populace.

Even more to the point is the self-styled anarchist, a worshipper of William McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz, a pretender to the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. The elderly man, played by Louis Mackay in the film's best performance, takes a would-be housebreaker on a tour of greater Austin--not the clubs and bookstores, but the streets and parking lots that run silent in summer, the quiet area between the city's two landmarks, the Texas Legislature and the UT Tower.

"Just look at that shit!" he exclaims pointing to the Legislature's dome, and then goes off on his further dreams of anarchism. One day, he says, he'll pull a Guy Fawkes and blow the whole thing sky high . . .

Then, pointing to the other end of the South Congress corridor, he points to the tower, and goes on about "the greatest day in this city's history," the day when Charles Whitman took a footlocker's full of rifles and ammo to the 23rd floor and began shooting unsuspecting innocents on the ground. The anarchist's one regret was that he missed the whole thing--"I had lunch out there every day that summer," he says, every day but that one. Perhaps even as he speaks he fails to realize that, had he been eating lunch in the place to which he points, he would have been a sitting duck for one of Whitman's bullets, and not merely a witness. It was his "fucking wife," he says, who had a doctor's appointment, who kept him from viewing Whitman--and who probably saved his life.

It is here, from a distance of 15 years, that we can look upon this man's words and realize that ideas of anarchism and death were not just voiced by charming old codgers with Hemingway's collected works and delusions of having fought with Orwell. Ideas have consequences. Four years after the release of the film, Timothy McVeigh basically performed on the Oklahoma City Ferderal Building what the old man had threatened, and how do we like the results?

More to the point is the old boy's parting words to the housebreaker (that is, right before his daughter give the crook his gun back). He says, "Remember, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion." Nice-sounding words. Put them into action and you have Muhammad Atta flying in through the office window. In truth, Slacker, given repeated viewings, is symbolic of our holiday from history, a movie completely emblematic of the thirteen years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, when matters of life and death seemed nothing more than theory. The world has changed since 1991. But Slacker has come back to us in different ways. It remains a product of its time, but also a timeless (if futile) search for some kind of truth.