Slacker Utopia

Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991)

It's Christmas day and I'm home for the weekend from New York. I think for most people, there's an air of emotion and nostalgia to coming home, seeing your old friends, getting away from your usual life. For me, it sets a reflective tone and by the second or third day here, I find myself engaging in more creative, inspired, maybe even spiritual ways of thinking.

Anyway, I was getting a cup of coffee at 7-11, the only store that seemed to be open. Christmas, like any holiday, bestows a certain feeling of calm to the streets. People move slower. There's less of them out. It's one of the rare times that there is quiet in a public space. Any conversation, whether with a store clerk or a person you know, can take on an intimate quality, even if the content of the conversation is casual or trivial.

So, as I was walking out of 7-11, there was a guy standing by the trashcan, maybe 35, balding but with long hair, in a sweatshirt and jeans, a giant pair of headphones around his neck. He was opening up sugar packets and putting them into a coffee. He looked a bit crazy, and as I walked by, he shouted out "Hey there!" with a big smile and an expectant look on his face. I responded back in kind and picked up the pace of my walk, a bit leery of a conversation with someone who seemed odd. I've had too many random, confrontational, or scary interactions in New York not to be timid about the chatterings of strangers.

I walked on and down the street, then doubled-back to go a different direction. I was wandering a bit, and as I crossed the parking lot diagonally he walked past me about 5 yards away. The way we moved reminded a bit of the camera movement in Slacker, Richard Linklater's 1991 experimental film in which the camera follows from person to person as dozens of characters conversations between friends and strangers flow with little to no tension. People pour out monologues and delve into intellectual topics with the same ease that they would discuss the weather.

And in thinking about Slacker, which admittedly, has been on my mind a lot lately, I realized that I had just had a bit of a Slacker moment. But a real Slacker moment, not a filmic one. An impoverished interaction, laden with hesitation, fear of the unknown, and a host of invisible social boundaries. There was no monologue. There was no intellect. There was only "Hello" and an unsaid goodbye. In the film, we would have walked for several blocks, with the man rambling on about some intriguing conspiracy theory. In reality we parted immediately.

And it got me to thinking more on just how utopian the film really is. It envisions a world in which the inner yearnings of our consciousness are expressible at almost any time and to any person, in which our isolation from each other is almost non-existent.

I picture myself waking early on a Sunday morning at age 19, brimming with excitement over some line of poetry or song lyric, bursting with thoughts and musings too broad to be articulated, and waiting for someone who I felt close enough to that they might understand to wake up so that I could at least attempt some expression. But even when they did wake up, and even when we try to express those inspired inner ramblings, a host of other walls are erected, immediately and invisibly, always already keeping us from communication. To exchange a greeting (which rarely happens in Slacker), to ask how someone is doing, what they've been up to, to engage in established social practices, is to move from an inner, personal world, into a social world that is always the same- at least at first. And in this movement, we are cut off from a communication so direct, so dream-like.

In that sense, Linklater's film, along with its companion, Waking Life, seem to present a sort of dream communication, a world, whether realist or fantastical, in which the words flow freely, in which the poesy of our thoughts is able to be articulated with immediacy.

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I'm going to be writing my thesis on the idea of utopia in Richard Linklater's films this spring. I'll be using this blog as a platform to jumpstart  and explore my thinking on his movies and subjects related to them.