One of my favorite things about this column is the opportunity it gives me to put in a word on behalf of an overlooked or underrated classic: a book or film that may have gotten respectful attention when it came out, but deserves more now. Deserves not just celebration for the way it’s “held up,” but for the way it’s grown since its debut in the sense that time and repeated reading or viewing have disclosed layers and depths not necessarily apparent on the first encounter.
Such a film is Slacker, a film that was either dismissed (or appreciated) as an amiable satire of Austin hippies, heads, coffee-bar layabouts, and beer-garden lounge lizards. A dismissal that can be attributed to one of the film’s subtle strengths: to what it describes in a self-referential episode as its “oblique strategy.”
It’s an obliqueness that disguises the fact that, despite its Texas college-town setting, its cosmic-shitkicker accents and characters, Slacker is at heart a very Russian film. Not just in its obvious kinship to Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov’s great nineteenth-century Russian novel, the classic celebration of the luxuriant pleasures of lethargy and the sensual delights of the contemplative life. There’s another Russian link, to Turgenev and his novels of the “superfluous man.” (And, to make a cross-cultural comparison, there’s a link as well to the seventeenth-century British pastoral “poetry of retirement” tradition, whose varieties are best limned in a volume with the lovely title The Garlands of Repose by the scholar Michael O’Loughlin.)
But on a deeper level, the true Russian kinship is less with Goncharov or Turgenev than with Dostoyevsky, to a novel like The Brothers Karamazov: the kind of novel that is unashamed in its preoccupation, its obsession, with ultimate philosophical and metaphysical questions.
The link is not obvious, because Slacker addresses these questions with a sly sense of humor, an affectionate mockery of its slacker-philosophes that disguises its love for the deeper questions they’re obsessed with. Made in 1990 for a reputed $23,000, remembered more for its role as harbinger of the independent-film movement than its intrinsic merits, Slacker is a brilliant tribute to bohemian cerebration and metaphysical speculation: the coffee houses and beer gardens of Austin are stand-ins for the agora of Athens.
Of course, there are some pure comic satiric moments that still hit home: The sequence featuring a woman selling what she claims is “Madonna’s Pap smear” may be the most acute comment ever on the ludicrousness of celebrity worship.
But let me return to the notion of “oblique strategies.” To put it in the context of the film, Slacker consists of a series of interrelated episodes—mostly conversations, riffs, raps, and rants. They begin with its writer/director, Richard Linklater, playing a guy taking a cab from the Austin bus station into town and telling a silent cabdriver about a strange dream, a dream in which “instead of anything…going on, there’s nothing going on”—a harbinger of the movie’s contrarian discourse on the virtues of inaction, the virtues of, frankly, sitting around talking. Sitting around talking about creation rather than mindlessly “creating.” (Toward the close of the film, one character describes himself as an “anti-artist,” one who likes “to destroy other people’s artwork.”)
Anyway, Linklater, the director playing the guy who ”Should have stayed at the bus station,” goes on from recounting his nothing-happens dream to posing (to the patient cabdriver) the epistemological problem that dreams pose—the problem first raised as the ultimate refutation of realism by the pre-Socratic Athenian skeptics in the fourth century b.c.: No one can be certain whether one’s dream is the reality, or whether the life one seems to be living is the dream.
All of this is delivered in an easily mockable “like, man, you know, dude” lingo that gets mileage from the mockery, but nonetheless insinuates these ultimate questions into the film. Questions that range—in Linklater’s cab monologue alone—from the ancient epistemological problem to the current debate over the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, one articulated first, I believe, by a cosmologist based at the University of Texas at Austin. (Not an accident, I think.)
Anyway, I digress. To return to the structure of Slacker—which is, come to think of it, a serial digression, a digression about digression, meta-digression—Linklater, as the guy who ”Should have stayed at the bus station,” arrives in downtown Austin and witnesses a hit-and-run accident. We then follow the guy in the hit-and-run car. We see him being arrested, and then we follow a guy who witnesses the arrest to a coffee shop, where we listen to another guy at a neighboring booth. This guy (identified in the credits as “Dostoyevsky wannabe”) is asking his friends, “Who’s ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?”
This riff is somehow his take on The Gambler (Dostoyevsky’s novella), a take that evolves into his Principles of Noncreation, which include “intensity without mastery” and “the obsessiveness of the utterly passive.” He goes on to celebrate “opportunistic celibacy” (which means, I think, if you can’t get laid, turn no-sex into a principle) and the “renunciation of all human endeavor.” It’s a pose that—characteristic of Slacker—is both satirized and savored. Frankly, I like the idea that we could all do with doing less. That the doers of the world are more likely to cause destruction and horror than the nondoers.
Anyway, the film ambles through Austin by way of this interlinked series of riffs and rants. There’s a video-terrorist type who advocates that the workers of the world adopt a Lazy Man’s Marxism. He’s in favor of workers not working at all, not making things at all: “Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.” There’s a guy who claims to be a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who fought with Orwell and the anarchists’ brigade, but turns out to be a nondoer of another sort: he’s utterly faked or dreamed up this heroic past, and he talks such a good game of it that you wonder whether it made a difference that he wasn’t there with Orwell.
All these links in the Great Chain of (Non-) Being, all these talkers of good games, eventually lead, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, to the “oblique strategies” sequence. This woman in sunglasses is standing in a lot, offering cards to passersby. She says laconically, “Oblique strategies.”
We see a few takers read the oblique strategies on their respective cards. One (very likely my favorite, and perhaps the signature line in Slacker) is: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Again, a knowing tribute, a satirically expressed philosophical rationale for lethargy or, if you prefer, principled laziness.
Then there’s “It’s not building a wall, but making a brick,” which I believe in philosophic terms might be seen as an anti-teleological ethic. Ambitious focus-on-the-future mentality distracts us from apprehension of the infinite dimensionality of the Here and Now in our hands, in front of our eyes.
And finally, “There is no structure. The underlying order is chaos,” which devolves into a muddled discussion of chaos theory. This oblique strategy can be seen as a self-referential characterization of Slacker itself: it appears to have no structure, to be chaotic (a matter of random encounters), when, in fact, it has a very subtle, extremely well-crafted structure that makes it a portrait of chaos. But there’s a difference between a portrait of chaos and chaos—a difference often called art. Even if it sometimes goes under the guise of anti-art.
1991
100 min
Color
1.33:1
Categories: Film Essays
3 Comments
Wed 15 Jul at 03:24 AM
Henry Swanson
“Devolving into a muddled discussion of chaos theory” – I like the sound of that. Part of me truly enjoys watching Slacker because I can sometimes pretend that I’m somehow part of that imagined “Scene” and that these people are my Friends – but then I often get the impression that there are no real relationships in the entire film, only a thinly-spread rainbow spectrum of weak social interactions between utterly isolated nodes of finely cultivated subcultural obscurity. “Isolated nodes of finely cultivated subcultural obscurity” – does that sound like a line from another random Slacking nobody?
Part of me is also afraid that too many of the ‘unwashed milk bottle days’ of my lives are like this – painfully slow ambient drifting from nowhere to tepid nowhere – third of a page of scribbled self-lies, projects and schemes and bleary, half-baked (!) plans that come to half-way up the middle of nowhere. An endless non-linear series of semi-surprisingly bland overheard conversations. City heat on the back of the neck, the mildly acidic night sweat of middling intellects gone to seed in the listless pursuit of “Yeah man, like.. totally.”
I hear a lot of dope fueled agreements between alleged peers in this film, just no real arguments, no real angst. I guess that’s the point – if ‘making a point’ were the point of the film, which it’s not. In fact there’s nothing but points – free floating directionless vector scars on an infinite pale canvas, threadbare and generally unloved, unknown even by those who weave its listless daily fabric of designer coffee, cigarette smoke and un-rewound video cassettes.
I enjoy this film immensely because I believe in its discharged Jungian potentialities; I dislike this film intensely because its flat, cardboard-tasting reality strikes a little too close to home with the crushing force of a nerd’s nerf ball against my blind third eye. Ripping up a #Things-to-do list..
Take it easy, just not too easy
Henry Swanson
Sat 12 Sep at 07:11 PM
Rick Sawyer
I find it curious that you don’t mention the source of the phrase that you take as the title of the essay. “Oblique Strategies” was a series of enigmatic epigrams written by Brian Eno to inspire creative thought. (“To withdraw in disgust, etc.” is not one of Eno’s strategies.) Eno, like Madonna, JFK conspiracy theorists, Ed Hall, and even the pile of books from the New Left canon, form the sort of secret spine of the film—the flukey and freaky cultural context that supports the philosophical meat.
That said, as a longtime and somewhat obsessive fan of this film, I love this essay.
Wed 23 Sep at 02:43 PM
Eli
Don’t forget, “repetition is a form of change.”
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