(This character is aptly credited as “Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station.”) He describes how, in this dream he had on the bus, he was reading a book in which “every choice or decision you make – the thing you choose not to do fractions off and becomes its own reality.” He verbally explores this idea for a few minutes (it’s not clear if the cabbie can even hear him: he is absolutely unresponsive), speculating that, maybe, if he had stayed at the bus station instead of taking a cab, he would have met some beautiful woman and gone back to her apartment. Within the taxi, Linklater’s character talks to the driver for three full minutes in one continuous, stationary shot, about a dream that he had recently – a particular type of dream that he has “every two years or so” – in which everything is “completely real” and vivid. The camera shows him riding on and departing a bus, then getting into a taxi. The first character we spend time with – played by Richard Linklater himself – is perhaps the only diegetic clue concerning what Slacker is about (if it’s even about anything). There is no cohesion there is no “plot” but there are delightfully entertaining and surprising segments at every turn. The latter technique contributes to Slacker‘s shtick: the film’s focus shifts from subject to subject almost every time there is more than one character on screen. There are two types of shots in this film: either the camera is completely stationary while a character rambles on about anything from The Smurfs to the JFK assassination, or the camera follows the movements of characters moving from one place to another. Slacker does not contain any narrative in the traditional sense (one might even call it anti-narrative), nor does it exhibit much in the way of aesthetic sensibilities. That may seem like a criticism – and for a lot of movies it would be – but for Slacker, this state of willful apathy with regards to plot and character development is calculated with precision. Its floaty, uncommitted form lulls the (potentially inebriated) viewer into a state of low-stakes entertainment that can easily be talked over for ten minutes, then re-entered without confusion. Although it might not necessarily fit within the confines – if there are any – of the stoner film (nobody smokes weed on screen), it does feel as if it were made for those nights when it’s hard to focus on any particular storyline for very long. If you ever find yourself too dazed and confused to comprehend the plot of Dazed and Confused, then Richard Linklater’s lesser-known film, Slacker (1991), is the next stop you should make.
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