Slacker 2011

Has it been thirteen years? I guess it has.

Looking for my next-thing-to-do in Boulder after last week's climate science lecture, I read a notice in the printed version of the Onion, of all things, for a showing the following Wednesday on the CU campus for Slacker 2011, which I immediately discerned must be an updated version of the famous film Slacker by Austin film producer Rick Linklater. Given that I had just been reminiscing about Austin, this seemed like the obvious next step.

Slacker (link) came out in the summer of 1990, at the end of my first year in graduate school in Austin. I remember the guerilla marketing for it all around West Campus and the Drag that spring. It soon became a local cult classic. One of the most notable actors in it was later in a film shot in my own house on Duval Street in the spring of 1992, produced by my roommate James Froeschle as part of his master's thesis at UT (imdb entry).

In the original Slacker, the rambling stream-of-consciousness style that dragged the viewer haphazardly from one conversation to another, following various people who crossed the screen, seemed to be the perfect style for Austin. Say what you want about it, somehow it captured the goofy spontaneity of Austin and its weird inhabitants right on the cusp of the 1990s. I was looking forward to seeing the "update," although I knew there would be a bit of poignancy in that it would remind me that I had not been back to Austin since the spring of 1999, and in most ways, it was no longer my place to call my own, or my home at all anymore.

I noticed the showing would be at the Meuzinger Auditorium on CU. That was just a little bit further up the hill from the Institute for Behavioral Sciences. Could there be anything more perfect for my next step?

I drove to Boulder a bit early and stopped for dinner at a Tibetan take-out place at the corner of Folsom and Arapahoe. What could be more Boulder than a Tibetan take-out place? It was the first time I'd been there. I'd driven by it repeatedly and thought of going. It seemed like the time to start new things. I asked the Tibetan-looking guy at the counter for a recommendation for Tibetan food, and he suggested a spicy beef dish. As I ate it, sitting at the window counter with my back turned, a young couple that had just moved to Boulder from Detroit chatted with the owner about Tibet and Tibetan food. The owner went into a history of Tibetan independence and non-independence. He said Tibetan food was a cross between Indian food and Chinese food, as one might expect. He discussed how he had come to America from India, where Tibetan exiles live these days. He talked about times long past in Boulder---the old days and how they differed from today. It took me a while to realize that he was talking about 1992.

I parked down by the high school and walked up the hill to campus on 17th Street. It's the nicest way to approach campus. Some of the buildings remind me so much of UT at times. I got to the auditorium a few minutes early and killed time staring up at the CU physics building across the street, a mini-high rise that also recalls the physics building in Austin.

The film was being shown as part of CU's international film series (link). The auditorium is in the psychology building, and was a nice place to see a movie for seven bucks. The girl at the table gave me a torn paper ticket from a roll. The auditorium was almost entirely empty. Only about a dozen people were in attendance. All were men in their forties and fifties. With exception of one pair, they all had come alone.

It took me until the end of the movie to realize that Slacker 2011 was not in fact made by Linklater himself. He had gone on to much bigger fame, of course. Rather this sequel is the collaborative product of the Austin Film Society, with different film makers contributing various scenes to the stream-of-consciousness tapestry. The style is true to the original---we follow a character for one scene, and then follow another character randomly into a completely different scene. There were a few distinct homage scenes, including a reprise of the most famous scene from the original where the late John Henry Faulk, an Austin legend, narrates his experiences on the day of the Whitman tower shooting in August 1966. In the updated version, the dialogue is exactly the same, but the roles are played in a humorous inversion by new actors that gives it a surreal flavor.

But most of the material was fresh in content. Right in the first scene, I was pleased to recognize streets I had once walked on years ago. In those same scenes I noticed how cell phones, which did not exist in 1990 in their current from, now played in important part in so many of the mini plots.

It was fun to reminisce and to see places of business that I recognized---old signs---and "have it all come back to me." But there were plenty of new things too, places I didn't recognize at all, but which I knew must have become new well-known hangouts. A new Les Amis!? I was prepared for this kind of zeitgeist shock. Like I said, I knew Austin wouldn't feel like home to me anymore. If I wanted it to be home, I'd have to go back and reclaim it all anew.

But there was more dislocation in my reaction than this personal element. In many of the scenes, I noticed that a strong current of something akin to nihilism, something which was not in the original at all. It made me realize why I don't actually want to live in Austin anymore. It was as if, on the one hand, nothing had really changed there, only that the dysfunctions of the trends of 1990 had been blown up and amplified over the years to the point where the character sketches were no longer whimsical and fun but downright sad.

The characters were mostly young people in their twenties---barely just babies when the original came out. I felt sorry for them. It was as if they were wandering around in anger and confusion looking for the Austin that existed long ago, the Austin they had heard so much about back in Brooklyn, etc.,  but which had been overrun and tapped out long ago, and now consists of a stream of new arrivals and refugees trying to find "Austin verification" from each other. Many of them expressed the dead-end nature of their lives, a frustration at the apparent meaningless of their existence. There was an undercurrent in many of the stories of a desire to escape their lives. Only a few characters seemed to have the goofy life force of the ones of 1990.

The interactions between the young men and the young women were highly indicative of this ennui among the youth. Repeatedly we saw aimless, weak young men attempting to curry favor with (and hit on) angry, recalcitrant, disdainful young women, who by and large scorned them and rebuffed them with jaundiced eye and flippant phrases. There were only a few strong male characters who seemed to be on anything that could be called a "path" in life (one character ironically expressed a desire to go to Detroit and start anew by urban homesteading amidst the ruins there). Such is the post-millennial generational update of what it means to be a "slacker." And I thought my generation had it bad trying to emulate the hippies of the 1960s!

A few of the characters expressed downright dark apocalyptic visions of life and America, including one by a flamboyant gay man riding a bicycle, who seemed to yearn and look forward to the destruction of our entire culture and way of life. Despite his prophecy, his clarity in expressing this made him one of the most dynamic characters in the movie, and seemed to prove the cultural maxim we have arrived at, that (straight) men, devoid of purpose in their lives, are reduced to sexual beasts enslaved by their craving need for women (who flee from them naturally), and the only path to freedom for a man is to be a homosexual.

In a way this gay character seemed to speak for all the other characters, as if giving voice to the unspoken things in their souls. I felt like I was watching an End Times parade of the damned, a cataloging of a soul-deprived way of life that is no longer sustainable, not because of our material consumptions, but rather because of our inability to connect with each other, and to find meaning in our lives.

It was quite an X-ray. It left me somewhat depressed, despite the humorous and worthy update of the "throwing the camera off Mt. Bonnell" scene that closes the original. Yet artistically it was certainly a success, and thus gave me hope underneath it all. Hope comes from recognition of issues, and there was certainly recognition in this movie, even though the only solution seemed to be darkly apocalyptic.

After the movie, I came back out in to the cold of the CU campus. There was a brilliant full moon in a clear sky above the physics building. As I walked back down towards 17th Street, I passed a parking lot where a young woman was talking on a cell phone. The first words I heard her say, loud and clear, were: "Staten Island...he's a big guy..."