Slacker · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young man rides in the back of a cab and won't stop talking. Every road you don't take, he tells the driver, spins off into its own reality where some other version of you keeps going; he just dreamed the whole thing. The cabbie says nothing, eyes on the road. The kid pays, climbs out, walks off — and the film that seemed to be his simply lets him go. It will do this about a hundred more times before the day is out.

That cab ride is the whole movie in miniature, and it's worth pausing on what does NOT happen in it. Nobody forms a plan. Nothing the passenger says changes anything, and he doesn't seem to want it to. In an ordinary film a man gets into a cab because he needs to be somewhere, and the ride is a link in a chain of cause and effect the story will eventually close. Deleuze had a name for the moment cinema stopped trusting that chain: the crisis of the action-image. After the war, he argued, a certain kind of character lost the ability to act in any way that altered his situation. He could perceive. He could talk. He could drift. He could not resolve. Slacker is built entirely out of such people — no protagonist, no conflict, no resolution — and Linklater turns their inability into a form.

The form is a relay. The camera follows someone until they brush past someone more interesting, then defects, and never comes back. Deleuze, describing exactly this loosening, called it the dispersive situation: many characters, weakly linked, with no center to organize them. He took the idea from Robert Altman, from the overlapping crowd of Nashville — which sits right there in Slacker's lineage. Linklater shrinks Altman to one college town and pushes him further. Altman at least cut back to his people; Linklater drops each thread for good. That refusal is the engine. Deleuze's word for the seam is weak links — slackened causality, the elliptical cut — and here the link is almost nothing: a shared sidewalk, a glance, two bodies crossing in a doorway. Every story is abandoned just as it might develop, and the abandonment becomes the momentum. Somewhere in the first twenty minutes you stop waiting for a payoff. The dropped thread IS the payoff.

Where is everyone going? Nowhere, which is the point. The purposeful journey of the old cinema — the quest, the chase, the errand that means something — gives way after the war to what Deleuze called the balade: the stroll, the trip that transforms nothing. Slacker is one continuous balade, an ambulatory day of walking and talking that ends roughly where it began, with the city no different for any of it.

And when you can no longer act on what is in front of you, all that is left is to look and to listen. Deleuze called these pure optical and sound situations opsigns and sonsigns, and Slacker is almost nothing else — a film of talk, of location-recorded voices overlapping in cafes and rented rooms, the microphone simply left running. The silent cabbie is the film's first seer, Deleuze's voyant, the one who endures the world rather than acts on it. He is also us. We are handed monologue after monologue with no power to intervene, and the long held takes keep us there past the point of plot, in what Deleuze called dead time, where the everyday is simply allowed to go on.

So what do these people DO, if not act? They legend themselves. The man hawking what he swears is Madonna's pap smear. The conspiracy obsessives. The old anarchist recruiting for a revolution that will never come. Deleuze called this fabulation: people caught in the act of telling themselves into being, and he noticed that once truth stops being the goal, characters turn into forgers, each spinning a private cosmology. The conspiracy theorists are almost a Deleuzian joke. Where the old cinema had a plot, Slacker has people who believe in plots — a diffuse cover-up behind everything that no one can name. Talk has become the only available action. Rohmer had already staked a whole cinema on that wager; My Night at Maud's makes a single long conversation the central event. Linklater inherits the bet and lets it flood.

The debts run clean. The baton-pass descends from Ophuls' La Ronde and Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty, the handheld walk-and-talk from Breathless, the deadpan low-budget drift from Stranger Than Paradise, the mosaic from Nashville. What Linklater added was nerve. He made the structure itself the subject, so that a film about people who opted out of ambition and narrative opts out of plot in the same gesture. Form and content became one refusal. And he proved it could be done for the price of a used car, on 16mm, with your friends — a lesson the next decade of independents, from Clerks to mumblecore, absorbed whole. The hyperlink films that followed, Short Cuts and Magnolia, are slicker and less brave; they always tie the knots back up.

Watch it again and watch the cut. Every time the camera defects, ask what it gives up — a story you will never get — and what it gains: the sense of a whole city talking at once, none of it adding up, all of it alive. Deleuze thought that was what time looks like when you stop using it to get somewhere.