Abstract<\/strong> | Slacker<\/em> (1991) by Richard Linklater is considered a milestone in American independent cinema (King). The film is entirely shot on location in Austin, Texas, mainly in the area of the Drag. Its 24-hour narration of city life has specific features: a script conceived as a \u201cRoadmap,\u201d with no main characters or turning points; members of the scene and film crew as non-professional actors; and local Austin music. This article explores Slacker<\/em>\u2019s unique representation of the local indie scene and how its collective performance became emblematic of a generational phenomenon, thus shifting the culture discourse\u2019s emphasis from space (Austin) to time (Generation X). <\/div><\/p>\n
R\u00e9sum\u00e9\u00a0<\/strong>| Slacker<\/em> (1991) de Richard Linklater est consid\u00e9r\u00e9 comme un jalon d’une importance cl\u00e9 dans le cin\u00e9ma ind\u00e9pendant am\u00e9ricain (King, 2005). Le film en entier a \u00e9t\u00e9 tourn\u00e9 \u00e0 Austin au Texas, principalement dans le voisinage de la Drag<\/em>. La narration de 24 heures de la vie urbaine poss\u00e8de des caract\u00e9ristiques particuli\u00e8res\u00a0: un sc\u00e9nario con\u00e7u comme une \u00ab\u00a0feuille de route\u00a0\u00bb, sans personnages principaux ou moments charni\u00e8res; des membres de l\u2019\u00e9quipe de mise en sc\u00e8ne et de tournage comme acteurs non professionnels; de la musique d\u2019Austin. Cet article explore la repr\u00e9sentation unique de Slacker<\/em> de la sc\u00e8ne ind\u00e9pendante locale et de quelle fa\u00e7on sa performance collective est devenue embl\u00e9matique d’un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne g\u00e9n\u00e9rationnel, en mettant l’accent non plus sur l’espace (Austin), mais sur le temps (G\u00e9n\u00e9ration X).<\/div>
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Maria Teresa Soldani |\u00a0Independent Researcher and Musician<\/p>\n
THE PERFORMANCE OF THE AUSTIN INDIE SCENE IN SLACKER<\/em>:
\nFrom the Body of a Scene to the Body of a Generation<\/h4>\n
Slacker<\/em> (1990\/1991) is Richard Linklater\u2019s second feature film, following his undistributed debut It\u2019s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books <\/em>(1988). It was shot on location in Austin, Texas between 1989 and 1990 and picked up for distribution by Orion Classics in 1991 after several independent showings in the US. Geoff King considers the movie a milestone in the history of American indie film (21) and names it one of the most successful low-budget productions of all time (14). In his history of American independent cinema, Emanuel Levy speaks of Linklater and Slacker<\/em> in relation to regional filmmaking, highlighting the importance of locality as a foundational dimension of indie film culture (172-176). Slacker<\/em> was released the same year as the breakthrough novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture<\/em> (1991) by Canadian writer Douglas Coupland. Subsequently, the mainstream media began to talk about the post-baby-boomer \u201ctwenty-something<\/em>\u201d generation portrayed in the film and novel, grouping together Slacker<\/em>, Generation X<\/em>, and grunge music (especially Nirvana) as works by\/from\/on \u201cGeneration X.\u201d Film scholar Peter Hanson grouped Slacker<\/em> within the category of the \u201cCinema of Generation X\u201d (62-63), his label for certain new films produced in the late 1980s and 1990s, such as Kevin Smith\u2019s Clerks<\/em> (1994), Ben Stiller\u2019s Reality Bites<\/em> (1994), and David Fincher\u2019s Fight Club<\/em> (1999). He argued:<\/p>\n
Gen-X filmmakers are those directors born between 1961 and 1971, a ten-year period that falls well within the range given by sociologists seeking to identify when Generation X was born. While ten years of birth can\u2019t encompass an entire generation, the filmmakers in these years were exposed to key social, political, and cultural factors. Therefore, their collective body of work can be analyzed as a reaction to those forces that shaped their generation as a whole. (5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In the 1980s independent music scenes associated with alternative rock culture flourished in the US (see Straw \u201cSystems of articulation;\u201d Kruse), producing a phenomenon that the journalist Michael Azerrad later called \u201cthe American indie underground 1981-1991.\u201d During those years, a prolific independent scene took shape in Austin, involving such bands as Glass Eyes, Ed Hall, Zeitgeist, and Dharma Bums, who steadily played in urban venues and produced DIY records. Moreover, many musicians moved to Austin, such as the band Butthole Surfers and the songwriter Daniel Johnston. In 1985 MTV dedicated an entire episode of Cutting Edge<\/em> to the scene, giving it the title \u201cAustin Avalanche of Rock and Roll\u201d.\u00a0 The program was produced by the independent I.R.S. Records and directed by Jonathan Dayton with Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine<\/em>, 2006).<\/p>\n
This article explores Slacker<\/em>\u2019s filmic construction of the local indie scene, examining the process by which Austin\u2019s regionalism became emblematic of a cultural phenomenon that was both national and generational. I will trace the process by which Slacker<\/em> was conceived, written, produced, directed, and shot in Austin, and show how this independently produced film was deeply connected both to the local indie music scene and to the form of the city symphony film. Drawing on Rob Stone\u2019s analysis of Slacker<\/em>, I will examine the ways in which the making of the film, involving, as it did, a local cultural scene, produced complex relations between space and time. I will further explore these issues by invoking the concepts of d\u00e9rive (Guy Debord), time-image (Gilles Deleuze), chronotope (Mikhail Bakhtin), and generation (Karl Mannheim), suggesting that Slacker<\/em> constructs a distinctive relation between the visuality of the Austin indie scene and the generational discourse commonly associated with the film.<\/p>\n
Slacker<\/em> depicts a 24-hour day in the city life of Austin\u2019s residents. No central character emerges and no professional actors were used. The film\u2019s narrative is organized as a flux of meetings between two, three, or more people, in streets, venues, and houses located, for the most part, in the Drag\u2014the neighborhood along the western side of the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Levy summarizes the film\u2019s narrative as a chain of events: \u201c[Slacker<\/em>] travels across the lonely, eccentric trajectories of dozens of people over a single day (from dawn to dawn), dropping some characters just as they become interesting, finding something peculiar in nearly every episode\u201d (175).<\/p>\n
This \u201cAustin movie\u201d (Linklater 3) opens with the image of a bus travelling at dawn as we see a male passenger wake up. The silhouette of the face, captured against the moving landscape, belongs to Linklater himself. Over this image are two sets of titles: \u201cDETOUR FILM PRODUCTION presents\u201d and \u201cSLACKER.\u201d In the second shot the bus stops at the Austin station as the male passenger gets off and takes a cab towards an unknown destination. The third shot is a long take of the passenger as he tells the taxi driver the story of his dreams and his theory of the existence of parallel realities: he explains how, in the exact moment in which a person makes a choice, all other (lost) opportunities still exist contemporaneously. In the original script, the character is called \u201cShould Have Stayed at Bus Station,\u201d a name defined by function rather than given in a customary act of naming. The movie adopts this approach throughout, giving nameless characters equal weight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Slacker<\/em>\u2019s script contains real events, local legends, and fictional stories involving over a hundred characters, young people living in Austin at that specific historical moment. King describes the film as an innovative choral narration (i.e. \u201cTangled Webs: Multi-Strand Narrative\u201d), identifying this element as characteristic of American independent cinema (84-85). Slacker<\/em> is a collective urban tale, mapping Austin through the trajectories of multiple figures. Each scene flows into another, connected by at least one character, and this chain of scenes produces the urban, social, and cultural cartographies of Austin, following a script that was, indeed, known as \u201cthe Roadmap\u201d (Linklater 23).<\/p>\n
Slacker<\/em> \u201cShould Have Stayed at Bus Station\u201d 00h 00min 00s:<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\nJames Haley argues that Slacker<\/em> is a non-fiction film and notes how its essence lies in the fact of its being set in the Drag, insofar as what fills the film is the humanity of that neighborhood:<\/p>\n<blockquote>Richard Linklater\u2019s Slacker<\/em> could not have been made anywhere but in Austin, Texas. Oh, sure, a crew could film such footage on any urban location. But that would be fiction. Only Austin\u2014and more specifically, only the eight blocks of the Guadalupe Street Drag that skirts University of Texas\u2014could open its collective trench coat and flash its vitals at an unsuspecting audience\u2014and have it be true in revealing its netherworld of space cadets, goofballs, punk groupies, gently aging iconoclasts, coffee shop feminists-gone-\u2018round-the-bend,\u2019 conspiracy dweebs lurking in used-book stores, artists, anti-artists, and a whole purgatory of other refugees from the world of productive sanity. (\u201cGTT,\u201d Linklater 5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn the 1980s, the Drag was the heart of the Austin indie scene, which had flourished since Raul\u2019s starting playing punk music at the end of the 1970s, thus establishing that scene\u2019s independence from the locally rooted progressive country and blues scenes. As Will Straw points out, establishing a scene produces the key context for alternative rock music culture: \u201c[the scene] is that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization\u201d (\u201cSystems of Articulation\u201d 373). The musicians in the scene create \u201cforms of communication through which the building of musical alliances and the drawing of musical boundaries take place\u201d (373), creating highly hybrid, personal, and eclectic styles developed \u201cwithin an ongoing process of differentiation and complexification\u201d (376). Austin in the 1980s was defined by such a bounded cultural space, with music practices that involved multiple styles establishing a special relation between space and time, as we shall see.<\/p>\n<h5>The Austin music scenes: performers and sweating bodies<\/strong><\/h5>\nIn his case study of Austin, Barry Shank defines a scene as an \u201coverproductive signifying community\u201d in which \u201cfar more semiotic information is produced than can be rationally parsed\u201d (122). Shank speaks of the \u201cinterrogation of dominant structures of identification, and potential cultural transformation\u201d that takes place during live musical performance, in \u201can evident display of semiotic disruption\u201d (122). In the Austin scene, Shank suggests, \u201cthe music . . . performed is the result of an entire set of social and cultural relationships intersecting through the \u2018personalities\u2019 of the musicians in the field of musical performance\u201d (138). He further elaborates on the performance of sincerity in connecting the members of the scene to Austin itself:<\/p>\n<blockquote>This belief in the importance of sincere personal expression established a communicative atmosphere that elicited a willing and pleasurable identification among Austin\u2019s young music fans. These young fans developed a tendency to group together in the city\u2019s music clubs\u2014listening, dancing, and fantasizing along with the performances of local musicians. Once this tradition was established, the clubs of Austin began to function as a cultural synecdoche. (15-16)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe venues Shank surveyed, such as Raul\u2019s or Sparky\u2019s, were crowded with Communications students from the University of Texas and people whose age, sexualities, genders, and races rendered them marginal (104). Local filmmakers, writers, musicians, record sellers, and promoters began to share interdisciplinary projects that involved several art forms and media, including performance art, music, film, video, and writing. In Shank\u2019s terms, the Austin indie scene became \u201ca media-conscious movement\u201d (115).<\/p>\nIn 1985, Linklater and some friends founded the Austin Film Society, with the aim of distributing independent, foreign, and experimental films that had not yet been shown in town. That same year Linklater and cameraman Lee Daniel shot and edited a short film on Woodshock, the annual independent music festival staged in Austin. Both the name of the event and the title of the film referenced Woodstock, the legendary rock music festival of 1969. Woodshock 1985 was staged in the natural environment of Dripping Springs, with the participation of Austin\u2019s most notable local bands alongside other US indie acts. Linklater and Daniel edited seven minutes of the recreational activities of the scene\u2019s members in the festival area, but did not show any activity transpiring on the stage. The live music performed during the festival was the background sound for some interviews and jokes involving the audience, heard against images of half-naked bodies under the sun as captured by the Super 8 cameras. Among the various people shown, a still unknown Daniel Johnston promoted his self-produced tape of home-recorded music, his behavior exemplary of the sincerity Shank observed in the Austin music scene. In the end titles, Linklater and Daniel ironically called Woodshock<\/em> \u201ca film attempt.\u201d At the very least, this embryonic Super 8 film, with its emphasis on showing the bodies of its members, translated into visual terms the concept of the independent local scene. These sun-scorched bodies spurred those processes of identification and differentiation between musicians and audience that, in Shank\u2019s account, were part of the \u201ccarnivalesque atmosphere\u201d of live performances in Austin:<\/p>\n<blockquote>The bodies of the performers (particularly that of the lead singer) are framed on a stage, where their gestures map out a sexualized field of affect, meaning and desire. The vibrations of the music then circulate an overwhelming eroticism through dancing and listening bodies, an eroticism that in turn is cast upon a widest variety of secondary objects, rapidly translating the libidinal ties of love and identification into one another and back again, in the overproduction of the signs of identity and the overstimulation of the sense. These are the necessary conditions for the development of a scene: a situated swirling mass of transformative signs and sweating bodies, continually reconstructing the meaning of a communion of individuals in a primary group. (128)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWoodshock<\/em> was Linklater and Daniel\u2019s first exercise with content and form: it framed the \u201ctransformative signs and sweating bodies\u201d (Shank) of the members of the Austin indie scene in experimental fashion and made use of a specific film format, Super 8, which had played a key role in the history of avant-garde and underground cinema.<\/p>\n<h5>Slacker<\/em><\/strong>: the filmmaking process<\/strong><\/h5>\nLinklater describes Slacker<\/em> as \u201csort of a group art project\u201d (qtd. in Lowestein 26). The film is a collective narrative in which no scene is more significant than the others and in which there are no turning points; each scene is only connected to the following scene in the chronological order established by the passage of time (i.e. day\/night\/day). The only instance of repetition is that the first day\u2019s dawn, which opens the film, is mirrored in that of the second day, which closes the film. These two events, marking the boundaries of a 24-hour cycle, are connected to earlier and later films by Linklater. The first sequence recalls It\u2019s Impossible to\u2026<\/em>, and initiates the imaginary account of daydreaming which is at the core of Waking Life<\/em> (2001); the topos of the encounter on the road is developed in the trilogy Before Sunrise<\/em> (1995), Before Sunset<\/em> (2004), and Before Midnight<\/em> (2013). In addition, the last sequence in Slacker<\/em> recalls the Super 8 films that Linklater and Daniel made over several years at the beginning of their careers, such as Woodshock<\/em>: \u201cIn itself, this last sequence is the kind of film I was first making. Lee and I would, say, take a trip out of town and shoot Super 8 the whole time. Then you get the footage back, edit it, and maybe project it while a friend\u2019s band plays\u201d (Linklater 128).<\/p>\nIn order to prepare his cast and crew, Linklater collected some production notes grouped according to the following topics: \u201cVertical narrative\u2026 Script\u2026 Visual\u2026 Casting\u2026 To the Actor\u2026 Characters\u2026 Dialogue\u2026 This Film\u2026 The Viewer\u2026 A Method\u201d (Linklater 10-13). These notes were published in 1992 in Linklater\u2019s book on Slacker<\/em>, which also included the first script, a history of the production, actors\u2019 profiles, cast reminiscences, notes from the crew, and an interview with the author:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<blockquote>VERTICAL NARRATIVE<\/strong><\/p>\nA film as a long sequence in which each shot, each event and character, lead only to the next.<\/p>\nNew scene\/New start: each complete in itself, the next is simply juxtaposed to it. The relationship between various scenes can be connected later (or before \u2013 cause can follow effect).<\/p>\nThe audience will itself construct causal relationships.<\/p>\nThe scenes and characters change\u2026 but the preoccupations of the movie remain the same.<\/p>\nWhat seems like a straight line (as narrative) will actually be a circle (emotionally speaking).<\/p>\n\u201c\u2026any apparent philosophical and political contradictions are actually an integral part of the non-narrative\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\nSCRIPT<\/strong><\/p>\nA film where anything goes \u2013 anything people do can be integrated into this film.<\/p>\nA film of people posing problems, even in a confused state (possibly to be solved or addressed differently elsewhere).<\/p>\nOptimistic cinema: anything is possible, nothing is prohibited.<\/p>\n\u201cSomething filmed is automatically different from something written, and therefore original\u201d Jean-Luc Godard<\/p>\n <\/p>\nVISUAL<\/strong><\/p>\nCamera: quiet but eloquent (especially when it moves).<\/p>\nColors: muted, not bright, muddied by the environment.<\/p>\nFiction\u2026 entering into documentary. Documentary of characters acting out a fiction?<\/p>\nLack of establishing shots: as a partitioning effect (same with the characters\u2019 lack of development).<\/p>\nEnvironment: suggests documentary.<\/p>\nCharacter: passion. (10-11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nFaithful to this methodological framework, Linklater payed particularly attention to the performative aspect of filmmaking, producing notes on actors, characters, and dialogue. In his casting, the director favored finding a persona<\/em>, someone with attitude, physical presence, interesting life experiences, and particular cultural tastes (11). The notion of persona has been key in descriptions of independent scenes, especially those involving musicians, and has been a prominent feature of the representation of such scenes within films. One need only think, for example, of those films made within the No Wave scene, which flourished amidst the decay of New York City\u2019s East Village at the end of the 1970s and is sometimes considered the first \u201cindependent scene\u201d (Yokobosky 127). A key feature of No Wave was the creation of hybrid forms of music, film, media, and visual arts in which scene-based persona<\/em> such as Lydia Lunch were seen to embody certain characteristics of the scene overall. The sense that persona<\/em> and performances are central to the visuality of the Austin indie scene is clear in the case of Slacker<\/em>. Linklater noted in his internal communication to cast and crew that \u201c[p]erformance will depend on the screen presence: the actor must give off the right vibrations, be the surface that represents the complex depths, and be able to capture the essence of the moment of that time\u201d (11).<\/p>\nIn Slacker<\/em> the performance of the Austin indie scene is enacted in several ways. First of all, performances by virtually all of those involved in local indie music\u2014Glass Eye, Poi Dog Pondering, Bad Mutha Goose, Daniel Johnston, Shoulder, Sick People, Jean Caffeine, Hickhoids, Butthole Surfers, Triangle Mallet Apron, Not For Sale, The Texas Instruments, Pocket Fisherman, Crust, Ed Hall, The Jackofficers, and St. Cecilia\u2014are almost entirely diegetic. Their music is played live and unplugged along the street, in daytime or, plugged-in, at venues, in nighttime; it is reproduced on sound systems at home, in a car, or in a bar; it is listened to by a few people or by larger groups. All these contexts are the daily experience of music and urban life, not the extraordinary events we might associate with mainstream rock and pop culture. There are only two exceptions in this restriction of music to diegetic sources: the final scene, with its ambiguous use of \u201cDie Graskop Polka,\u201d which may be diegetic (coming from the car radio) or not; and the end titles, in which we hear the Butthole Surfers\u2019 song \u201cStrangers Die Everyday.\u201d<\/p>\nThe scene which stands as the fullest performance of the Austin music scene is also the most emblematic scene in Slacker<\/em> as a whole. A guy who comes out of a house (Ultimate Loser) and a young woman (Stephanie from Dallas) are speaking in the street. They are updating each other on their recent lives\u2014UL is still playing with his band, the Ultimate Losers, while SfD has just come back to town after a period in a clinic in Dallas, TX\u2014when another girl (the Pap Smear Pusher) interrupts their flirting to try to sell them what she presents as the \u201coriginal Madonna pap smear.\u201d<\/p>\nSlacker<\/em> \u201cMadonna Pap Smear\u201d 00h 24min 30s:<\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/R9f26GUUldE?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\nThe performances in this scene are by three musicians active in Austin: Scott Marcus (UL) and Stella Weir (SfD) from the Glass Eye, and Teresa \u201cNervosa\u201d Taylor (PSP) from the Butthole Surfers. The scene effects an irony of sorts with respect to pop-star worship, and this itself encapsulates the film\u2019s anti-Hollywood attitude. The representation of the Austin indie scene also includes performances by members of the film\u2019s crew: Linklater; D.O.P. and cameraman Daniel (GTO); cameraman assistant Clark Walker (Cadillac Crook); editor Scott Rhodes (Disgrunted Grad Student); sound engineer Denise Montgomery (Having a Breakthrough Day); and script-supervisor Meg Brennan (Sitting at Caf\u00e9). Linklater describes these people as \u201cfriends\u201d with \u201ca common aesthetic,\u201d \u201ckind of a film family\u201d (Linklater 128-129). These alliances, emblematic of Linklater\u2019s approach, would continue over several years and movies, adding a strong personal and reflexive dimension to his filmmaking.<\/p>\n<h5>The \u201cRoadmap\u201d: Slacker<\/em> as a City Symphony<\/strong><\/h5>\nShank\u2019s sense of Austin\u2019s music venues as forming a \u201ccultural synecdoche\u201d is one way of understanding Slacker<\/em>\u2019s connections to the film form of the city symphony. Its 24-hour narration and restriction to the bounded space of Austin are the most obvious characteristics Slacker<\/em> shares with city symphonies, \u201cthose films,\u201d in Scott MacDonald\u2019s words, \u201cthat provide a general sense of life in a specific metropolis, often by revealing characteristic dimensions of city life from the morning into the evening of a composite day\u201d (3). This film form\u2014developed in Europe in the 1920s, in the work of Walter Ruttmann, Dviga Vertov, and Alberto Cavalcanti\u2014inspired the city films on NYC made by vanguard filmmakers such as Rudy Burckhardt. It is useful to see a number of independent, music-centred American films as variations on the city symphony: The Blank Generation<\/em> (Amos Poe and Ivan Kral, 1976), The Decline of Western Civilization<\/em> (Penelope Spheeris, 1980), The Slog Movie<\/em> (David Markey, 1982), Athens, GA: Inside\/Out<\/em> (Tony Gayton, 1986). These films suggest affinities between the project of the city symphony form and the documentation of cultural scenes. They make visible \u201cthe theatricality of the city [\u2026] [and] the city\u2019s capacity to generate images of people occupying public space in attractive ways [\u2026]. \u00a0[In them, m]usic provides a pretext for being out in the city, for consuming culture in moments of collective interaction which are embedded in the more diffuse public life of cities, in drinking and in public, in collective conversation\u201d (Straw, \u201cCultural Scenes\u201d 412).<\/p>\nMacDonald considers Spike Lee\u2019s Do the Right Thing<\/em> (1989) to be a city symphony, noting characteristics of the film that, arguably, are shared with Slacker<\/em>\u2014the combination of genres (i.e. fiction, documentary, avant-garde) and the critical analogy between cinematic and musical forms:<\/p>\n<blockquote>In an orchestra, dozens of musicians play instruments that have evolved over history to produce a multipartite, but unified and coherent performance within which the individualities of the contributing musicians are subsumed; in the city, the individual contributions of millions of people (working with technologies that have developed over centuries) are subsumed within the metropolis\u2019s mega-partite movement through the day, a movement that reveals several predictable highs and lows. (4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nOther elements connect Slacker<\/em> to this film form: the realistic look of the 16mm film, generally used for documentary films; the choral and decentered narration; the first sequence, with its titles at dawn, that functions as a prelude; the presence, at the beginning, of an author who explains his interpretation of reality in self-reflexive terms; the final sequence, with its use of Super 8 film in an experimental fashion to signal a new dawn; and the \u201cfireworks\u201d visually created by the cameras as they are thrown in the air. Further comparisons of Slacker<\/em> with Do the Right Thing<\/em> are useful: while the latter focuses on questions of race, the former foregrounds questions of generation (of the twenty-somethings<\/em>) in its representation of the scene. Both films seek to develop alternative ways of dealing with social issues. For MacDonald, the alternative dimensions of Lee\u2019s film were \u201cdemonstrated by the production process of the film<\/em>, which required individuals with backgrounds even more varied that those of the characters in the film to find ways to collaborate, not just for one day, but for several of the hottest weeks of New York summer, in a neighborhood in Bed-Stuy\u201d (15, original emphasis). This collaborative and alternative work process presumes the existence of a historical continuum<\/em> between time unfolding before, during, and after the events which make up the diegesis.<\/p>\nIn Do the Right Thing<\/em> the representation of daily life in a single block (Bedford-Stuyvesant) in a borough (Brooklyn) of an American city (New York) is critical in relation to the national media discourses that debated the film\u2019s political and cultural issues. In Slacker<\/em> we find a similar set of relationships, except that, in the case of Linklater\u2019s film, the specific political issue is not explicitly addressed but rather conveyed implicitly through the independent means with which the film was made. The filmic representation of Austin and rendering of the visuality of the local indie scene may be interpreted in terms of emerging issues having to do with generational identity.<\/p>\nUsing the film form of the city symphony, both Do the Right Thing<\/em> and Slacker<\/em> portray the collective as a living organism, made up of individual pieces that become emblematic of a wider body. As synecdoches of the country, Bed-Stuy and the Drag require that we shift our perspective as \u201cviewers\u201d from the local to the national. The underground independent scene represented in Slacker<\/em> shared many features with those scenes proliferating during the 1980s across trans-local networks, moving on from the effervescent experience of No Wave in NYC and punk scenes in Los Angeles. Slacker<\/em> offers a representation of the Austin indie scene as a cultural synecdoche; the film moves from showing how venues embody the urban scene to suggesting ways in which the scene is coextensive with a national territory. Indie scenes are visualized from the perspective of two subject positions: one positions the subject in the city and the other locates the subject in relation to a mapping of the nation as a whole. The visualization of the scene is produced by specific independent or alternative media (e.g. DIY recordings and films, graffiti art, and print material such as fanzines, posters, and flyers) which are both made by the members of scenes and circulate between them within larger networks.<\/p>\n<h5>The Urban Night as Territory of the Austin Indie Scene<\/strong><\/h5>\nScenes are inextricably connected to night-time. The daytime parts of Slacker<\/em> are structured around linear narratives established by the chronological chain of events, in which any climax is avoided. Differently, those sequences set in the night represent various kinds of intensification\u2014in particular, an increase in the number of meetings between characters as well as in the loudness of diegetic sound and the frequency of cuts.<\/p>\nIn Slacker<\/em>, when day gives way to night, several changes happen, generating a sense of excess in the film\u2019s representation of the cultural scene. The night is explored by the eye of the camera as it goes from venue to venue: we see bars overflowing with beer, non-stop smoking, characters jumping into a van to go to a concert, others trying to avoid paying for tickets by using the guest-list or copying an admission stamp onto their skin and so on. Some people are making a video project during a Triangle Mallet Apron performance, or attending an Ed Hall concert at the Continental Club, or drinking and speaking about photography, or hopping onto a car to finish the day in someone\u2019s bed. We can read the night in Slacker<\/em> in Straw\u2019s terms, \u201cas a circumscribed, territorial phenomenon, with its distinctive practices, sensory features and characteristic sites of narrative action (like night-clubs). In particular, the sense of night as territory follows the recognition that night has its own populations, personality types and distinctive forms of behaviour\u201d (\u201cChrono-Urbanism\u201d 54). The night in Slacker<\/em> can be conceived as a \u201cterritory\u201d to pass through, with its characters\u2014and the camera which follows them\u2014constantly in motion.<\/p>\nIn the night section of Slacker<\/em> the elements that characterize the cultural scene in Austin are enhanced by specific filmic choices: not only do virtually all of the shots take place in public locations, but new media formats are introduced (video, Super 8) and the diegetic music is mainly played live on stage. TV and VHS appear during sunset in the media lab of the character \u201cVideo Backpacker,\u201d and video, in the form of Fisher Price PixelVision, returns in the nighttime to capture in a club the dark performance of an experimental ensemble. The already mentioned Super 8 sequence, during the final dawn, is both a celebration of night-life in Austin and an expression of Linklater\u2019s own excitement at the films previously made to portray that artistic scene and its members. In addition, these two sequences are shot from the viewpoint of a filmmaker \u201cinside the scene\u201d\u2014in both the cinematic and social senses of \u201cscene\u201d\u2014who is attempting to capture its life just as Linklater and Daniel had attempted to do in Woodshock<\/em>. In this way, Linklater includes other elements of an advanced self-reflexivity within the film. The director notes, with respect to the ending, that \u201cSlacker<\/em> is a celebration of day-to-day life. Especially the last scene, with the all-night partiers driving around and filming each other. It\u2019s a microcosm of the whole film, ordinary people saying \u2018Hey, my life\u2019s worthy of cinema\u2019\u201d (17).<\/p>\nSlacker<\/em> \u201cClosing sequence\u201d 01h 28min 14s:<\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/FfjI7c3IEaw?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<h5>Slacking<\/em><\/strong> in Time-Images<\/strong><\/h5>\nThe creation in Slacker<\/em> of fictional characters whom Linklater (12) called \u201cnot developed,\u201d in a narration with no protagonists or antagonists, produces a narrative that is \u201calternative\u201d relative to those of Hollywood classic cinema (see King 82-86). These non-professional actors and actresses perform a story that avoids leading roles and engages in a collective construction. Rob Stone suggests that Slacker<\/em> embodies the \u201cpolitics of slackness\u201d as a form of opposition both to established Hollywood cinema and to the doctrines of Reaganomics. Musicians, promoters, artists, poets, video amateurs, students, writers, and bartenders mix their roles, shifting continuously between fiction and reality. The local scene is represented as a collective body sharing a commitment to independent principles. This way of making the movie, its adoption of DIY media and practices, suggests, to individuals who mostly belong to the same generational cohort, an alternative way of positioning oneself within American society. Linklater noted:<\/p>\n<blockquote>I think this generation has drifted farther away from any kind of ideologies: seeing all official systems of thought as alienations. And when you look at the American political system, there\u2019s nothing to feel aligned with, you\u2019re not represented. (18)<\/p>\nWork isn\u2019t mandatory in our society. [\u2026] If you\u2019re willing not to have a family, a new car, nice living conditions, nice clothes, and eat out every night; if you are willing to go, \u201cI just want to work part-time or not at all and spend most of my time making music, writing, reading, or watching movies,\u201d you can consciously drop out. (19)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nA deeper analysis of the spatial and temporal categories in Slacker <\/em>adds further elements with which to interpret the shift from the local space of Austin to the larger historical category of Generation X. Guy Debord\u2019s notion of d\u00e9rive<\/em>, Gilles Deleuze\u2019s time-image, and Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s chronotope help illuminate the film\u2019s \u201creterritorialization of a part of America called Austin\u201d (Stone 22). Stone describes the filmic space in Slacker<\/em> as \u201ca mundane space of transit,\u201d \u201ca space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible\u201d (21-22). The camera drifts along the street space, from character to character and from place to place. Debord\u2019s account of d\u00e9rive<\/em> is useful in capturing the ways in which chains of events are organized in the film: \u201cIn a d\u00e9rive<\/em> one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there\u201d (50). The drift could unfold over a day or a few hours and involve the entire city, a neighborhood, or at least a few blocks. In Slacker<\/em>, the drift is conveyed through the shooting process, the use of long shots which mostly involve motion, and a style of editing marked by a limited use of cuts.<\/p>\nThese elements, together with the collective narrative, the absence of main characters, the frustration of any action-directed plot, and dialogue which takes the form of monologues lead towards the accomplishment of the time-image, as Gilles Deleuze has described it. The French philosopher identifies a rupture in Italian Neorealismo, marked by the \u201cart of encounter\u2013\u2013fragmented, ephemeral, piecemeal, missed encounters\u201d (Zavattini qtd. in Deleuze 1) where \u201cthe real was no longer represented or reproduced, but \u2018aimed at\u2019\u201d (1). What Deleuze calls \u201cthe crisis of the action-image\u201d emerges first in \u201cthe form of trip\/ballad films\u201d and \u201cthe slackening of the sensory-motor connections\u201d (3), whose result tends towards \u00a0a \u201cpure optical-sound image\u201d (4). Speaking of the Japanese director Ozu, but in terms whose pertinence for Slacker<\/em> seems clear, Deleuze suggests that it is in the framing of daily life that the film image becomes time-image:<\/p>\n<blockquote>There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, \u2018a little time in its pure state\u2019: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced. The night that changes into day, or the reverse, recalls a still life on which light falls, either fading or getting stronger [\u2026]. Ozu\u2019s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states. [\u2026] Each is time, on each occasion, under various conditions of that which changes in time. Time is the full, that is, the unalterable form filled by change. Time is \u2018the visual reserve of events in their appropriateness\u2019. (17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nCharacters in Slacker<\/em> are framed in their changing everydayness, with each scene lasting as long as their encounters on the road. Characters, as well as actors, share a time that presumes a time before and after the moment of shooting: the time of their lives within the spaces of Austin.<\/p>\nIn the street the camera meets that varied humanity whose collective life is celebrated in Bakhtin\u2019s conception of the carnival, as \u201ca spirit of resistance\u201d and \u201can organic form of life\u201d (Stone 99). Even if the characters in Slacker<\/em> may appear purposeless, they avoid stasis by expressing an energy for social and cultural activities: the drifting camera explores the space they occupy in small groups and their collective time is experienced as duration, even by the viewers. According to Stone, the concepts of time-image and carnival converge in the \u201cchronotope,\u201d a narrative temporal-spatial unit wherein time becomes visible and space makes the passage of time into movement\u2014\u201ca concrete whole\u201d (Bakhtin 84). A key connection is made \u201cbetween the motif of meeting and the chronotope of the road\u201d (98), while the \u201cpublic square\u201d is considered the \u201creal-life chronotope\u201d (131). This specific unit makes possible \u201cthe temporal contiguity<\/em> of phenomena\u201d as \u201ccollective,\u201d \u201cdifferentiated and measured only by the events of collective<\/em> life\u201d (206, original emphasis). For Bakhtin, what novels shared with the chronotope of the road is that \u201c[t]he road is always one that passes through familiar territory<\/em>\u201d; \u201cit is the sociohistorical heterogeneity<\/em> of one\u2019s own country that is revealed and depicted\u201d (245, original emphasis). In reading Slacker<\/em> through the framework of the chronotope, the urban context of the Austin indie scene becomes a synecdoche for the young adults of the US whom the film represents: \u201c[t]ime, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it (forming the road); [\u2026] [the] road is turned into a metaphor, but its fundamental pivot is the flow of time\u201d (243-244). The characters of Slacker<\/em> meet each other at street level, avoid any official trajectories through the drift, and join a communal life founded in the passing of time without being caught in any hierarchic order or social roles. Their collective activities blossom in what Bakhtin defined as \u201cthe time of productive growth<\/em>\u201d: \u201c[t]he passage of time does not destroy or diminish but rather multiplies and increases the quantity of valuable things. [\u2026] This is a time maximally tensed toward the future. [\u2026] Generally speaking there is as yet no precise differentiation of time into a present, a past and a future\u201d (207, original emphasis).<\/p>\nThe particular relationship here between Slacker<\/em>\u2019s real, filmic, and metafilmic dimensions is held in the chain of events framed by the lens, which maintains a constant distance between camera and characters. The camera drifts through the multitude of characters of equal status who are, in real life and at the same time, members of the local scene. This filmmaking strategy may enact the co-existence of two types of time-image: the presence of \u201csheets of pasts\u201d and of \u201ca present of the future<\/em>, a present of the present and a present of the past<\/em>, all implicated in the event, rolled up in the event, and thus simultaneous and inexplicable\u201d (Deleuze 100, original emphasis). In such a strategy, all the encounters\u2014the concerts, the car rides, and the possible realities they open up\u2014represent events: \u201cFrom affect to time: a time is revealed inside the event, which is made from the simultaneity of these three implicated presents, from these de-actualized peaks of present<\/em>\u201d (100, original emphasis). In Slacker<\/em> the characters live in a tense that bears no clear distinction between past, present, and future; they experience collectively \u201cthe time of productive growth<\/em>\u201d of which Bakhtin wrote (207). They express a state of becoming which is framed in time-images, rather than the indirect representation of themselves induced by an action-oriented plot.<\/p>\n<h5>From the Body of a Scene to the Body of a Generation<\/strong><\/h5>\nSlacker<\/em> seeks to re-territorialize the local scene by treating it as a circumscribed unit of time and space with both particular and universal meanings. The film represents those members of the Austin indie scene in 1989\/1990 who share cultural and social practices (e.g., chatting in bars, attending a concert, playing music) and, at the same time, a multitude of sketched characters caught up within narrative strategies and topoi (e.g., d\u00e9rives<\/em>, encounters, the road, and collective life). The constant drift of the camera in the streets of Austin brakes the sensory-motor schema which is the basis of Hollywood films, creating a filmic construction that avoids plot-oriented actions and characters. According to Stone, \u201ctime-images create this incessant flow of life and dissolve the patterns of street based impressions and encounters within the film. The reterritorialization of American values thus occurs in Slacker<\/em>\u2019s alternative history of the neverending moment\u201d (99).<\/p>\nSlacker<\/em> encourages personal ways of living for a collectivity Linklater refers to as \u201cmy generation\u201d (4). In this way, the movie suggests enjoying apparently purposeless public and private activities, such as chatting or reading, as part of a common itinerary, that of living in the passage of time:<\/p>\n<blockquote>In a very short time, I went from thinking [\u2026] that my generation had nothing to say to thinking that it not only had everything to say but was saying it in a completely new way. It was a multitude of voices coexisting and combining and all adding up to something that certainly \u201cmeant\u201d something but couldn\u2019t easily classified. Each individual had to find it in their own way and in the only place society had left for this discovery\u2013the margins. I think that\u2019s where Slacker<\/em> takes place\u2013the accredited sources of information or the image we officially have of ourselves as a society. This seems the place where the actual buzz of life goes on, where the conspiracies, schizophrenia, melancholy, and exuberance all battle it out daily. (Linklater 4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLinklater\u2019s words reference a sense of generational identity that runs through Slacker<\/em>. This generational sensibility is manifest, first of all, in the alternative filmmaking strategies employed. The film is independently and collectively produced, with no professional actors. At the level of scriptwriting, Slacker<\/em> is an urban choral narration conceived as a roadmap with no main characters or protagonists. The style of shooting is one in which the camera drifts through city spaces and keeps the same distance from the characters. Linklater made the movie with his friends and fellow scene members, engaging the social and cultural spaces and practices of the Austin indie scene. He also places himself, as filmmaker, \u201cwithin the scene\u201d: at the beginning, when he acts as the first character and looks forward to the narratives of the films that will follow (e.g., Before Sunrise<\/em>, Waking Life<\/em>), and at the end, when he inserts a film sample of his work with Daniel before Slacker<\/em> (e.g., Woodshock<\/em>).<\/p>\nWith Slacker<\/em>, a lively representation of the Austin indie scene became central to a discourse of generation which circulated in mainstream media. Both John Ulrich and Catherine Strong have traced histories of the term \u201cGeneration X\u201d which came to be applied both to the Austin scene represented in Slacker<\/em> and to the broader musical phenomena known as grunge. Ulrich follows the history of \u201cGeneration X\u201d from Robert Capa\u2019s first photographic studies of the post-World War II generation (3-8) to its association with the phrase \u201cBlank Generation\u201d (the title of a song, album, and film) and \u201cappropriation\u201d as a \u201csignifier of punk style\u201d by Billy Idol\u2019s band when it took the name \u201cGeneration X\u201d (12-14). For Strong, sociological definitions of \u201cGeneration X\u201d remain unclear, and media uses tend to apply it to any overlooked generational phenomena (131-152).<\/p>\nAccording to Karl Mannheim, a generation is not defined by sharing a decade of birth but rather by the cultural and social sharings that render a collectivity conscious of itself. His work offers a number of insights into generational phenomena whose pertinence to our understanding of Slacker\u2019s<\/em> generational sensibility seems obvious:<\/p>\n<blockquote>The social phenomenon \u201cgeneration\u201d represents nothing more than a particular kind of identity of location, embracing related \u201cage groups\u201d embedded in a historical-social process. (292)<\/p>\nMembers of a generation are \u201csimilarly located,\u201d first of all, in so far as they all are exposed to the same phase of the collective process. [\u2026] What does create a similar location is that they are in a position to experience the same events and data, etc., and especially that these experiences impinge upon a similarly \u201cstratified\u201d consciousness. (297)<\/p>\nA further concrete nexus is needed to constitute generation as an actuality. This additional nexus may be described as participation in the common destiny of this historical and social unit<\/em>. (303; original emphasis)<\/p>\nYouth experiencing the same concrete historical problems may be said to be part of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways, constitute separate generation units.<\/em> (304, original emphasis)<\/p>\nA generation as an actuality is constituted when similarly \u201clocated\u201d contemporaries participate in a common destiny and in the ideas and concepts which are in some way bound up with its unfolding. (306)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn these terms, generational collective belonging is defined by the sharing of social and cultural spaces, practices, and media. Cultural scenes, we might suggest, are the spaces in which this \u201csharing\u201d takes place, but generational sensibilities are revealed in the ways in which these scenes are represented. The visuality of the local scene in Slacker<\/em> is crucial to accomplishing a rupture of the sensory-motor schema characteristic of American cinema more widely. The drift of the film\u2019s camera through the spaces of the scenes reveals the varied humanity of a new generational phenomenon. The multitude of scene members, themselves characters in the film\u2019s own scene, inhabit the open, stratified temporality of Austin\u2019s streets. Slacker\u2019s<\/em> fascinating approach to filmmaking turns the performance of the Austin indie scene as collective body into a representation of that scene as the body of a generation.<\/p>\n<h5>Works Cited<\/strong><\/h5>\nAzerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991<\/em>. New York City, NY: Little Brown and Company, 2002. Print.<\/p>\nBakhtin, Mikhail. \u201cForms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics.\u201d The Dialogic Imaginations: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin<\/em>, edited by Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006, pp. 84-258. Print.<\/p>\nCoupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture<\/em>. New York City, NY: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 1991. Print.<\/p>\nDebord, Guy. \u201cTheory of the D\u00e9rive.\u201d Situationist International Anthology<\/em>, edited by Ken Knabb. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, pp. 50-54. Print.<\/p>\nDeleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: the Time-Image<\/em>. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print.<\/p>\nHanson, Peter. The Cinema of Generation X: a Critical Study of Films and Directors<\/em>. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2002. Print.<\/p>\nKing, Geoff. American Independent Cinema<\/em>. London and New York City, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Print.<\/p>\nKruse, Holly. Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes<\/em>. New York City, NY: Peter Lang, 2003. Print.<\/p>\n— \u201cSubcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture.\u201d Popular Music<\/em>, vol. 12, no. 1, 1993, pp. 33-41. Print.<\/p>\nLevy, Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film<\/em>. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 1999. Print.<\/p>\nLinklater, Richard. Slacker<\/em>. New York City, NY: St. Martin\u2019s Press., 1992. Print.<\/p>\nLowenstien, Stephen. My First Movie: Take Two<\/em>. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Print.<\/p>\nMacDonald, Scott. \u201cThe City as the Country: the New York City Symphony from Rudy Burckhardt \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 to Spike Lee.\u201d Film Quarterly<\/em>, vol. 2, no. 2, 1997, pp. 2-20. Print.<\/p>\nMannheim, Karl. \u201cThe Problems of Generations.\u201d Karl Mannheim:<\/em> Essays<\/em>, edited by Paul Kecskemeti. Abingdon: Routledge, 1952, pp. 276-322. Print.<\/p>\nShank, Barry.\u00a0Dissonant Identities: The Rock\u2019n\u2019Roll Scene in Austin, Texas<\/em>. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Print.<\/p>\nStone, Rob. Richard Linklater: Walk, Don\u2019t Run<\/em>. New York City, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print.<\/p>\nStraw, Will. \u201cChrono-Urbanism and Single-Night Narratives in Film.\u201d Film Studies<\/em>, vol. 12, no. 1, 2015, pp. 46-56. Print.<\/p>\n— \u201cCultural Scenes.\u201d Loisir et soci\u00e9t\u00e9 \/ Society and Leisure<\/em>, vol. 27, no. 2, 2004, pp. 411-422. Print.<\/p>\n— \u201cSystems of articulation, logics of change: communities and scenes in popular music.\u201d Cultural Studies,<\/em> vol. 5, no. 3, 1991, pp. 368-388. Print.<\/p>\nStrong, Catherine. Grunge: Music and Memory<\/em>. Farham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Print.<\/p>\nUlrich, John MacAllister. \u201cIntroduction. Generation X: A (Sub)Cultural Genealogy.\u201d GenXegesis: Essays on Alternative Youth (Sub)culture<\/em>, edited by John M. Ulrich and Andrea L. Harris. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press and Popular Press, 2003. Print.<\/p>\nYokobosky, Matthew. \u201cNot Part of Any Wave: No Wave Cinema.\u201d The Downtown Book. The New York Art Scene 1974-1984<\/em>, edited by Marvin J. Taylor. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\nThis article is licensed under a\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/3.0\/deed.en_US\">Creative Commons 3.0 License<\/a> although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing\u00a0under the\u00a0Canadian\u00a0Copyright Act.<\/p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"3695\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/?attachment_id=3695\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/88x31-1.png\" data-orig-size=\"88,31\" data-comments-opened=\"0\" data-image-meta=\"{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}\" data-image-title=\"Copyright Information\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/88x31-1.png\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3695\" src=\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/88x31-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"88\" height=\"31\" \/><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a07-2 | Table of Contents\u00a0|\u00a0DOI 10.17742\/IMAGE.VOS.7-2.4 | SoldaniPDF Maria Teresa Soldani |\u00a0Independent Researcher and Musician THE PERFORMANCE OF THE AUSTIN INDIE SCENE IN SLACKER: From the Body of a Scene to the Body of a Generation Slacker (1990\/1991) is Richard Linklater\u2019s second feature film, following his undistributed debut It\u2019s Impossible to Learn to Plow by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4062,"featured_media":9453,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[131,4,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-7-2-the-visuality-of-scenes","category-article","category-current-issue","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/3620Slacker-Still-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p707hj-2nL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4062"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9161"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10164,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions\/10164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}