A Confused School of Sunrise Slackers: Reconsidering Richard Linklater

The name Richard Linklater will never invoke the same idea of a cinematic auteur that we associate with contemporaries like Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh or even Kevin Smith, because his signature is far too subtle: although one can make connections between his films, it is too difficult to say what it is about his style that defines it. All the same, no other filmmaker of his generation has been able to capture so perfectly the conflicted mix of jaded intellect and blind optimism inherent to what the critics used to call Generation X.

Linklater (b.1960) was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and left college midway through his studies to work on an oil rig. Due to the dangers involved, oil riggers traditionally follow a work schedule of one month on and one month off, and this pattern left Linklater with a lot of free time to immerse himself in literature and film. Having the luxury of long idle spells in his mid-twenties to simply sit and think about life is one possible explanation for the abundance of philosophical ponderings in films such as Slacker and Waking Life.

Having decided that his heart was in filmmaking, Linklater bought an 8mm camera and moved west to the cultural capital of Austin. There is a wonderful scene in his most recent film, Bernie, (2011) in which a small-town local divides Texas culturally into five areas, dismissing Linklater’s new home city as “The People’s republic of Austin, with hairy-legged women and liberal fruitcakes”; this makes an amusing contrast to the stereotype of Texas as a Republican’s wet dream. Linklater helped cement Austin’s bohemian reputation through his founding of the Austin Film Society.

His first full-length film, Slacker, was shot for the minuscule sum of $23,000 before going on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. An aimless wandering camera drifts between different peoples’ personal narratives over the course of a day in the same small Texas town. It was an important landmark for American independent film in the early 90’s, a series of extended monologues stylishly shot that showed how much a film could do with such modest means. At the very least, it inspired Kevin Smith to make Clerks, whose legacy cemented in the eyes of financiers the box-office potential of no-budget cinema.

The following excerpt is taken from the opening of the film, and features Linklater himself playing a nameless travelling youth spitballing shower-thoughts at a silent taxi driver:

Slacker may have been his calling card, but it was his next film, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, that made him an accepted part of the cult indie canon. Another twenty-four hour narrative, this time focusing on a collection of Houston teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976, Dazed is not a “teen movie” as much as it is a movie about teenagers. It covers all aspects of the teenage psyche: the hierarchy of high school psychology, the will for mindless destruction of property, the arrogance of knowing that you are better than your elders, but also the strong communal bonds between people with the common goal of enjoying youth while it lasts. In addition, it has all the components of a good cult movie – a great soundtrack, quotable dialogue and Ben Affleck getting covered in paint. Quentin Tarentino once called it “maybe the greatest hangout movie ever made”, whatever that means.

This scene opens the film with a montage of the various high-school cliques set to the underrated Aerosmith groove-rocker 'Sweet Emotion':

1995’s Before Sunrise is best seen in conjunction with its companion piece, 2004’s Before Sunset. The former is the ultimate date movie: a wide-eyed American boy (Ethan Hawke) and a sassy French girl (Julie Delpy) meet on a train and decide spontaneously to get off in Vienna and spend the day walking around and falling in love, only to part each other’s company the next day. It is sweet but never saccharine, joyful but never trite. The sequel sees the two same characters meet up again ten years later for another day in which they look back and laugh at their youthful romantic folly. Linklater manages to avoid what could easily be an overindulgence of soppy celluloid lovey-doveyness through the magic of the dialogue, co-written by the two main actors, whose many little truths are spread across a series of conversations that manage to capture what people really sound like when they talk to one another, a rarity in modern cinema.

For 2001’s Waking Life Linklater took his knack for conversation pieces to the weird realm of lucid dreams, as the main character floats through his slumbering subconscious into a series of odd yet always fascinating dialogues. As opposed to Inception’s fun but silly action film with floaty-bits approach, Linklater’s affair comes far closer to portraying what dreaming feels like. In addition, it was filmed in Linklater’s unique rotoscoped animation style, in which sequences shot in live-action are painstakingly drawn over to create a surreal visual language that lies somewhere between real life and cartoons. He used this same technique for 2006’s dark drug-induced masterpiece A Scanner Darkly, without doubt the best adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick novel since Blade Runner, and the only film to truly benefit from Keanu Reeve’s wooden acting style by having him play a brain-fried synthetic drug addict.

The following scene gives an idea of how 'alive' the animation looks on screen, in a way impossible to show with still frames.  At the same time, the film conveys something about the daily habits and conversations of recreational addicts that is as funny as it is sad, and finds poetry within the balance:

As diverse as his resume appears, from teen comedy to flirtations with romance and psychedelic science fiction, the bulk of his best work is united in its attention to the optimistic daydreams of youth. Like a photographer trying to perfectly capture a bubble in mid-burst, Linklater’s work focuses on that sudden moment in life where we are at the height of our naïve idealism, sprung from secondary education with the certainty that we will grow up to change the world, brimming with ideas on how to do so, wrapped in the illusion that no one before us has tried like we will. Placed in that golden time between full time education and full time work, Linklaters’ characters have the freedom they’ve been yearning for since childhood but not yet the reality of serious employment to ruin it. The fact that many of his films take place within one day is a fitting tribute to the brevity of this spell.

Oh yeah and he made School of Rock.  Which was pretty good.

Key Works:

Slacker – One of the great indie debuts of the 90’s, a directionless wander through the lives of suburban Texas on a Summer’s day.

Dazed and Confused – The best film ever made about adolescence, all the wonders and horrors shot side-by-side with an ensemble cast that reads like a who’s-who of 90s American independent cinema.

A Scanner Darkly – a mind-melting near-future foray into the bizarre animation technique of rotoscoping, as Keanu Reeves goes undercover to investigate the suppliers and effects of Substance D, a mysterious new psychedelic drug. Features a brilliant turn from experienced drug lover Robert Downey Jr. in one of several roles that cemented his comeback.

Linklater’s ‘Before Midnight’, the third chapter in the modern love story that began in 1994’s ‘Before Sunrise’, was announced after this article was written, but it's out now, and it's great.