Why did he have to shoot this film?

Ever since I first watched Richard Linklater’s directorial debut Slacker, the question has never left my mind. I’d like to organize my thoughts at this time.

Slacker was shot in Austin, Texas. It follows various episodes over a single day, a way of storytelling Linklater would return to in his later work. Easily more than 100 characters appear in this film, but none of them is a protagonist. It’s not quite an ensemble film either. Every time characters briefly pass through without engaging, the camera switches its focus from one subject to another. The relation of consecutive scenes to one another doesn’t have any readily apparent meaning, and there is no drama to shape transition from one scene to the next.

The characters just keep on talking. They don’t seem to mind if others are listening to them or not, or if their talk has any real content. This can be seen from the beginning of the film:

The young man who has woken up in the bus arriving just before dawn (played by Linklater himself), gets into a taxi at the bus station and starts talking to the driver about the dream he just had. The taxi driver doesn’t even nod, only looking straight ahead from behind the wheel. The young man doesn’t mind and goes on to say: there could be another reality where I could meet a beautiful woman if I had hitchhiked from the bus station instead of taking a cab.

This reminds me of musician Kenji Ozawa’s first single in 19 years, Ryudo tai ni tsuite (roughly translated as “About a fluid”), where he sings “where am I living, in the parallel world.” There’s a common theme that floats like a drone going back and forth between Linklater’s Slacker and Ozawa’s song.

If my other self exists, who chose another path at a certain point in life, someone who passes by just now might be my other self living another world/story. This guy or that guy, if any of them could be me, the world would consist of myself, woven into one big story altogether. If we try to find a protagonist in Slacker, it might be the story itself.

However, it’s often said that Slacker doesn’t have any stories whatsoever. Still, in reading Why we call for narratives, an essay by Boshi Chino, a doubt emerges if that’s entirely true.

In this essay, Chino claims that people unavoidably construct stories more than merely listening to or reading them; Man is a species of storytelling. However, since some stories hold less or no values to be told in the plot, usually these are omitted most of the time.

To consider if there’s a story or not is akin to doubting whether a story is worth telling or not. Yet each “slacker” is speaking out in an attempt to narrate his or her own stories. To say that there’s no story is to say there’s no value to the narrative of the people in it. Isn’t it a very cruel thing to do?

What Linklater did was to gather stories that are considered to be worthless and left out. He then presented them in the film Slacker. The decision of whether these stories have value or not rests with the audience members watching the film who construct narratives of their own. Linklater attempts to grasp all the narratives that exist in the world. And his attempt is ongoing even now.