{"id":74743,"date":"2014-07-30T19:50:11","date_gmt":"2014-07-30T23:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74743"},"modified":"2019-02-05T14:24:52","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T19:24:52","slug":"still-slacking-after-all-these-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/30\/still-slacking-after-all-these-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Still Slacking After All These Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jB4xlYKAVCQ?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Everyone\u2019s talking about Richard Linklater\u2019s <em>Boyhood<\/em> at the moment\u2014as well they should; it\u2019s a remarkable film\u2014but in honor of the director\u2019s birthday, you should revisit his first feature, <em>Slacker<\/em>, which is freely available on YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>The Criterion Collection\u2019s site has a few insightful essays on <em>Slacker<\/em>, too. There\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.criterion.com\/current\/posts\/1059-slacker-freedom-s-just-another-word-for-nothing-to-do\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Freedom\u2019s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Do<\/a>,\u201d by Chris Walters, which was written in and about 1990, but feels right at home in 2014:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The all-but-total decay of public life has atomized others into subcultures of which they are the only member, free radicals randomly seeking an absent center as the clock beats out its senseless song.<\/p>\n<p>The movie buries its treasure here, in the crevasses of its drollery and craziness. Nothing in the current climate is more permissible than mocking or reducing such people; <em>Slacker<\/em> celebrates their futility as a sign of endurance and mourns the passing of time by marking it with emblems of affection and empathy, the only prizes worth having.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Or Ron Rosenbaum\u2019s \u201c<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.criterion.com\/current\/posts\/1058-slacker-s-oblique-strategy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Slacker<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.criterion.com\/current\/posts\/1058-slacker-s-oblique-strategy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u2019s Oblique Strategy<\/a>,\u201d originally published in the <em>New York Observer<\/em>, which makes a seemingly outlandish but ultimately shrewd claim:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Slacker<\/em> is at heart a very Russian film. Not just in its obvious kinship to <em>Oblomov,<\/em> Ivan Goncharov\u2019s great nineteenth-century Russian novel, the classic celebration of the luxuriant pleasures of lethargy and the sensual delights of the contemplative life. There\u2019s another Russian link, to Turgenev and his novels of the \u201csuperfluous man.\u201d (And, to make a cross-cultural comparison, there\u2019s a link as well to the seventeenth-century British pastoral \u201cpoetry of retirement\u201d tradition, whose varieties are best limned in a volume with the lovely title <em>The Garlands of Repose<\/em> by the scholar Michael O\u2019Loughlin.)<\/p>\n<p>But on a deeper level, the true Russian kinship is less with Goncharov or Turgenev than with Dostoyevsky, to a novel like<em> The Brothers Karamazov:<\/em> the kind of novel that is unashamed in its preoccupation, its obsession, with ultimate philosophical and metaphysical questions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And remember, in closing, the wise slogan proffered by one of <em>Slacker<\/em>\u2019s many hitchhikers: \u201cEvery single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone\u2019s talking about Richard Linklater\u2019s Boyhood at the moment\u2014as well they should; it\u2019s a remarkable film\u2014but in honor of the director\u2019s birthday, you should revisit his first feature, Slacker, which is freely available on YouTube. The Criterion Collection\u2019s site has a few insightful essays on Slacker, too. There\u2019s \u201cFreedom\u2019s Just Another Word for Nothing Left [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[9158,14562,14798,14799],"class_list":["post-74743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-birthdays","tag-richard-linklater","tag-slacker","tag-the-criterion-collection"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Still Slacking After All These Years<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Happy birthday, Richard Linklater! 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