Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
Films like Richard Linklater’s Slacker pose me something of a problem in terms of the typical criticism that I write up. I’ve said before that I tend to be most interested in ideas of narrative and structure. The questions I’m most interested in when it comes to film. Put another way, I like “why” and “how” questions—why does the story work the way it does, how does everything hang together. The meaning of the film is ultimately a “what” question. There’s nothing wrong with this sort of question and there’s a shit-ton of criticism out there that tackles this question and does it better than I can. It’s just not always a question that interests me.
With Slacker, though, there is no story, or at least not one in the traditional sense. This film is typically called “plotless,” which it is. What makes it interesting is that it is not without a story or an idea to drive it forward. There is an idea at the heart of Slacker that makes it work. Rather than driving this idea with a traditional narrative that follows a set of characters from point A to point B, it follows a meandering path through characters all headed in the same lack of direction.
