ANYTHING THAT CONFIRMS FOR ME THE TRANSITORY NATURE

OF REALITY ISN’T BAD. IT’S A GOOD LESSON IN HUMAN

HUBRIS. RICHARD LINKLATER

When, in 1989, then-28-year-old Richard Linklater

rounded up a bunch of friends and ne’er-do-wells in
his hometown of Austin, Texas, to film a lo-fi,
shaggy-dog odyssey of a movie, he didn’t have a
title, didn’t have what a studio exec might call a
story, and had only $23,000. But Slacker, as his
breakthrough feature came to be called, which
followed various characters as they wander around
Austin—just generally digging the scene and waxing
poetic about life, outer space, and conspiracy
theories—struck a nerve. When it premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival in 1991 (two years after
Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape and a
year before Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs), it
caught one of those huge, zeitgeist-y updrafts of
acclaim and floated off to the aerie of cult
status. In retrospect, Slacker’s success now looks
foundational, helping to usher in the mid-’90s
heyday of American independent cinema and pave the
way for a major American artist.

With his rather Fellini-esque approach to plotting

(as in, casual), as well as using Il Maestro’s
trick of making his hometown the main character,
Linklater broke form with contemporary Hollywood
filmmaking and found his voice—a lot of voice. The
chatty ebullience of Slacker would come to be a
hallmark for the writer-director of logorrheic
trilogy Before Sunrise (1995), Before
Sunset  (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). But
unlike Tarantino’s dialog, which sizzles with the
sound of a lit fuse, Linklater’s conversations are
just that—loose-limbed, unkempt attempts at
communication. His stories and his characters are
never strapped down to the rails of the plot, but
wildly ambulatory, discursive, and dreaming aloud.
Working with a regular retinue of actors
(frequently including fellow Texas native Ethan
Hawke), Linklater’s films play in a recognizable
reality of nuances, often in hyperawareness of the
passage of time.

His follow-up to Slacker, 1993’s Dazed and

Confused, has become a classic of the high-school-
flick genre, not for any adolescent Sturm und
Drang, but for its enduringly quotable lines and
its verisimilitude to actual high school behavior.
In Dazed, as in high schools everywhere, dudes
drive around; there is a kegger; people think,
people talk; and Ben Affleck wields a frat paddle.
It’s like life, man.