Slacker

In Richard Linklater's Slacker, a girl tells her boyfriend, "You're just pulling these things from the sh*t you read. You haven't thought it out for yourself. It's like you pasted together these bits and pieces from your authoritative sources. I don't know. I'm beginning to suspect there's nothing in there." Linklater caroms from one character to another in the college community of Austin, TX, moving through an unlinked assortment of people who like to hear themselves talk but don't like to listen very much. The characters include a cab fare (played by Linklater) who expounds to the cab driver about his theory of reality, a robber who ends up getting a tour of Austin from his victim, a man who suspects that one of the Apollo astronauts saw an alien spaceship, and a woman carrying around Madonna's Pap smear in a cloudy container. Linklater's relaxed and ironic tone depicts a collection of post-Reagan lost souls adrift in a sea of shallowness with no direction home. As one character asks a friend, "Do you ever just want to get out of this country?", The movie follows a day in the life of a group of eccentric, and overeducated twenty-something citizens in Austin, Texas. Slacker is a look at an emerging generation unable to turn their thoughts into action, and one of the key films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s. The term "slacker" was almost immediately co-opted as a media buzzword.