At the advent of my sophomore year of high school, I vividly remember my world cultures teacher screening Dazed and Confused for the class. In retrospect, I don't think we were baffled so much as ready to blank out mindlessly to something that didn't involve any kind of traditional sequence of education; the first two weeks of the standard high school year can prove draining to a 16 year old who just had the first real summer of their young adult life. As I was coming down, getting to sift through Dazed was sort of a cleansing of the palette. In retrospect, I think the instructor knew what he was doing, and kind of used that movie to segue into his style of teaching.
The director of that film, Richard Linklater, made his debut in 1991 with the now legendary cult favorite Slacker, a scrappy, grainy swan song that portrays Austin as an artistic blank canvas, with characters that in one way or another are all confined within the walls of some kind of personal or social purgatory. While watching you almost can't help but feel isolated; a continuous pan of sometimes awkward, sometimes angry, and often funny interactions with conspiracy theorists, trust-fund flunkies, and old man anarchists that would rather just talk a criminal trying to rob his house down than call the police. It comes to a literally dizzying decrescendo, much as dazed did, it's the perfect endpoint for a film that was trying to capture a time and place as a cultural aesthetic. If dazed perfectly exemplified late 70's middle class suburban kids' closeted desires, Slacker works simultaneously as the antithesis of those same desires, as if the dreams of those characters were left unfulfilled-all of the sudden, it's the 90's and people are dissident, lethargic, and complacent, but still somehow spirited and unrelenting. This might be the most captivating aspect of the film, that it kind of expresses a positive, uplifting message in a really backhanded, convoluted way.
In lieu of Slacker's 20th anniversary, some of the finest filmmakers in Austin got together and came up with a remake treatment that boasts 24 different directors-each assigned to a key scene of the film, in an attempt to see how it would translate to 2011's Austin. Not the blank artistic landscape it was in '91, It seems that we're all intrigued at how this time-capsule of a project will pan out, myself included. It's been a long, rough, hot summer, Austinites. I think we could all use a little palette cleansing. The new school year is starting. It might not be time to blank out, but to see how art can transcend time-Even if just for a couple of hours.
Slacker 2011 premiers wednesday at the Paramount Theatre here in Austin.
