Fake It Til You Make It

When Richard Linklater’s 1990 film hit theatres, it was largely treated as a humorous novelty, distilling the character – and the real-life characters – in the state capital of Texas that would later inspire a campaign to “Keep Austin Weird.”

As that slogan poignantly underscores, the high-tech boom of the 1990s and the high-income but low-curiosity white-collar workers who came with it soon threatened to deprive the mid-size city of the alternative culture that had made it special.

Today, that Austin is all but extinct, rezoned out of existence, like the scenes in many other American university towns.

So is its cinematic parallel.

While making the rounds to promote his new film Nouvelle Vague at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Linklater lamented the industry’s drift away from experimentation.

When Jean-Luc Godard was making his first feature, Breathless, in 1959, the erstwhile film critic broke one rule after another.

A French-language recreation of that experience, shot in black and white in old Academy ratio, Nouvelle Vague celebrates that heady time.

“There’s always newness,” Linklater told Variety this week. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for it to make an impression.

“Our currency is financial success,” he went on. “If it hasn’t sold a million albums or grossed $100 million, they just go, ‘Is it important? Should we pay attention?’ Unless it’s got money all over it, nobody gives a shit.”

Although Linklater was thinking about the peculiar combination of factors that thrust the French New Wave into the headlines, he also had his own origin story in mind.

Precisely three decades after Godard was figuring out how to make his first movie, Linklater and his like-minded collaborators in Austin were doing the same with Slacker, shooting in 16mm with borrowed equipment on a $23,000 budget that wouldn’t even pay for craft services on an independent production today.

In other words, Nouvelle Vague is also a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

While the new film is a lighthearted celebration of creativity, the lengthy standing ovation it received at its 17 May premiere doubled as a ritual of mourning. At a time when professional “creatives” are in grave danger of being replaced by AI technology, the fake-it-til-you-make-it approach that Godard took while making Breathless and which Linklater emulated while making Slacker feels too risky.

In the Variety interview, Linklater mentioned confessing to Quentin Tarantino how he had felt young again while making Nouvelle Vague, the way he had while working on Slacker.

“Everybody’s looking at you like you don’t know what you’re doing. And you’re full of confidence and cinematic ideas and revolution, and then the real world is around you kind of going: ‘Oh yeah? So, what now?’ It’s an exhilarating but fraught mindset.”

This is why now is the perfect time to revisit Slacker, a film that many people remember fondly but few truly understood when it came out.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that Slacker was already delivering proleptic nostalgia when it first appeared on the film festival circuit.

Dates given by members of its large ensemble cast make it clear that the film takes place in the summer of 1989, between the abortive spring uprising in China that climaxed in Tiananmen Square and the successful fall uprisings that led to the collapse of one Eastern Bloc government after another.

Although Slacker focuses resolutely on a local scene, the film now seems to be documenting a world on the brink of revolution.

There was something in the air that year, as young people brought up to believe that the Cold War was going to last forever suddenly confronted the realisation that their world could be turned upside down in a matter of days.

The traction that Slacker was able to get in the marketplace testifies to the same phenomenon.

Like Breathless before it, Slacker caught the perfect wave.

“It was probably the last time it got recognised,” Linklater told Variety. “You could be on the cover of Time. Those institutions, those gatekeepers were ‘alternative curious’ in the ’90s.”

Although this is also an era of seismic upheavals, the institutions he had in mind are no longer able to confer success.

The postwar establishment has been destroyed. We now inhabit a world in which the fringe theories expounded by Slacker’s most out-there characters are shared with impunity by world leaders and mega-billionaires.

How can the good kind of novelty make an impression in such an environment?

While it makes sense for Linklater to take a dim view of the present, it’s crucial to recognise that the cultural moment documented in Slacker looks a lot different now than it did in the late 1980s. What we now perceive as a rare window of opportunity often felt like staring at a brick wall back then.

It was vastly more difficult for the artists and thinkers showcased in Slacker to perceive themselves on the brink of revolution than it is for us to do so now.

If we are seeking inspiration to sustain us through these dark times, we shouldn’t focus on the brief period when alternative culture broke into the mainstream but on the years of dedicated labour that made that breakthrough possible.

Like Quentin Tarantino, Linklater did not come to filmmaking from either the traditional path, working his way up within the industry, or the post-Studio Era alternative, attending film school.

He learned by watching a lot of movies.

As he explained to Peter Becker in an interview for the Criterion Channel, after his university days, he worked on offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to save money. That meant that he had to spend his free time reading while on the job.

But when Linklater didn’t have to work, he visited the cinema as much as possible, going so far as to arrange his vacation schedule so that he wouldn’t miss screenings to which he was looking forward.

After finishing that job, Linklater was always at the movies, first in Houston and then in Austin, where the presence of the large and highly regarded University of Texas guaranteed interaction with a wide variety of “creatives,” from straight-laced academics to the countercultural misfits that populate most American college towns.

Linklater soon founded the Austin Film Society, which screened cult classics and foreign art house films. In his role as programmer, he sought out fare that wasn’t well known in the States, such as the early work of auteurs.

Moviegoers who know Linklater’s oeuvre well can spot many references to the films that inspired him to become a director, from the serious recreation of famous shots to inside jokes. Indeed, he provides a handy guide for this search by doing the same thing with his own films, recycling ideas and characters to impart a “meta” quality to his work more in keeping with the great auteurs of the Cold War – and Tarantino – than the hired guns of post-blockbuster era Hollywood.

Like Godard’s journey from film critic to director, Linklater’s journey from film programmer to director cannot be reproduced today. In their cases, building a mental library of influences required patience. Even for someone with insider connections, it simply wasn’t possible to sample that many films in a short time.

Today, by contrast, it is vastly easier for an aspiring filmmaker to watch films of all kinds, from pre-war classics to avant-garde experiments. But that ease of access paradoxically makes it harder to distil passive cultural experience into active experimentation.

There is simply too much culture to sort through. Scarcity is easier for the mind to contend with than surfeit.

That said, it’s still possible to learn from our forebears.

Linklater’s budget for Slacker prevented him from doing many of the things that Hollywood directors take for granted. Yet his vision for the film not only led him to make a virtue of necessity but also inspired him to impose unnecessary constraints on the production.

Although Linklater’s experience with the Austin Film Society gave him an unusually wide range of influences, comments he has made over the years make it clear that postwar French director Robert Bresson, known for the austerity and intensity of his vision, tops the list.

Bresson’s final film, L’Argent, was particularly important. Linklater recounts seeing it three days in a row after it came out in 1983, an experience that shaped both his vision as a programmer and the way he attempted to translate that vision into his own films.

At first, Slacker’s debt to L’Argent appears merely formal.

Like Bresson, Linklater chose to use the same lens for every shot in the film. Characters are often cropped out of a shot until the camera moves. Mise-en-scène is constrained as well.

The counterfeit banknote in Bresson’s film allows us to see how people of different classes and circumstances connect, whether directly – when the note changes hands – or indirectly – when a person’s fate is shaped by the fact that the note is circulating.

Slacker presents a more extreme vision of interconnectedness, showing how one interaction between strangers leads to another. Because there is no singular object equivalent to the counterfeit banknote in L’Argent, it might seem as though Linklater borrowed the narrative architecture of Bresson’s film but neglected the content inside.

Once Slacker’s novelty has worn off, however, particularly on repeat viewing, this contrast starts to fade.

Most of the interactions in Slacker convey traumatic content.

Sometimes, people tell stories of personal pain and suffering. Sometimes, we learn about the kind of disturbing stories that make the news or historical events associated with violence. And sometimes, we are confronted with direct evidence of criminal activity.

But this is only part of the story.

Not only must we contend with this distressing content lurking just beneath Slacker’s laidback surface, we are also invited, over and over, to determine whether the source of the trauma is real or imagined.

In one scene, two characters watch a video clip of a graduate student who supposedly murdered his thesis committee. Yet, there is no way for them or us to verify this claim.

Towards the end of the film, when a woman wearing sunglasses pulls them off to reveal a black eye, we are inclined by our cultural programming to presume that she is a victim of domestic abuse. Again, though, we have no way to know for sure.

One of Slacker’s most memorable sequences features an older gentleman taking a would-be robber on a walk through Austin. Directing his improbable companion’s attention to the tower from which Marine veteran Charles Whitman shot dozens of people on August 1st, 1966, the man explains that he would have been underneath the tower that day had his wife not made him go on an errand across town.

Although the regret in the older man’s voice might seem bizarre out of context, it aligns with the anarchist values he has been sharing with his assailant. He speaks rhapsodically about his experience in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, fighting the fascists and communists alike with George Orwell.

After the older gentleman returns to his house with the young man, he steps into the kitchen. His daughter asks the abortive robber what they talked about. He excitedly declares that he had never met someone who participated in the Spanish Civil War before.

“You still haven’t,” the daughter replies.

Like so many of the people we encounter in Slacker, her father was bullshitting his way through a conversation. He is a poseur.

Yet we have witnessed his courage and calm after finding a gun-brandishing stranger in his house. His self-delusion gives him strength. Like Godard and Linklater, he finds a way to fake it until he makes it.

This may be the most important lesson to take away from Slacker today.

Even if we are just passing along deceptions and distortions when we interact with strangers, the communication itself creates something authentic. This bond can only be achieved if we risk falling on deaf ears.

In a world plagued by an excess of communication and a dearth of human connection, the role of the artist is to remind us how to transmute one into the other.