Austin, Slacker (1990), Liberal Complacency, and Commodified Strangeness
Transplants, The Californian Ideology, Individualistic Inaction, and Being Weird from the Womb
Richard Linklater, the writer and director of Dazed and Confused (1993) and Boyhood (2014), has long produced love letters to the city of Austin, but his second film, Slacker (1990), best depicts the cultural milieu of the liberal yet stagnant, soon-to-be metropolis. The picture opens with a wayward traveler, played by Linklater, searching for meaning and a sense of direction, but unlike the recent transplants from California and Arizona, Linklater arrives via Greyhound with presumably nothing to his name. He muses about his dreams of nothingness to a silent cab driver, rambles about potential (un)realities, and sets up the film as an exploration of individual experience within a bubble of liberal complacency and strangeness.
Austin has seemingly always homed the odd and unusual, once serving as a hippy hub in the 1960s and 1970s. Our slogan is “Keep Austin Weird,” and yes, Portland stole that from us. Whole Foods started here and was not the Bezos-optimized grocery store we now avoid, but a co-op where grungy white men with dreads sorted alfalfa sprouts on the floor. The salad days of Leslie, the homeless, thong-wearing local celebrity who ran for mayor thrice, are gone and have been replaced by Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, and while these figures are heterodoxical, they are counter to the culture of Austin, and act as present day extensions of The Californian Ideology. Yuppies and tech moguls alike seem to be attracted to the empty streets and close-knit vibe shown in Slacker, but the days of the flower child, Shady Grove, and Hut’s Hamburgers are long departed. The strangeness of the city has faded as it became marketable, as strangeness posits itself as opposite from the norm, and, well, the recent influx of folks are distinctly generic in their affections for Teslas, upscale Tex-Mex, and Cortados.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Brain Worms and Big Fish to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.