The Slacker Movie's Quarterlife CrisisMutual Appreciation and The Puffy Chair reveal a genre stuck in a rut.
Posted Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007, at 12:37 PM ET
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StumbleUponWorse: Being a slacker isn't actually about underachievement. Slacking is about a different standard of achievement, eschewing corporate work to follow your passion, however obscure or lacking in formation. If what you really want to do is go on tour with your band Hey, That's My Bike!, or spend time in coffee shops making collages for your conceptual zine about Barbie, slacking reminds us that those are valuable pursuits. Slackers on film play an important role in the lives of nonslackers, former slackers, and anti-slackers alike, existing to gently remind us of our most pure and essential selves, untarnished by work, responsibility, and the Man. And as often as not, women aren't there to join in the good times, but to undermine the slacker hero, demanding commitment or employment or diverting attention away from his music or friends: a succubus for every pure soul.
There are exceptions like Linklater's Slacker—notable for having its share of female slackers, perhaps most famously Teresa Taylor of the Austin band the Butthole Surfers. But the tired equation of lazy guy plus the woman who reforms him repeats itself over and over. In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder, an ambitious documentary filmmaker, drives angsty musician Ethan Hawke to re-evaluate his ways by dating yuppified executive Ben Stiller. It's there in Mutual Appreciation, with Alan's attraction to his best girl friend—notable for being the only character with gainful employment—who doesn't do much besides demonstrate good organizational skills and spout sound, girly advice. And it's the central question in The Puffy Chair, where we are definitely supposed to root for Josh to break up with his girlfriend, a woman prone to asking, "Why do you love me?" before bed.
This brings up a flaw inherent to the slacker oeuvre: If these movies are meant to celebrate slacking, why must the slackers always give it up at the end? Sure, everyone likes a character arc, but there are many ways to be an adult between the extremes of the wake-and-bake and the morning commute. It seems lazy that Bujalski and the Duplass brothers don't try very hard to represent that. After two decades of slackers on film, the genre hasn't grown up—it's just moved to Brooklyn.
About halfway through The Puffy Chair, there is a surprise wedding with ad-libbed vows, provided for both bride and groom by Josh, that are supposed to be at once funny and moving. So, the groom solemnly intones to his bride that "when and if something goes bad between us, I will never look elsewhere for happiness." Fine. But her vows are so much more telling: "I promise to always support you in what you want, even when you don't know what you want. And I promise I will never pressure you to do or be anything you don't want to be." Could a slacker ever hope for a greater commitment than that? The new slate of slacker movies is retro not just because they imply that women can't properly hang with the guys; it's something far more nefarious and old-fashioned than that. Essentially, they're saying that women have to be there to care for and motivate a man—and in that responsibility, there's no room to slack off.
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Remarks from the Fray:
i thought this article was really interesting, although i disagree that women slackers aren't represented in the genre. there's 'walking and talking', 'lost in translation' and bujalski's last movie, 'funny ha ha' (whose main character is an unemployed 20-something woman -- considering that, it seems sort of unfair to align him with slacker-sexism), to name a few.
sure, if i were to think about slacker movies centered on men, i could come up with way more titles, but that's true of just about every film genre. in any category of character type or job description, there are at least five male roles to any single female role (with the exception of prostitutes, teachers and mothers/daughters). so the problem seems less about the under-representation of women in slacker movies and more about the under-representation of women in film in general. but that's hardly news.
i do understand the point, though, that women slackers are seen through a different lens than their male counterparts -- somehow the aimlessness/chemical-dependency/unemployment of a woman can seem sadder than those attributes in a man. perhaps it has to do with our biological clocks? the expectation that a woman has to become an adult as soon as possible, before it's too late to become a mother? or maybe it's that movies are still being made by men, who can understand these vices in themselves easier than they can in the 'other'?
--ramonaq
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Clerks 2 breaks the slacker mode and what does it get? A dismissive put-down.
I rather liked the film -- the characters hadn't lost their charm, they'd just gotten older, and more frustrated. And by the end they'd finally started figuring themselves out, and decided to do something with their lives. Not because some woman made them do it -- in fact, the manipulative, driving woman was pushed offstage, in favor of a woman more like the slacker guys (but sharing in their process of turning into grownups who could find that balance between work -- owning their own business, in fact -- and having fun).
--Auros-4
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While Richard Linklater's "Slackers" may have defined the ethos of the slacker film, the genre was really invented by Jim Jarmush's "Stranger Than Paradise". It was shot on 16mm B&W, and follows John Lurie, Richard Edson, and Eszter Balint as they wander around Brooklyn, Cleveland, and Florida, to no apparent purpose.
Any article about slacker films is incomplete without "Stranger Than Paradise".
--Woking
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