CHAPTER THREE

The Form and Content of Slack

Modernist novels that explore the multiform potential and limitations of the written word such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) and Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), which effects a stream of consciousness that includes changing languages and has chapters that can be read in any order whatsoever, are often pronounced unfilmable. While the attempt at fusing form and content to create film meaning is a creative pursuit, attempts at true Modernism may collapse into the kind of complex, self-referential relationship between form and content that results in the pastiche of Postmodernism. However, the Danish Dogme movement did manage it with its purposefully disabled filmmaking process matching form to the content of films about mentally and physically disabled characters. Removing tracking, tripod and artificial lighting, for example, takes mobility, emotional stability and clarity of vision away from films such as Festen (The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998), in which abused children strike back as traumatised adults, and Idioterne (The Idiots, Lars von Trier, 1998), where infirmity is present in both the collective pretence of a commune of ‘spazzers’ and the impaired morality of those they provoke with their ‘spazzing’. More explicit still is the expression of the various psychological and physical ailments of characters in Julien Donkey-Boy (Harmony Korine, 1999) by means of constantly abrasive, blurry, underlit imagery, which is climactically ‘owned’ by the schizophrenic title character (Ewen Bremner) and Chrissy (Chrissy Kobylak), a near-blind girl, who explains that until someone told her she was almost blind she had thought her sight to be just as good as that of everyone else. Watching this film thus gives a literal insight into how it must be to sense the world when schizophrenic and almost blind. How then should a film about slacking look and feel or, to put it another way, what might be the form and content of slack?

A theoretical approach to what might be called the Modernist cinema of Linklater should begin by traversing the frequent motif of the street. In It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, Before Sunrise, Waking Life, Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor, Before Sunset, and Fast Food Nation the street is a place and time of visual, auditory, sensual, romantic, spiritual and philosophical encounters. The locating of these encounters in the urban areas of Austin, Vienna, Paris, New York and SubUrbia’s metaphorical Burnfield suggests modernity and its flow of life, but also the fluid nature of the films themselves, for the movement of these films is the movement of the characters therein. Whether this follows the chain of passers-by in Slacker, tags along with Jesse and Céline in Before Sunrise, tries to keep up with them in Before Sunset, stumbles along with the proto-activists of Fast Food Nation, drifts with those of Waking Life, hangs out on the corner with the inhabitants of SubUrbia or takes the metaphysical guided tour of post-9/11 New York in Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor, this movement is always temporalised; that is, defined by time. This time-wary movement also doubles as the cost-efficient process of the film being made, whether it is the ad-hoc guerrilla style of Slacker and Before Sunrise or the shifts from rehearsal to filming to rotoscoping of Waking Life. And, finally, this temporalised movement also negotiates the potential of cinematic subjectivity and the sharing of empathy and emotional effect, whether it be on the road to nowhere of SubUrbia and Fast Food Nation or the stairway to heaven of Waking Life and Before Sunset. Thus the cinematic apparatus, the working practice employed in their making and the active spectatorship required in their reception is conjoined. The cinema of Linklater is one of time-frames and the movement therein: life, fluidity and open-endedness of thought and action. Although the budgets of these films are always far too limited to afford fashionable 3-D trickery, they are nonetheless multi-dimensional in their basis in creating and dissolving spatial and temporal collages that include characters, events and ideas such as Cubism, the dérive (drift), the time-image and carnival.

As slacker characters in the cinema of Linklater explore, change, reflect upon and adapt to their time and place in the street, so the films they inhabit extend by means of the collaborative working practice of the actual filmmaking to accommodate their movements in a synchronous manner. Consequently, the real time and space of their action or inaction is continuously reterritorialised as a cinematic construct, as is the time that it takes to explore, pass through or reflect upon the space that becomes cinematic. Thus, when a character in Slacker, such as Should Have Stayed at Bus Station, (Linklater) expounds upon the wide variety of possible alternative realities besides the one that he and this camera (and so this audience) happen to be following, a particular sense of layered time and space is suggested. On one level, for example, any potential for narrative momentum is purposefully slackened in the filming (by a long take) and the editing (by not cutting into it) to allow his monologue to play itself out. On another, it should be clear that the actor/writer/director playing the role is a collaborative part of the filmmaking collective drawn from the slacker community of Austin who is making a film called Slacker, which is about this very community. Meaning, in the cinema of Linklater, is a composite of all these layers.

Although any attempt to identify an intellectual pattern in films associated with a specific filmmaker may be dismissed as an intellectual construct, so too is any film. In rejecting the option of meaninglessness, moreover, analysis of the cinema of Linklater is surely entitled to search for structure, meaning and significance in the spirit of Main Character in Waking Life. In that film, for example, when Main Character pauses to reflect upon his path already taken and the options that lie ahead, his dilemma is expressed by means of a long, hand-held take with a 360 degree pan from the subject’s point of view that, in turn, reveals how the film itself prompts reflection and appears to share options with its audience. Inevitably, however, the key to understanding how meaning is constructed in the cinema of Linklater is found by going slacker-like with the flow. Because the low-budget, collaborative working practice that he favours demands fluid, imaginative, unwasteful filmmaking, so the flow of life onscreen tends to indicate a corresponding concern with efficient and necessary collaboration. Thus, the movement of slacker characters in Slacker, Waking Life, Before Sunrise and other films tends to mirror the flow of life behind the camera and vice versa, because slacking is not about laziness but imagination, reflection and collaboration as a rebuttal to convention, consumerism and competition. As Jean-Louis Comolli states, characters ‘are constituted by gesture and word by word, as the film proceeds; they construct themselves, the shooting acting on them like a revelation, each advancement of the film allowing them a new development in their behavior, their own duration very precisely coinciding with that of the film’ (in Deleuze 2005b: 186). The reality of Linklater’s cinema with its emphasis on drifting characters, collectivised creativity, spendthriftness and exploratory dialogue means that Slacker is a film made by slackers about slackers in a very slacker kind of way. In the same way that Dogme ’95 disables the filmmaking process to make films about disability and Ken Loach insists on working with a unionised crew to make films about the lack of unionisation such as Bread and Roses (2000), The Navigators (2001) and It’s a Free World (2007), so the cinema of Linklater makes its production appropriate to its content. Moreover, it is on these grounds that its political, philosophical and even spiritual sense is founded.

To appreciate this is not simple, however, for the equation connects various theories relating to film form, content and meaning. These include Guy Debord’s notion of the dérive as a model for narrative form and content, Jean-Luc Godard’s playful and disruptive aesthetics of collage, and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image that reveals the eruption of real time onscreen as both process and purveyor of meaning. In addition, attention must be paid to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space as well as to Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s notion of the street level carnival as a forum for dissent that finds expression in oppositional language. All this converges, moreover, in the structural conceit of Cubism, which incorporates the influence of what might be called the ‘tapestry’ genre of multi-narrative, multi-character works in American literature, film and television, such as Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and the film Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975). Beneath all this must first be laid, however, an awareness of the nature of time that was put forward by Henri Bergson and was the instigator of much Modernist thought.

Bergson’s theories were celebrated in his lifetime and following the revitalisation of his work in the 1960s by another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. In addition to ideas of multiplicity, perception, memory and creative evolution, Bergson promulgated a distinction between intellect and intuition that is exemplified by apposite understandings of time. Bergson claimed the intellect is something that seeks comprehension in order to ensure its survival and attains it by reducing reality to moments or fractions in order to rationalise its purpose scientifically: ‘Fixity is therefore what our intelligence seeks; it asks itself where the mobile is to be found, where it will be, where it will pass. […] But it is always with immobilities, real or possible that it seeks to deal’ (1992b: 15; emphasis in original). If the intellect alone were to analyse film it would first stop the projector in order to see each frame or press pause on the remote control. This is because the rational intellect believes time, like a butterfly, can best be seen by sticking a pin in it, thereby removing the distraction of its bothersome mobility and, moreover, its unpredictable life. Here, fragmenting, stopping or killing something in order to study its existence is not deemed a paradox but a scientific strategy. However, instead of bowing to the stubbornness of the intellect Bergson celebrated intuition instead, claiming that, by contrast with intellect, intuition was an ability to find reality in the flow of life: ‘To think intuitively is to think in duration. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of a mobility’ (1992c: 34). Thus, Bergson not only favoured study of the living butterfly but reflection upon what it had been and what it was becoming. He rejected fixity and claimed: ‘It is not the “states,” simple snapshots we have taken once again along the course of change, that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real’ (1992b: 16). Thus, a life cycle should not merely be reduced to the intellectual demarcation of caterpillar and butterfly as separate stages that can be pinned to a board in sequence. Instead, intuition concerns itself, like Céline says in Before Sunrise, with ‘the space in between’. Following Bergson, a butterfly needs to be understood as existing in the permanent flux of becoming something else: ‘Let us unfasten the cocoon, awaken the chrysalis; let us restore to movement its mobility, to change its fluidity, to time its duration’ (1992b: 17). Bergson’s theorising thus allows the intellect to play its role in offering a series of scientific or philosophical frameworks on which to pin stages, fragments and experiences, but, because the intellect ignores the flow of life, insists it is intuition that enables its perception.

Transposed to considerations of time, Bergson’s theories were entirely revolutionary. For Bergson, ‘time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything to happen’ (1992b: 12). In contrast to the intellect, which does not so much countenance time as fluid but seeks to pin measurable moments of history to boards as seconds, minutes, years and centuries, Bergson presents the paradox of time as something that is always departing and always arriving: ‘Its essence being to flow, not one of its parts is still there when another part comes along’ (ibid.). He calls this flow of time durée (duration or ‘what something lasts’) and celebrates its ‘uninterrupted up-surge of novelty’ (1992b: 18). He writes that it should be considered as ‘a creative evolution [with] perpetual creation of possibility’ (1992b: 21), and he insists that it cannot be fractured into measurable parts or fractions. Instead it is unique, variable and delirious with its own capacity for change. The relevance of this idea to film is that time and film share the movement that constitutes the flow of life and is inseparable from their meaning. Unless one stops the projector or hits the remote control there is no single ‘now’ in film or in time. This informs Slacker, for example, when Working on Same Painting (Susannah Simone) apologises for turning up late to Having a Breakthrough Day, who replies: ‘That’s okay, time doesn’t exist.’ In a similar way, the image of a film is never frozen or still, not even in an intrinsic freeze frame because this still passes inexorably through a projector or the scanner of a DVD. A film never stalls in the present except in the intellect’s pedantic insistence on the single frame that scientific manuals state stops for 1/24th of a second before the projector’s bulb. This may be a rational explanation of film but the mind is as incapable of seeing a single frame before the bulb as it is of observing a similar period of time in reality. Furthermore, in digital film the problem is perhaps even more pronounced, with no single image ever discernible from amongst the myriad transforming pixels except by hitting the pause button, which negates the whole nature of film just as sticking a pin in a butterfly negates its existence.

Confusingly, however, writing so close to the birth of the cinema meant that Bergson was actually more concerned with the novelty of the cinematic apparatus (the camera and the projector) as a machine for recreating reality than he was with the potential of film as an artistic medium and a vehicle for political and philosophical thought. Thus, in his own time and from his own experience of the cinema, he saw film as an illustration of the working practice of the intellect rather than intuition. Perhaps, at least then, it was. He drew his simile from the fact that a filmstrip was a succession of immobile photographs that illustrated exactly how the intellect (not intuition) saw time and reality (i.e. as a series of still images or frozen moments). Bergson thus posited that reality for the intellect was not found in the illusion of movement onscreen, but in the images on the filmstrip itself. The perception of movement created by the projector’s motor passing the filmstrip through the gate in front of a bulb was, he concluded, contrived, regulated and therefore repeatable. Unlike reality and unlike time, what was onscreen was not unique: ‘Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph and such is also that of our knowledge’ (Bergson 1998: 306). The dissolution of the critical standing of this simile after his death was perhaps partly due to the fact that the evolution of the filmmaking craft and art so quickly outstripped the initial remit of the cinematic apparatus to merely record reality. However, his theories of time endured and their resurrection in relation to cinema by Gilles Deleuze in the 1960s had important consequences for the development of contemporary film theory and underpins this analysis of the cinema of Linklater.

For instance, the relationship between intellect and intuition is the basis of Waking Life in which Main Character represents the wandering of intuition in the spaces in between myriad intellectual concepts. Main Character is at times a physical presence and at others a disembodied consciousness that still claims the film’s subjectivity. He is part of the flow of life that he gradually comes to think of as a particularly lucid dream. Throughout the film/dream, his intuition negotiates a series of encounters with theory-spouting intellectuals that are rendered impressionistically by being rotoscoped; that is, by having stylised animation overlaid on the live-action footage. By discussion and observation, Main Character is a more active collaborator in the elaboration and dissection of philosophical thought than Sophie Amundsen in Jostein Gaarder’s novel Sofies Verden (Sophie’s World, 1991), which provides a basic and objective guide to philosophy. Each of the dialogists met by Main Character puts forward a theory that sticks a pin through an aspect of life but, as his name suggests, Main Character is not a cipher but always resolutely the main character, whose predicament starts out dreamlike and ends up nightmarish. Some of these dialogists are real academics, such as Lisa Moore (English professor at the University of Texas [UT]), David Sosa (Philosophy, UT), Robert C. Solomon (Philosophy, UT), who lectures on the value of an exuberant response to existentialism, and Eamonn Healy (Chemistry, UT), who is credited as Shape-Shifting Man and expounds upon evolution by interaction. In a literally animated fashion that employs both meanings of the word, Healy explains how time has sped up along with the evolution of communities and the individual to the extent that change should now be visible within one’s own lifetime, and concludes ‘that would be nice’.

Other dialogists given time and space to expound upon their intuitive ideas include Austinite individualists such as Burning Man played by J. C. Shakespeare, a writer for The Austin Chronicle, who argues that society and humankind are drawn to chaos despite the ‘occasional purely symbolic participatory act of voting – you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?’ Then he turns himself into a media image by dousing himself in petrol and setting himself alight in the manner of the photograph taken by Malcolm Browne of the burning monk from Saigon 1963, whose self-immolation was the first televised image of violence and the first, therefore, to turn tragedy into mediated spectacle. Like other characters in Waking Life, Burning Man appears to illustrate a theory, making of his brief, animated existence an enactment of his thought. Here, for example, Burning Man extols and illustrates the theories of Jean Baudrillard, whose criticism of contemporary society and culture signalled an irreparable break with Modernism in the wake of his providing an explanation for the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath in The Spirit of Terrorism (2003).

In addition to the theories of Bergson and Baudrillard, still more are put forward by real and fictional characters from other films by Linklater, including the director himself, who appears twice in Waking Life. Firstly, he reprises his role as passenger from the first scene of Slacker but this time he passes the burden and illusory opportunity of chance onto Main Character when he improvises directions for Boat Car Guy (Bill Wise), who advises his passengers to ‘go with the flow’. Another recurring character is that played by Wiley Wiggins, for Main Character may be read as the somewhat older but still struggling character of Mitch Kramer that Wiggins played in Dazed and Confused. In addition, Louis Mackey, the real-life professor of Philosophy at UT who played Old Anarchist in Slacker, turns up as Himself to talk about the divide between great thinkers and ordinary humans who reside at what he claims is ‘at best, super-chimpanzee level’. Meanwhile, Kim Krizan, who was Questions Happiness in Slacker, the schoolteacher in Dazed and Confused and the co-writer of Before Sunrise, appears as Herself to discuss the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, while Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, who will appear in Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor and has a cameo as a waiter in The School of Rock, turns up in his role as New York tourist guide to quote Federico García Lorca and advise Main Character that ‘life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each other’s presence’. Jesse and Céline appear too, of course, in a post-coital discussion of the Taoist philosophy of Chuang Tzu and its relation to multiple consciousness that recalls Céline’s concerns about her grandmother in Before Sunrise: ‘It’s like I’m looking back on my life, like my waking life is her memories.’ Yet another intertextual reference is the appearance of the poet David Jewell, whose poem ‘Delusion Angel’ is used in Before Sunrise. Beleaguered by so many intellectual theories and frameworks of discussion, Main Character gradually becomes aware by intuition (not by intellect) that the only ‘consistent perspective’ in and on this flow of life is his own. Thus he intuitively comprehends that he is involved in lucid dreaming, which, as he describes it, ‘is mostly just me dealing with a lot of people who are exposing me to a lot of information and ideas that seem vaguely familiar but at the same time it’s all very alien to me’. Nevertheless, he escapes all the attempts of the dialogists to pin him down and finally floats away.

It used to be (and often still is) that a single and absolute belief in a god, a monarch or a dictator could subdue intuition with dogmatism. However, in Waking Life Main Character has to contend with the multitude of theories that emerged to fill the vacuum caused in large part by the wars of the twentieth century and no single theory dominates or concludes his search for meaning as long as his intuition and its instinctive searching elsewhere can resist. Made just before the 2001 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, Waking Life points to a world that will soon be perceived in a highly fragmented fashion. What emerges from Waking Life is the notion that the human consciousness is itself a moment of structure: the universe is chaos and only the time of being human is coherent. What is more, the structuring principle of this time is emphatically the Bergsonian concept of intuition. Thus the existence of Main Character is not merely spatial, but also temporal. He is a moving, vital essence in constant evolution from what he was to what he is becoming. Thus he too embodies the paradox of time as something that is always departing and always arriving. This is what Bergson meant by durée: ‘pure, unadulterated inner continuity’ (1992b: 14). It is the idea of time as something mobile and incomplete that cannot be fractured into measurable parts. Instead, durée is unique, variable, organic and delirious with its own potential for change. As such, it could only ever be grasped by the intuitive force of the imagination. Or, as Linklater himself puts it in Waking Life: ‘There’s only one instant, and it’s right now. And it’s eternity.’

Waking Life illustrates the movement of Main Character’s intuition from theory to theory without ever getting pinned down, which in turn inspires Linklater and the animators to create the responsive form of the film with restless hand-held, intuitive camerawork and an overlay of stylised animation. Because of its odd angles, whip pans and floating aerial shots of Austin that Linklater filmed from a hot air balloon, the temporalised movement of the camera is fused with the film’s content in the editing to create a meaning that becomes the temporalised movement of the film itself. This multiplicitous mental puzzle is akin to the process required to understand the meaning of durée, which requires the employment of intuition in order to experience it. For Bergson, intuition is ‘the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it’ (1992f: 161; emphasis in original). Thus, it is no wonder that Waking Life has such a sterling reputation as a ‘trip’ movie, for in addition to its visual fireworks and philosophical debate the film requires its audience to sympathise with its flow in order to empathise with its meaning. Although the dialogue was worked up by the cast and rehearsed beforehand, Linklater admits on his Region 1 DVD commentary that the structure of Waking Life was mostly discovered in the editing. Following this, the edited footage was rotoscoped using the Rotoshop computer program of art director Bob Sabiston that allows for animation to be overlaid on the footage, thereby adding a further, metaphysical level to the film that chimes with the oneiric status of the events onscreen. In terms of heightening the collaborative nature of the project, moreover, not only do most of those onscreen play themselves or characters based upon themselves, but the large roster of animators were also ‘cast’ or assigned to characters based on the appropriateness of their style of animation. In sum, therefore, it is the working practice of the film’s making as well as its form and content that makes Waking Life a film about the communication and negotiation of ideas. In the context of Linklater’s cinema, moreover, Waking Life also sports significant intertextuality, whether explicitly (in the reappearance of characters from other films, such as Céline and Jesse), implicitly (with the reappearance of actors such as Wiggins, Charles Gunning, Nicky Katt, Adam Goldberg, Kim Krizan and Linklater himself) or by direct reference to the work of key influences such as Guy Debord and Philip K. Dick, the author of A Scanner Darkly, who Pinball Playing Man (Linklater) quotes at length and clearly reveres.

Waking Life is also something of a palimpsest of Slacker in that it personifies anew the kind of Austin-based, low-budget guerrilla filmmaking that involves extended rehearsals and a collaborative script. Apart from the rotoscoping, the only difference is that a looser, more improvisational shooting style was enabled for Waking Life by its six weeks of filming on Mini-DV digital cameras. Thereafter, Sabiston and his team of animators coloured, layered and embellished the footage in styles ranging from realist to borderline abstract, from pointillism to pop. Sometimes it seems as if the animation is transparent and the actors can be seen beneath; at other times the characters are vibrantly cartoonish. Yet this interchangeability of appearance and reality only adds to the film’s meaning by raising the question of how we can be certain of what we are seeing when the distinctions between reality and unreality are blurred, which is a dominant theme in the cinema of Linklater. In response, Waking Life features a variety of respondent theories that includes Céline’s citing of biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of a vital, evolving universe with its own inherent memory: ‘Maybe I only exist in your mind’ (2009). In addition, more immediately relevant to Bergson and the cinema of Linklater is Waking Life’s rebuttal of the Postmodernist claim that people are merely social constructions. The torrent of dialogue that constitutes Main Character’s search for meaning is not concerned with excuses for behaviour but with a concrete responsibility to communicate. For all its cerebral wanderlust, Waking Life is clearly not estranged from contemporary political activism either, for, as is noted: ‘It’s always our decision who we are.’ In addition, the film is graciously not above self-criticism. As One of Four Men (Adam Goldberg) observes of the quixotic and stranded Man on the Lamppost (R. C. Whittaker): ‘He’s all action and no theory. We’re all theory and no action.’

Nevertheless, of all the theories expounded upon in Waking Life the one that gets closest to an understanding of the slacker ethos is that of the aforementioned Guy Debord, who is actually present as Mr Debord (Hymie Samuelson) and makes the following declaration: ‘Free the passions. Never work. Live without Dead Time.’ It was Debord who contributed the notion of the dérive to the group of international revolutionaries of the 1960s known as The Situationist International (SI), which was formed in 1957 and dissolved in 1972 following the failure of workers, students, revolutionaries and the SI itself to capitalise on the achievements of the 1968 riots in Paris that the SI had done a great deal to instigate. This movement and its theories emerged from European Modernist tendencies that exalted a more instinctive response to life and drew upon Bergson’s concept of intuition in order to promote a radical subjectivity. Consequently, this dérive became a favourite technique of the SI by which an environment that was appropriate to being explored by intuition would reveal itself in the durée of this exploration. The terms that were developed to classify a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations included unitary urbanism and psycho-geography; but essentially, thought and action were fused in the dérive, which is a recurring motif in the cinema of Linklater, wherein walking and talking often features as content, inspires and determines the form of films, and contributes to their meaning. Thus, as Lesley Speed perceives, ‘the relationship between Linklater’s films and the SI is an instance of postmodern revivalism’ (2007: 103). Speed concludes that ‘Linklater’s films posit worlds in which freedoms of thought and self-expression are presented in spatial terms’ (2007: 104) and she correctly identifies Slacker and Waking Life as films that ‘posit space as a locus of orientation in relation to fractured linear time’ (ibid.). In part, the dérive was a kind of art project with a political objective, that of reterritorialising urban spaces by means of an intuitive revision of their potential. The SI utilised the dérive to express their scorn for materialism, authority and determinism, each of which had negated free will. Most at home (and at the same time deliberately homeless) in Paris (as is apparent in Before Sunset), the dérive was associated with the concept of the flâneur and the flânerie proposed by the poet Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century to describe the pedestrian’s exploration of Parisian streets by those whose wanderings enabled their understanding of the evolving metropolis. The daylight wanderings of the flânerie (as for the participants of a dérive) rejected geometrical town-planning and the quantitative measurements of functional space and sought instead to realise new meanings and functions for the streets. In this they were much like their nocturnal associates of the 1920s, the Surrealists led by André Breton, who had sought dreamlike encounters in the streets at night. Like the Surrealists, the SI were against all repressive regimes and therefore made of the dérive something like a symbolic trespassing on official spaces, a pointed trampling of any prohibitive demarcations and a freeform remapping of the city for revolutionary pursuits. Their wanderings were intended to destroy old values and invent new truths, just as Austin was reterritorialised as an oasis of dissent against corporate America in Slacker.

This act of walking and talking that the cinema of Linklater shares with the dérive is not about defining the asphalt in any concrete manner but reterritorialising the streets by the flow of life. In effect, these streets become a psychological terrain that visually represents the exploration of an inner life by the protagonists. Following Bergson, this entails an intuitive exploration of visual, aural and sensual encounters in an urban area with the objective of transforming the meaning and dimensions of the space itself in order to illustrate the reflective process of the explorers. It is by these means that Waking Life redeems the entrenched limitations of Austin a decade after Slacker and how Vienna and Paris are reterritorialised as spaces fit for romantic and metaphysical transcendence in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. These spaces, like these films, are mapped by fluid camera movements that are temporalised by following, entering into, and being subject to the flow of life. For example, any uninterrupted tracking shot following Jesse and Céline down a Parisian street must last at least as long as it takes them to drift down it. This temporalised movement seeks communication, and is therefore constantly creating and dissolving spatial and temporal collages such as those conjured in Jesse and Céline’s encounters with objects and passers-by. There is even a clue to this Bergsonian temporalisation in Before Sunrise, when Céline comments on a poster in Vienna for an exhibition of the paintings of Georges-Pierre Seurat that, like her, is briefly estranged from Paris: ‘His human figures are always so transitory, like they are disappearing into the background.’ Moreover, as Siegfried Kracauer asserts in his essay on the redemption of physical reality:

The street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appeals to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow casts its spell over the flâneur or even creates him. The flâneur is intoxicated with life in the street – life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form. (1960: 72)

Clearly Kracauer defers to the Bergsonian notion of time as something that is a durational state of mind in which the elements of its coherent whole are not located spatially but dispersed throughout the passage of time. The notion of flânerie thus resonates in the cinema of Linklater, wherein and whereby it communicates subjectivity about life in the street to its audience.

The dérive used creative intuition to liberate spaces from their definition by rigid intellect, whereby a designated parking space for a government official might be danced across, for example, or a crossing might inspire a pause regardless of the Parisian traffic. The relevance to Cubism of such child’s play with adult intent is that, as Gliezes and Metzinger stated in Du Cubisme (1912), it is by such means that ‘sensory space is subsumed within a temporal concept of human consciousness’ (in Antliff and Leighten 2001: 83). Any linear perspective invoked or represented by the lines of the crossing or the rectangle of the parking space is the product of a mathematical system of representation and the dictation of rules and regulations by officialdom and hierarchy. Consequently, it must be ignored, defied, debased, overthrown and recycled as a temporal space suitable for intuitive creation, for, as Douglas Coupland remonstrates in his post-apocalyptic slacker novel Girlfriend in a Coma, we must ‘dismantle and smash everything that stops questioning’ (1998: 263). Following the theories of the Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, moreover, the temporalised space in the cinema of Linklater may be understood in terms of its social function, as something that can be classified as either a basic natural space, which simply exists, or as a social space that both affects and is affected by its inhabitants. A social space, argued Lefebvre, is a product that is defined by perception and therefore liable to be valued: “The space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action’ (1991: 26). Yet, because ‘new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa’ (Lefebvre 1991: 59), it is also possible that space can be repeatedly reclaimed and reterritorialised as an arena of such thought and action. Thus it may be argued that the drunken Korean immigrant in Sans soleil who ‘takes his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads’, the Chinese students standing up to tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the slacker community hanging out in Austin in 1991 are all engaged in a form of revolution by reterritorialisation.

The actions of a dérive, when perceived by intuition as occurring somewhere in the Bergsonian notion of time as a thing that is eternally dissolving and becoming, are truly immeasurable and unrepeatable. Time ‘is a totally human idea – without people time vanishes. Infinity and zero become the same thing’ (Coupland 1998: 263). Cubism illustrates this concept because it disperses the temporal condition of an object and challenges the spectator to synthesise it. Cubism may be included in the group of art movements known collectively as Modernism, which includes Post-Impressionism, Dadaism, Fauvism and Surrealism, but contrary to common assumption, it was not a complete break with Classicism (see Cooper 1999).1 Surrealism subscribed to intuition in the production of art as well as its reception, but Cubism employed the intellect in its initial pictorial deconstruction of an object prior to its synthesis by intuition. This Cubist strategy is seen, for example, in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), in which the artist first subjected the five human figures ‘to a programme of conscious planning that resembled the great academic projects of Leonardo or Géricault, before finally painting his 8ft square canvas’ (Jones 2007). The result was a painting that was a ‘perpetual motion machine that never loses its vitality [.] Actually looking at the picture means moving constantly from one facet to another; it never lets you settle on one resolved perception’ (ibid.). Thus, whereas the intellect measures and fragments objects, intuition is freed to consider an infinite number of ways in which to piece them back together. What Cubism and the cinema of Linklater have in common is that they both explore not just the spatial extent and location of an object or event but its multiplicity, its evolving place in fluid time: its durée.

Antliff and Leighten state that Cubism is ‘the seminal art movement of the twentieth century’ (2001: 7) but analysis of its effect and meaning has so far hardly extended beyond painting, sculpture and design. Nevertheless, its ‘radical approach to imagemaking, employing some of the most important features of modernism in Europe and America: visual abstraction and obfuscation, spatial and temporal disorientation, avant-gardist rejection of past values, and breakdown of class hierarchies in the embrace of popular culture’ (ibid.) is hugely relevant to cinema and the films of Godard, Altman and Linklater, amongst others. Cubism breaks up objects so that they are seen simultaneously from many different viewpoints. Braque’s Violin and Palette (1909), for example, breaks apart, dissolves and suspends the still life identified in its title. Instead of painting the object according to the rules of perspective that govern spatial representation, Braque rendered the object in time: he painted its durée. Moving around the violin and palette, he depicted them so as not to privilege any perspective behind the objects or any point of view before them. Thus he depicted broken planes, floating transitions, discontinuous edges, contradictory shade and seemingly arbitrary light. Although disorientation is one result, the true potential for a contextual appreciation of the objects is multiplied. The disruption of depth of field and perspective creates a flat ambiguous space that is juxtaposed with the temporal multi-dimensionality of the ‘exploding’ objects within the painting. The violin and palette thus exist in various planes at the same time and are thereby depicted as evolving objects. At the same time, they can be reconstructed in endless ways by intuition taking any one of numerous elements in the picture as the starting point for their incomplete recreation. In addition, ‘Bergson strongly affected French writers associated with the development of Cubism’ (Antliff and Leighten 2001: 80) because of their shared notion that human consciousness also exists in an infinite moment of exuberant existentialism in which it is gifted an endless capacity for redirection. As Antliff and Leighten maintain: “The Cubists welcomed Bergson’s “intuitive” approach to science and studied his thought to justify their adaptation of [Jules Henri] Poincaré’s alternative geometries to their mode of pictorial abstraction’ (ibid.). Subscription to Bergson’s theory of intuition as the key to experiencing time and the temporality of creation also enabled revolutionaries, artists and ordinary people to reject the dominant concept of measurable, deterministic time. Following Bergson, Cubists favoured ‘a specifically subjective temporality in contrast to the mechanical time of the clock’ (Antliff and Leighten 2001: 65). They thus aimed to develop an empathetic consciousness made of intuition that might grasp and reveal the inner nature of reality, fused as it was with the flow of time.

Because what is sought is creative insight, understandings of time have also underscored the films of several European filmmakers with an interest in religious, metaphysical and/or existentialist discourses, such as Dreyer, Bresson, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski and Medem, who all share a concern with the form, content and meaning of the kind of long takes that Deleuze would call time-images. The Cubist aspect, which is based upon seeing these takes as overlapping, discontinuous perspectives on an object or issue, was first evident in the cinema of Alain Resnais and Godard, who was identified as a Modernist in 1965 by the poet and novelist Louis Aragon in Les Lettres Françaises.2 Colin MacCabe writes that Godard ‘travelled from a position of pure classicism (using established genres and an accepted language to address an established audience) to one of pure Modernism (deconstructing established genres and grammars to address an ideal audience)’ (2002: 207). Godard, like Linklater, was involved in a cinematic dérive that disrespected the restrictive rules of cinematic conventions such as linear narrative and transition shots because he felt no confidence in them, although (for a time) he remained sufficiently affectionate towards those conventions to rework genres into unsettling but freeform ‘movies’. Setting a template for low-budget, independent filmmaking that would be used for Slacker, Godard made À bout de souffle in just four weeks ‘for a third of the normal cost because he was working with an extremely reduced crew’ (MacCabe 2002: 115). Aiming to capture ‘reality on the run’ (MacCabe 2002: 116), he and his cast and crew worked so fast that ‘passersby on the Champs Elysees didn’t know they were there’ (ibid.).

Moreover, the form of Godard’s films of the mid-1960s, like many of those directed by Linklater, also leaned towards the aesthetics of collage rather than montage, offering what might be recognised as a Cubist fragmentation and dislocation of a subject such as contemporary France in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967) that made for an intuitive, associative filmmaking practice and aesthetic. In an affined close reading of À bout de soufflé that accords with the notion of Cubism, Noël Burch writes of ‘fragments of the subject appearing and then disappearing in accordance with a rhythm that is quite essential to the discontinuous structure of the film’ (1992: 149). Because of this, Susan Sontag calls Godard ‘the deliberate “destroyer” of cinema, hardly the first cinema has known, but certainly the most persistent and prolific and timely’ (1969: 150). In addition to narrative disjunction, the appearance of improvisation in Godard’s films signified a split from classical cinema and a new Modernism that would later blur into Postmodernism, which also correlates with the ideas of Bergson, for, as Jean-François Lyotard contends, Postmodernism, ‘is not Modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (1999: 79). The cinema of Godard illustrated Lyotard’s view that, ‘modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the “lack of reality” of reality, together with the invention of other realities’ (1999: 77). Like Picasso and James Joyce, who ‘attacked new formal problems in each of [their] works’ (Hoffman and Murphy 1992: 8), Godard’s experimentation with film form included its fragmentation, by which the space and time of each image was explored in an, at times, arguably Cubist manner. This was a reaction against traditional realism, one that substituted discontinuity and ambiguity for exact measurements, which is the same reaction expressed by the cinema of Linklater, which may also be diagnosed as perhaps having suffered from the kind of generational unease that re-emerges every decade or so with a vague sense of inheritance rather than any explicit taking up of the cause.

The notion of collage that informs how Godard compiles films such as Une femme est une femme, Made in USA (1966) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle is akin to the Cubist technique employed by Braque and Picasso around 1912, which also included adding fragments of reality: here, documentary footage and improvisation to fiction films, there postage stamps and strips of newspaper to paintings. Instead of a single, overarching perspective that governed a single, linear narrative, Godard explored the temporalised representation of objects and issues in films with the consequence of leaving them open and incomplete. For example, the twelve tableaux of Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live, 1962) reveal the temporalised representation of Nana (Anna Karina) as she becomes a prostitute in the manner of a Cubist portrait; that is, by discontinuous and incomplete sequences based on observation from overlapping viewpoints that include a Marxist critique, a melodrama and a dance around a pool table. To truly grasp the potentially Cubist nature of this film, moreover, it helps to consider the twelve tableaux as being projected simultaneously onto a single screen. Technology permitting, it would have resulted in a near-opaque portrait of Nana as an object that is eternally dissolving between her twelve tableaux or ‘flows of life’. And the film would have ended after six minutes, which is altogether more satisfactory than what Godard offers when actually obliged to end the film at a reasonable eighty minutes; that is, a cynical parody of the convention of a film ending in which Nana is gunned down in an overwrought shoot-out.

To classify Linklater as a Cubist filmmaker is probably overstepping the remit, but at least the suggestion may serve to reveal his cinema’s connections with its own limitations and its indebtedness to Modernist filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel and Godard amongst others. Cubism is essentially about how an object exists in time more than it does in space and it is in this respect that its relevance to the cinema of Linklater is most profound, for his films variously offer multi-layered Cubist representations of specific time-frames, communities, collaborative working practices and issues that are reflected in the way the films are made. Slacker, for example, may be appreciated as a Cubist portrait of Austin’s slacker community and its particularly collaborative creative practice, while Dazed and Confused is a Cubist picture of what it feels, looks and sounds like to have been born in 1960 and be sixteen years old on the last day of school in 1976. Similarly, Before Sunrise may be appreciated as a Cubist rendition of what it feels like to fall in love during a few hours walking and talking around Vienna, while the real-time drift of Before Sunset offers nothing less than the durée of a dérive. Waking Life too is the durée of a dérive, but one that is philosophically-minded rather than romantically-inclined. The emphasis on the streets in these and other films directed by Linklater is expressive of Bergson’s dictum that ‘though all the photographs of a city taken from all possible points of view indefinitely complement one another, they will never equal in value that dimensional object, the city along whose streets one walks’ (1992f: 160–1). Consequently, the Cubist approach to filming/walking the streets in the cinema of Linklater corresponds to one of Bergson’s key illustrations of thought.

This Cubist approach to the temporalised condition of an object also feeds off Roland Barthes’ theorising that a text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (1982: 146). Yet it does not court or risk the potential meaninglessness of Postmodernism because its fragmentation is never absolute. Instead the fragments always orbit a core issue or hypostasis (such as prostitution in Vivre sa vie or the horror of high school in Dazed and Confused) much like the lines, angles, light and shade of a Cubist painting always refer back to the object from which they came. Fragmentation may make the object indeterminate as a whole, but it is still the unifying element of the many pieces. Nana in Vivre sa vie may end up a cipher for female suffering in a Marxist equation, but what she illustrates is always vibrant, challenging and uncontained within the duration of any single, six-minute tableaux, just as slacking is not defined by any single character in Slacker, the meaning of life is not limited to any one theory in Waking Life and the issue of fast food does not reside solely in the matter of either animal welfare, immigrancy or consumer health in Fast Food Nation. Nevertheless, as the example of Vivre sa vie shows, because the literal application of Cubism to cinema was disallowed by the impossibility of showing all the tableaux or frames of a film all at once, Godard subscribed to an equivalent idea of film as tapestry instead: ‘I don’t really like telling a story. I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider my own ideas’ (in Roud 1980: 436). Thus, just as ‘regional’ cinema was replaced by the term ‘independent’ so the notion of ‘Cubist’ cinema was superseded by the peculiarly tactile (and textile) notion of ‘tapestry’ that is perhaps clearest in American cinema, where the term is used to denote the form and content of works of literature and film with multiple overlapping narratives involving multiple interrelated characters.

In American literature, for example, the ‘tradition’ or ‘genre’ of tapestry form and content is exemplified by Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 novel Winesburg, Ohio. From this group of tales of Ohio smalltown life at the end of the nineteenth century there emerges a gallery of grotesques whose troubled lives are gradually revealed to be inextricable from each other. The accumulative sense makes of the work, like one of its main characters Adolph Myers, ‘one of those […] in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized’ (Anderson 2008: 15). The aesthetics of incompletion that signal the Cubist element of the work are also evident in Doctor Reefy, who ‘had begun the practice of filling his pockets with […] scraps of paper [on which] were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts’ (Anderson 2008: 19), as well as in the tales told by Doctor Parcival to young George Willard that, Anderson writes, ‘began nowhere and ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence of truth’ (2008: 32). Winesburg, Ohio was a major influence on Linklater and Eric Schlosser during their writing of Fast Food Nation. As Schlosser recalls:

I love the novel Winesburg, Ohio, written in the 1920s [sic.], which is the portrait of one town, but in looking at this one town, it is looking at America. Rick [Linklater] likes the novel as well. Suddenly it seems like not an obvious way to approach the [adaptation of Fast Food Nation into a screenplay]. (In Badt 2006)

Linklater concurs, offering a useful definition of his cinematic Cubism besides:

It’s a narrative strategy that has a lot of precedents in literature. It’s a way to tell a story from multiple viewpoints and to try to get around subject matter that is pretty vast. It seemed logical to set it in one area and deal with the inhabitants of that area who get there from different angles. I have a history of ensemble film work, and I like that as a storytelling method. (In Feinstein 2006)

Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World (aka. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal) emerged from a series of articles for Rolling Stone magazine that were written by investigative journalist Schlosser, who published the complete text as a monograph in 2001.3 Thus the work was always fragmentary in its creation and form. In it, Schlosser investigates the development of the fast food industry and the changes to America and Americans that have caused (and been caused by) this growth. He calls this spread of concrete and waistlines ‘the malling and sprawling of the West’ (2001: 9) and pointedly blames the centralised purchasing power and marketing campaigns of the fast food giants such as McDonalds for ‘wiping out small businesses [and] obliterating regional differences’ (2001: 4). Schlosser states:

[I am] interested in [fast food] both as a commodity and as a metaphor [because] a nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. (2001: 3)

It is easy to see why Linklater, who has been vegetarian since 1983, should have found Fast Food Nation suitable for a Cubist film treatment. There was always the cinematic model of Altman’s Nashville, which might be considered the prototypical Cubist film in American cinema for the way it took American music and politics as the subject of its mobile and incomplete collage in the cause of satire. Like Fast Food Nation, Nashville is suggestive of a portrait of a specific object (a country music concert) but this object is just a detonator around which explodes a plethora of characters, scenes and comments that depict contemporary America and its politics in a Cubist manner. Following Nashville, Fast Food Nation also spins off vague, incomplete considerations of its object from many different perspectives. Like Braque’s Violin and Palette and Godard’s Vivre sa vie, therefore, each film presents numerous perspectives on a hypo-stasis to the observer, whose intuition is challenged to reconstruct a violin, palette, prostitution, France or America from different points of view. Consequently, Fast Food Nation may be appreciated as a Cubist film in which the elements of contemporary America explored in its many fragments include not just the dominion of convenience food but also immigration, migration, environmental abuse, the idealism of youth, health and its relation to issues of class, the plight of farmers, minimum wage, drug use, gender in the workplace, globalisation, corporate responsibility, unemployment, activism, exploitation, surveillance, paranoia, obesity, animal rights, slaughterhouse conditions, marketing, and many more besides. What Fast Food Nation is about depends upon the interest, knowledge, activity and subjectivity of each spectator, which informs the perspective or point at which the spectator chooses to anchor his or her understanding of the film. If it helps, in the manner of the hypothetical overlaying of the twelve tableaux of Godard’s Vivre sa vie, the multi-narrative form and multi-character content of Fast Food Nation might be imagined as overlaid and projected simultaneously to provide a Cubist portrait of contemporary America with all the opinions, perspectives, angles and elements that supposes. Bergson had already conceptualised this possibility but surmised that ‘in the case of time, the idea of superposition would imply absurdity, for any effect of duration which will be superposed upon itself and consequently measurable, will have as its essence non-duration’ (1992b: 12). Nevertheless, the fact that outside of a gallery installation by the likes of Chris Marker and the experimental films of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren film is limited to being rendered in a succession of images rather than as endless, bottomless superimpositions only makes the Modernist awareness of its limitations more relevant to the sense of helplessness that pervades Fast Food Nation.

Richard Linklater directing on the kill floor in Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation begins with a cheesy commercial for The Big One, a burger that Don Anderson is steering to success for a fast food franchise called Mickey’s. When the campaign is threatened by independent reports of ‘shit in the meat’, Don is sent to Cody, Colorado (‘An All-American Town’) to investigate the Uni-Globe meatpacking complex. Although set in Colorado, the film was also shot in Austin, albeit under the pseudonym Coyote so as not to enrage local industry (Gross 2005) and, as Linklater explains on the region 2 DVD, in a Mexican meatpacking plant, whose owners were swayed by the film’s focus on the plight of Mexican immigrants. Uni-Globe by its name alone stands for globalisation and the nickel-squeezing policy that Don comes to suspect ‘may be running the production line too fast’, thereby occasioning accidents, animal abuse and shit in the meat. His movement towards the truth of the matter is hindered by corporate glad-handing and veiled threats, however, and is juxtaposed with the movement to Cody of illegal immigrants from Mexico, including Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Furthermore, an ironic third juxtaposition is made with Amber (Ashley Johnson), a high school-age employee at Mickey’s, whose contrasting movement away from Cody is stymied by the ennui that her developing awareness encounters in all but her radical Uncle Pete (Ethan Hawke), whose own philosophy of life is limited to the fact that, as he says, ‘I’m really alright with what I’m not doing.’ That Uncle Pete encourages Amber’s vague ambition of becoming an astronaut does not indicate what might be Capraesque fulfilment of a smalltown wish but an ironic comment on the pointlessness of any ambition for a girl who cannot even get out of Cody.4 At key moments these three perspectives on America overlap without giving a complete picture. At a stop sign, Anderson’s car passes Leroy’s Plumbing Supplies van carrying the Mexican immigrants and he banters amiably with Amber in the restaurant, even commenting on the friendly manner in which she gives him the ‘right’ answer to his asking what she likes on the menu: ‘Oh, I like everything!’ Yet Anderson’s later exchange with a hotel receptionist, who is trained to smile and ask questions but does not listen to his answers, spoils the bonhomie he supposes with Amber by stressing the lack of communication between those who struggle to live by the rules of corporate America. Ultimately, the film explores a void of empathy and fills it with justifiable, even sensible paranoia: ‘There’s a reason why it only costs 99 cents!’

There is certainly no resolution; at the end of the film the cycle begins again as fresh illegal immigrants are met with a Mickey’s Itty-Bitty meal. Ultimately, however, Fast Food Nation is past the point of possible activism and redemption. It exists bleakly and helplessly at the same evolutionary tipping point as Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma:

One hundred years ago – or even fifty years ago – the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That’s why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It’s because Earth is now totally ours. (1998: 265–66)

Around Don, Ashley and Sylvia, who are well cast with intelligent actors capable of expressing ordinariness, are fragments of myriad characters whose lives are defined by the industry in this world ‘so large’ and time ‘so screwy’. These include an immigrantsmuggler (Luis Guzmán), a burger-flipper who adds spit to the shit (Paul Dano) and a suitably mythic Kris Kristofferson as an embittered farmer: ‘My granddaddy went up against the meatpackers in 1919.’ It also features an unbilled Bruce Willis, who delivers a rational defence of the industry and its meat with bloody ketchup smears across his face: ‘Just cook it!’ Fast Food Nation is thus fair, at least, because it illustrates, in Coupland’s words, that ‘human beings and the world are now the same thing’ (1998: 266). All the human beings in Fast Food Nation offer valid perspectives on contemporary America as emblematised by the fast food industry, and their incomplete, contradictory and discontinuous appearances add texture but no definable shape to the Cubist object. As Kristofferson’s farmer says of the object of Don’s investigation in words that also describe the film’s intent: ‘This isn’t about good people versus bad people; it’s about the machine taking over this country.’

Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear) wising up and hating it in Fast Food Nation

Revolution is withheld, however. Don simply walks out of the film halfway through, Sylvia submits to sex with her foreman in order to take up her injured husband’s job on the kill floor, and Amber tries to free the company’s several hundred thousand cows by cutting their fence but is left simpering at the immobile, indifferent cattle: ‘Don’t you want to be free?’ A semblance of underlying structure is provided by match shots of cows crammed in pens with immigrants in a cramped motel room, and of the camera movement from Sylvia being fucked by the foreman to Ashley sawing through the fence, but the ultimate point of the film is the ironic disconnection between its many parts and characters. Awareness raised, everyone just gets on with their duties in their tiny part of the machine. Don returns to corporate comfort, Amber retreats to meaningless debate and Sylvia will soon get used to the carnage and stop crying on the kill floor. As Geoff King contends:

To impose the usually affirmative Hollywood arc onto such material – to portray characters lifting themselves out of their difficulties, triumphing through adversity, and so on – is to impose a typically American-capitalist ideological framework, rooted in the notion that America is a society in which even those from the lowest reaches can achieve the dream of prosperity. (2005: 67)

This is why Fast Food Nation purposefully deflates, becomes flat and discards all narrative drive, to the extent that the climactic scenes inside the slaughterhouse may seem curiously undisturbing. Instead, the white walls, steaming hoses, plastic-robed workers and conveyor belt on which cattle are stunned, killed and rendered, reek of an efficiency that makes the tragedy of the situation its coldbloodedness. Says Linklater:

This efficiency model that my film demonstrates runs our world of mass production. […] That is the product of the last hundred years of our so-called progress, but it is the world we live in, with no care about the people or the environment […] and that’s not just American, it’s everywhere. (In Badt 2006)

As befits a Cubist approach, there is no overriding perspective or limiting point of view to Fast Food Nation. The bullshit is not just in the meat but everywhere. And we’re all in it together.

In effect, Fast Food Nation embodies the idea that whereas Renaissance and classical artists focused their creative energy on a single vanishing point in space that governed their perspective, Cubists refused this in favour of a notion of simultaneity that referenced the theory of relativity, whereby many different moments could be depicted as occurring in time from different perspectives. Correlatively, Fast Food Nation rejects recognisable terms such as heroic characters and an uplifting conclusion and favours numerous instances of reflection instead. This simultaneity allows for many elements of contemporary America to be spun off centrifugally from the central object of fast food and thus sets the film apart from other issue-driven but centripetal ensemble films such as Traffic or Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004), which explore the topics of drugs and racism respectively. If the centrifugal force of Fast Food Nation also means, as Time surmised, that Linklater ‘can’t breathe life into any of the characters [and is] content to create stick figures’ (Corliss and Corliss 2006), then this may be because, as Michael Koresky concludes in his review for Indiewire, that it is ‘a film about huge subjects writ tiny’ (2006). This Cubist approach removes life as the intellect knows it from an object, meaning that it is no longer fully formed, defined by perspective as three-dimensional, situated in space and probably functional with little potential for intuitive exploration. Instead, the Cubist approach renders it more temporal than spatial, more expressive of its occurrence in time rather than of the space it occupies. Instead of depicting the scientific rationality of an object, it may be stated that:

The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro, and refuting time-honoured theories that art should imitate nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality […] that depicted radically fragmented objects. (Anon. 2010a)

This ‘new reality’, albeit a metaphysical one, is a common theme in the cinema of Linklater, wherein it is defined by its occurrence in time. This is why so many of the films he has directed employ a time-frame within which time is rendered in the Bergsonian sense as a Cubist object. Slacker is one whole day from dawn to dawn, Dazed and Confused runs from noon to daybreak and SubUrbia is one evening and night, as are Before Sunrise and Waking Life. Tape and Before Sunset are as long as the events onscreen, their real-time occurrence being one with the developing consciousness of their protagonists. Given Linklater’s academic interest in classical theatre and his experience of writing and directing plays in the second year of his university education, it is probable that the deployment and exploration of time-frames in the films he has written, co-written and directed stems in part from his knowledge of the classical precept of time and space that inspired the correspondent dramatic unity of the time-frame and single setting as upheld by Aristotle. However, an appreciation of this concern with time as object is also usefully informed by the theories of multiplicity that Bergson put forward in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, (1888). In this essay Bergson defined consciousness, which is expressed in something like a moral response, as temporal and in a constant state of becoming, as free, undefined and incomplete. It was this theory that inspired Gilles Deleuze to write (and thereby revitalise) Bergsonism (1966), as well as Cinema 1: The Movement Image (2005a [1983]) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (2005b [1985]). Bergson is vital to Deleuze’s argument that film does not represent an external reality but a means of arranging and expressing time and movement. Deleuze claims that cinema does not describe figures in movement (as would a photograph), but rather cinema’s own movement reveals the figures (2005a: 5). Because of this, he argued, cinema was ‘capable of thinking the production of the new’ (2005a: 8). The arguments put forward by Deleuze in these two volumes are vast and complex and as much about a philosophy of life and its perception as they are about cinema. However, boiling them down to a level of immediate relevance to the cinema of Linklater leaves us with a useful, expressive and revealing indication of the previously mentioned distinction between what Deleuze calls the movement-image and what he identifies as the time-image. The movement-image is the basis of narrative cinema and most films are just a linear succession of them. Each one serves the plot and brings the resolution closer. For Deleuze, the movement-image is not separable from the object which moves: the movement-image, like the film, is always moving towards its resolution. Movement-images are thus associated with editing rather than camera movement or the duration of the shot. And because ‘image in movement constantly sinks to the state of cliché’ (Deleuze 2005b: 20), these movement-images tend to serve generic conventions and deliver the expected, thereby satisfying audiences of the ‘movement-image-universe’ or ‘the world of the film’. Essentially, this theorising proposes that within a narrative based on generic conventions (and therefore movement-images that are calibrated by the intellect) no true representation of time as it is perceived by intuition can be established without halting the flow of movement because this would betray audience expectations and withhold the required resolution. In dominant, everyday, mainstream narrative cinema this movement is more important than time. Time is merely subject to the events that take place within it such as a car chase or a kiss, which usually last just as long as the narrative needs them to.

However, Deleuze contends that the trauma of World War II meant that ‘the sensory motor schema was shattered from the inside’ (2005b: 39). This, he claims, provoked a crisis of the movement-image in post-World War II cinema that was necessary in order that a new ‘thinking image […] beyond movement’ (2005a: 219) could reflect upon the unrepresentable: recent warfare, wholescale destruction and a crisis of faith exacerbated to inexpressible extremes by the atomic bomb and the Holocaust. In this Deleuze also responds to the theories put forward by André Bazin in What is Cinema? (1958–1962), wherein he advocated objective reality by means of deep focus and true continuity based upon resistance to montage. However, Bazin’s sense of realism was swayed by his belief that every shot is a representation of God manifesting creation (a notion that inspires the discussion of ‘Holy Moments’ between the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and the poet David Jewell in Waking Life that was filmed in Austin’s Paramount Theater). In response, nonetheless, Deleuze observed that in certain post-war films ‘the subordination of time to movement was reversed, time ceases to be the measure of normal movement, it increasingly appears for itself and creates paradoxical movements’ (2005b: xi). He called these instances of time appearing for itself time-images and he identified them in films in which the ‘sensory-motor schema is loosened and a little time in the pure state […] rises up to the surface of the screen’ (2005b: xii). The time-image was one of stasis, durée, reflection, alienation and resistance. Could the time-image be a slacker?

Despite what at first might be assumed, the ideas of Deleuze do correlate with those of Bergson. The classical, linear narrative cinema of the movement-image is akin to the intellect’s notion of time, being linear, sequential, continuous and complete, whereas the loose, reflective, possibly non-linear cinema of the time-image is akin to intuition’s notion of time being seemingly incomplete, discontinuous and happening all at once. Perhaps the finest metaphor for this (and a key indicator of how the cinema of Linklater is informed, constructed and received) is found in James Joyce’s Ulysses and quoted verbatim in Slacker. As Guy Who Tosses Typewriter tries to jolly a jilted pal by reciting from what appears to be an antique edition of the novel, the self-deluding rationalisations of each of the many lovers of Molly Bloom stand for the ignorance of the intellect in relation to time, in contrast with the truth that comes from intuition:

It all makes sense if you’d just read from this passage here. It’s when Leopold discovers that he’s just been fucked over by his wife. He says: ‘If he had smiled, why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas, he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity’.

Contrary to what the lovers tell themselves, there is ‘a continuity of flow’ around Molly’s bed that corresponds to ‘a succession of states each one of which announces what follows and contains what precedes [.] In reality, none of them do begin or end; they all dove-tail into one another’ (Bergson 1992f: 163). Such is the subject and structure of Slacker as well as the encounters of Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise and Waking Life, and the multiple characters in Fast Food Nation.

Bergson was not wrong when he wrote of the cinematic apparatus as a symbol of how the intellect sought immobilisation and fragmentation, but in later years Deleuze added that the cinema was not limited to this single mode of perception. Rather, Deleuze surmised that the nature of film was to unfold in time. He therefore posited that like time it also existed in a state of becoming, always departing and always arriving. Thus, although Bergson and Deleuze might have differed as regards the function of cinema, they reunite, as Robert Stam explains, because ‘Deleuze is drawn to Bergson as a philosopher of becoming, for whom being and matter are never stable’ (2000: 258). In expounding upon this, Deleuze destabilised traditional understandings of representation and caused a significant shift in contemporary film studies by treating film ‘as event rather than representation’ (ibid.). Instead of bowing to mathematics or science, Deleuze emphasised the temporal nature of creation and thought on film. His theories therefore maintain that fixed representation is no longer rational or possible in the cinema. Instead, fluidity and temporality direct our intuition to the provocative experience of what Deleuze termed ‘a direct time-image’ (2005b: 41). This he claimed could inspire transcendence, fusing memory, perception, time, thought and movement. Ultimately, of course, the debate between Bergson and Deleuze is philosophical. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bergson had little inkling of what the cinema would become beyond its meagre advance on the photograph, and saw the novelty of the illusion of movement as a contrivance. On the other hand, Deleuze, writing towards the end of the century, saw a simplistic division between popular cinema and the European art house and, quite simply, did not see enough films besides the elitist, Modernist traditions of Godard, Pasolini, Alain Resnais and others to make his writing on the cinema complete. Nevertheless, this incompletion is itself a provocation that has inspired much philosophical, academic and critical debate, as well as work by filmmakers such as Linklater who aspire to capturing, creating and releasing images and ideas of time in their work.

In building his argument, Deleuze sought and identified time-images in the films of several filmmakers including Godard, who, without using the term, by the mid-1960s had already claimed the collage of time-images as the true art of the cinema. By definition, a time-image cannot be measured or identified by reference to criteria, only sensed by intuition. Thus the ‘pointing out’ of time-images rarely convinces as this same signalling triggers an intellectual response to the image rather than an intuitive one. Nevertheless, examples worth considering include the tracking shot along a traffic jam in Godard’s Week End (Weekend, 1967) and Nana (Anna Karina) watching La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) in Vivre sa vie. There is even the witty spoof of the measurement of time by the intellect in the one minute’s silence ordained by Odile (Anna Karina) in Band à parte, which prompts Godard to show how time is subject to intuitive interpretation by cutting the entire soundtrack for what is mischievously much less than a minute. Time-images like these are those in which we see and experience the passing of time itself, without measurement or the mediating influence of the protagonist or plot. These are most often experienced as long takes in the films of Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Víctor Erice, Terrence Malick, Carlos Reygadas and Linklater, wherein certain images are released from their subordination to movement and become subject to time instead. Even so, the long takes of these filmmakers may harbour different intent. Those of Antonioni were often in the cause of estrangement and alienation, while those of Bresson spoke of fatefulness. In Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1988) Malick used long takes to convey the timelessness of nature as a corrective to the often violent urgency of man, while Tarkovsky sought meditation in images whose duration was at times a kind of penance. The political resonance of the time-image in the cinema of Linklater comes from the fact that, by their very nature, time-images cannot be integrated within narrative and generic conventions. Thus, confrontational thought appears in shots that withhold functional spectacle and closure. The time-image is revolutionary, but by its refusal to act, rather than by its action. The time-image is a slacker!

As a bona fide slacker, the time-image allows for imagination, reflection and collaboration to occur as a rebuttal to the conventions of a hurrying mainstream narrative cinema. The time-image, like the slacker, deliberately ignores all pressures to conform, compete or consume. Instead the slacker, like the time-image, uses time to reflect, consider and explore. As both can be seen as creative layabouts, their conjunction in the cinema of Linklater is significant, while their predecessor, as Richard Brody suggests, is Godard, whose innovative long takes in Vivre sa vie occurred because he simply could not afford or be bothered to set up and shoot different angles of a scene, which is as good a way as any to produce an entirely new film language (2008: 129–41). The key to all this is that ‘not being bothered’ requires great effort, because only the authentic ‘wasting of time’ engenders alternative priorities to conformity, tradition, consumerism and nationalism. As Dostoyevsky Wannabe in Slacker comments: ‘Who’s ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?’

In À bout de souffle, Une femme est une femme, Band à parte and Alphaville it is apparent that although the imagination of the French New Wave had been colonised by Hollywood genres, Godard had in his idleness reflected upon this enough that he was beginning to sense betrayal. By 1965 in Pierrot Le Fou, it is partly this union of the time-image and the slacker ethos that points to the politicisation of Godard, when Ferdinand tires of being in a genre film that has him ‘driving towards a cliff at 100 kilometres per hour’. ‘I wonder what’s keeping the cops. We should be in jail by now,’ he muses before writing a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create by painting his face blue and blowing himself up. Correlatively, the union of the slacker ethos with time-images in the cinema of Linklater often signals the political aspect of his cinema too. Examples of this might include many scenes from It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, wherein Linklater films himself in a position of pending travel in ‘any-spaces-whatsoever’ (Deleuze 2005a: 112), numerous sequences in Slacker in which the discourse, reflection or direction of characters inhabits the durée of the image, and several indeterminate and unequal moments of reflection and re-direction in Waking Life. More specifically, personal subjectivity might argue for the term in describing (amongst others) the scene in Before Sunrise when Céline and Jesse react to the potential longeur of being left on the bridge by the two guys from the play about a cow. Glen Norton writes of this moment as temps mort (dead time), which he links to the nouveau roman movement in its Modernist use of ‘microrealism’ and may be correlated with that of the theory of the time-image (2000: 64). As deployed by Antonioni, temps mort results from a lingering camera and defines a scene retroactively because ‘the power of the temps mort lies precisely in our attempt to define it; within the immediacy of viewing, it is nothing more than a flash of insight and emotion’ (ibid.). Other approximations of the time-image in the cinema of Linklater include the shot of Jesse and Céline crammed together in the listening booth in Before Sunrise, that which Linklater holds on the sliding doors through which Don has departed in Fast Food Nation (but he doesn’t come back), several pained close-ups in Tape in which furious thought is experienced as a response to the pressure of time, and a number of the long-takes that make up the similarly time-framed Before Sunset, including moments in the drift along the Seine, climbing the spiral staircase, and the embrace in which Jesse dissolves into molecules. In sum, these are all sequences that arguably accord with Deleuze’s assertion that the emergence of a little time in the pure state destabilises the narrative mastery of space and diverts characters and audience from narrative. As Deleuze describes, characters like Jesse and Céline ‘saw rather than acted, they were seers’ (2005b: xi). Given too much time and space in which to look and think, they reveal themselves by a process of painful reflexive awareness, ‘where the character does not act without seeing himself acting’ (2005b: 6). Forced to fill the time-image with something other than cliché, the slackers, lucid dreamers, Don, Jesse and Céline confront the abyss of their existence beyond the narrative, while their dislocation is endemic to a similarly adrift audience.

The political element emerges because in Pierrot Le Fou and so in Slacker the ‘time out’ of the time-image opposes the notion of national narratives, or narratives of nationhood. Benedict Anderson argued that the nation was ‘an imagined political community’ (1983: 6) and that the time of the nation was linear and progressive, ‘moving steadily down (or up) history’ (1983: 26). More recently, however, Georg Sørenson has observed the dissolution of nation states in Europe and identified a new ‘community of sentiment’ in their place (2003: 83). David Martin-Jones contends that Deleuze is pertinent to this evolution because of the way that national history and identity is explored through narrative. Moreover, he echoes Derrida in de-centring Europe as a normative culture of reference when he claims that ‘it is no longer enough to simply posit the time-image as the European other of the American movement-image’ (2006: 223). Following King, who identifies Slacker as ‘a point of transition’ (2005: 84) between ‘decentred, downplayed or fragmented narrative’ (2005: 63) and ‘multi-strand narrative’ (2005: 84), the cinema of Linklater may be appreciated as one more ‘product of attempts made by marginalised or minority groups to create a new sense of identity’ (Martin-Jones 2006: 6) that has often resulted in and from the deployment of the time-image. In the cinema of Linklater, the time-image is aimed at reterritorialising contemporary America in the style of films that employ ‘unusual time schemes [to] negotiate transformations of national identity’ (Martin-Jones 2006: 19). More specifically, it relates to the way in which ‘American independent films […] use their narratives to deterritorialise dominant myths of American national identity’ (Martin-Jones 2006: 11). Mirroring the origins of the time-image in the ‘any spaces whatsoever’ of post-war Europe, the time-image in the cinema of Linklater emerges from the streets of Austin both during and following the triumphalism of the first and second Gulf Wars conducted by the Texas-based Bush dynasty, when America was so media-addled by propaganda that victory in the Gulf was paraded as a foregone conclusion. The oppositional tactic and result, as identified by Stam, is that ‘lately we find a slackening of narrative time’ (2000: 318; emphasis added).

The time-image in the cinema of Linklater fuses with the ethos and practice of slacking because it refuses to conform and tends to enshrine alienation instead. It (and by extension the cinema of Linklater) opposes corporate America by inaction as surely as refusing to stand when President Bush enters a room. Where a montage of movement-images constitutes and enables a linear timeline of nationhood, the displacement of the narrative by a collage of time-images may deterritorialise this nationhood and even constitute a revolution against the overbearing myths of its identity. The occurrence of a time-image also signifies modernity’s confrontation with its own limitations, which may explain why and how films directed by Godard, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Wenders, Erice and Linklater have acknowledged the difficulties of France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Germany, Spain and the USA respectively, because it is the conflict between movement-images and time-images in their films that signals several national identities in crisis. It is, for example, in the cinema of Linklater that time-images occur as rare pauses in contemporary American cinema, denying the hastening of narrative and inspiring instead reflection upon agency and stasis. In several of them ‘a cinema of seeing replaces action’ (Deleuze 2005b: 9) because it is in these films that ‘the action-image disappears in favour of the purely visual image of what a character is’ (Deleuze 2005b: 13; emphasis in original). Moreover, Deleuze suggests that viewers who observe these temporalised bodies (such as Having A Breakthrough Day in Slacker, Mitch Kramer in Dazed and Confused, Jesse and Céline, and Don in Fast Food Nation) experience the same sense of hollow, hanging time that cannot be reconciled with their exterior life. To watch the films that enclose these characters is to read the image, seeking movement and pondering its infinite potential, especially when the slacker ethos denies the direction of that potential towards conventional objectives. Derided as pointless by those whose priorities it deliberately disrespected, Slacker was actually a collage of dissent against the era in which it was made. It rejected classical form and content and the intellect’s understanding of time in favour of a Bergsonian celebration of intuition and the time-image, which is an entirely deliberate strategy because, as Linklater claims on the region 1 DVD commentary on It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, ‘the ultimate rejection of Hollywood structure is to see time passing’. It is subsequently of note that the time-image was adopted by several American filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose grungy wave of alternative, regional and independent films such as Ruby in Paradise (Víctor Nuñez, 1993) and Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994) often illustrated the antithesis of Republicanism. And it is clearly no coincidence, moreover, that the second tenure of President George W. Bush and the second Gulf War prompted the revival of cinematic slacking in the recent Mumblecore movement that was composed of no-budget, non-professional digital films that were highly indebted to the cinema of Linklater (and especially the ‘plot’ of Before Sunrise) such as Quiet City (Aaron Katz, 2007) and In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

What Slacker did quite uniquely for its time was follow the movement of ideas, which relates to the techniques of associative thought favoured by the Surrealists, the dérive of the Situationist International and the experiments with film language of Godard. Slacker and many of the films that Linklater wrote, co-wrote and/or directed afterwards thus allowed for the expression of ideas that simply could not be voiced or visualised within the pre-existing structures of dominant modes of production. Because ‘the frame for Deleuze is unstable, dissolvable into the flux of time’ (Stam 2000: 259), so life in Slacker seeps beyond the frame as it does so often in the cinema of Linklater. Time-images create this incessant flow of life and dissolve the patterns of street-based impressions and encounters within the film. The reterritorialisation of American values thus occurs in Slacker’s alternative history of the neverending moment. Slacker is a blog or tweet of what is actually happening at street level long before online social networking sites cleared the streets of slackers. And, unsurprisingly therefore, when the time-image appears in the cinema of Linklater it is in its representation of the street as a Bakhtinian carnival that occurs with full awareness of its unique meaning in this time and this space.

Writing during the 1920s, when the Russian people and their customs were being homogenised and restricted under Soviet rule, Bakhtin drew his theories of folk culture from a study of François Rabelais, in whose satirical and scatological vision he identified the prospering of a cultural life based upon the interaction of distinct individual voices that opposed the official language and its version of culture. In Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin proposed that the popular revelry of the Renaissance period described by Rabelais signified a spirit of resistance. He called this ‘carnival’ and described it as an organic form of life with its own time and place. What may now be examined is how Linklater, being part of Austin’s mid-1980s slacker community, supposed himself to be involved in Bakhtin’s concept of oppositional, street level, un-funded folk culture and how this contributed to the creation of Slacker. As Linklater states of the streets of Austin: ‘That’s where I saw the real world. It wasn’t on the six o’clock news, it wasn’t anywhere on the media. There was the official world and there was the world of people’s real feelings and problems’ (in Walsh 1998).

What happens in the street is central to the theories of Bakhtin, whose ideas of the chronotope and carnival conclude this investigation into the form and content of slack. As stated, Bakhtin defines a chronotope (literally ‘time space’) as:

The intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature [in which] time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time. (2006c: 84)

The convergence of this theory with that of Deleuze thus allows for the locating of the time-image within a certain space to attain specific meaning. Just as Bakhtin contends that ‘the real-life chronotope is constituted by the public square’ (2006c: 131), so the connection with the urban area traversed in Debord’s dérive points to an affinity with the streets that feature so meaningfully in the cinema of Linklater. For Bakhtin, as for so many characters in Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life and others, ‘time is collective, that is, it is differentiated and measured only by the events of collective life; everything that exists in this time exists solely for the collective’ (2006c: 206; emphasis in original). Correlatively, the Austin of Slacker becomes subject to the slacker’s Bergsonian intuition of time that is expressed by Having a Breakthrough Day:

I’ve had a total recalibration of my mind, you know. I mean, it’s like, I’ve been banging my head against this 19th century type of, um, what? Thought mode? Construct? Human construct? Well, the wall doesn’t exist. It’s not there, you know. I mean, they tell you, look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, there is no tunnel. There’s just no structure. The underlying order is chaos.

Finally, therefore, in relation to the Cubist approach to film it is summative to note that Bakhtin contends that ‘the single great event that is life (both human and natural) emerges in its multiple sides and aspects, and they are all equally indispensable and significant within it’ (2006c: 211). Moreover, in what could serve as a description of Cubism, Bakhtin states that ‘all of these [sides] were merely different sides of one and the same unified event, and all sides shared an identity with one another’ (ibid.). Thus, where Bakhtin enables a conclusion to this theorising is in relation to carnival, which with its emphasis on form as an active component of meaning in art is, like Cubism, ideal for application to the cinema of Linklater. Bakhtin’s concern for the folk culture that was under threat from an increasing totalitarianism certainly has its echo in the preoccupations of the people in the streets of It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, SubUrbia, Waking Life, Before Sunset, Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor and Fast Food Nation. Prior to World War II, the rejection of folk culture in Europe was part of the rise of Fascism that took ethnic cleansing to be compatible with European cultural centrism. Direct parallels with the anti-Communist crusade of Vietnam-era Republican America are the stuff of extremists but, even so, a sense of oppression was definitely a characteristic of the post-Vietnam slacker community in Austin and a reason for its enduring collective approach to acts of creative expression that included music, art and filmmaking. Where this activity connects so firmly with the theories that Bakhtin puts forward in ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (2006d [1934–35]) is in his emphasis on heteroglossia (meaning co-existence and conflict in language that holds Socratic dialogue as a discursive mechanism), and on carnival as the structuring principle of streetlife and its consequent shaping effect on language, where film should be recognised as a language too. Carnival opposes official culture in form and content and is associated with Socialism, instinct and the kind of spontaneous but doomed creativity of the people in that same inter-war period that James Joyce captures in Finnegans Wake (1939), wherein the everyman protagonist goes by the initials H. C. E., one interpretation of which is ‘Here Comes Everybody’.5 This celebration of collective intuition duly opposes the kind of official language and culture that breaks people down in both senses of the phrase. Writing on the analogous pre-Renaissance period in which François Rabelais wrote (and thereby wresting a critique of Stalinism that effectively drew a parallel between the oppressiveness of sixteenth-century Catholicism and twentieth-century Stalinism, but metaphorically so and therefore less life-endangering6), Bakhtin’s observations indicate that ‘the generations that lived through those years had to work out for themselves fresh categories by which the utterly new and bewildering universe into which they had been thrust would let itself be known’ (Holquist 1984: xiv). Such, in its purest form, was the ideal of slacking too.

Instead of the closed, single, linear, conventional texts of the official culture that brokered no independent interpretations based on intuition, Bakhtin described the notion of an ‘open text’ by which an audience might enter and bring about change from below. Parallels with regional or ‘independent’ attempts at a viable American cinema such as Linklater’s Detour Filmproduction, the Austin Film Society and their Austin Film Studios are thus apparent. This is particularly evident in the way that the efforts of communities such as these that seek expression through independent means may find themselves embroiled in a political conflict with the kind of corporate machine that engineers a synergy of global production, distribution and marketing. As globalising conglomerates, major film studios might be said to supply an ‘official’ product made from franchises, generic templates and studio packaging, and it is perhaps only in ‘independent’ American cinema that the hubbub and brouhaha of carnival allows ‘independent’ American people to exist and express their intuition in their own time and space. At another level, moreover, it begs comparison with liminal cinemas worldwide and therefore the status of independent American cinema in the world market.⁷

In conclusion, where Bakhtin matches Bergson, Deleuze, Debord, Godard and Linklater is by seeking new relations between form and content that might inspire, enable and give meaning to revolution. A stifled language, for example, might be outmanoeuvred by an expressive physicality, just as limited access to cranes, tracking rails and Steadicams inspires an oppositional hand-held aesthetic in ‘independent’ cinema. It is by these means that the development of independent filmmaking practices tally with the carnivalisation of speech and physical expression in communities that oppose hegemony in their expression. Just as Bakhtin carnivalises the present because it is a hope for the future, so the cinema of Linklater carnivalises the time of its characters in order to oppose the entrenchment of corporate puppeteering in American politics. In cementing the validity of this approach to ‘independent’ cinema, moreover, it should be noted that carnival is a common synonym for festival, whereby the ritualised spectacles of the marketplace that so inspired Bakhtin find their counterpart in the likes of Sundance, Telluride and Austin. Just as Bakhtin defines carnival by its confluence of ‘ritual spectacles, carnival pageants [and] shows of the marketplace [that] does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators’ (1984a: 5–7), so a festival full of filmmakers includes screenings (ritual spectacles), prize-giving (carnival pageants) and interviews and debates (shows of the marketplace). The carnival/festival is thus the culmination of the production process (of foodstuffs, crafts or films) that enables ‘the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance’ (1984a: 9). Like a carnival, a film festival such as the one that takes place in Austin every October enables this utopian realm of community with workshops and a multitude of informal get-togethers. Together they enable the exploration of alternative viewpoints and practices that oppose the official versions provided by Hollywood, Fox News and MTV, which only offer what Bakhtin calls ‘the triumph of a truth already established’ (ibid.).

Clearly, in following this analogy one should avoid any utopian vision of streetlife that ignores the grotesquerie that Rabelais celebrated and the business of film funding and distribution sometimes resembles. On the one hand, Bakhtin’s railing against the restrictions imposed on Russian novelists, who were required to imitate the official exemplification of Maxim Gorky as a more ideologically submissive dramatist, may even correlate with the manner in which ‘independent’ American filmmakers including Linklater have sometimes conformed to Hollywood commissions for generic product, albeit with different grades of subversion. Nevertheless, even here one may see the vampiric relationship that Hollywood nurtures with independent filmmakers and their ideas as one which resembles the Russian government’s relationship to folklore and the carnival, which ‘had to be tolerated and even legalized outside the official sphere’ (ibid.). In opposition to the ‘official’ Hollywood emphasis on franchises and generic product that provide ‘all that was ready-made and complete’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 11), what might be termed ‘unofficial’ independently-made American films suffer limited distribution. Films like Slacker, Tape and Fast Food Nation must therefore be budgeted with fore-knowledge of this limitation because many will be unseen beyond the festival circuit. They are fated to bear the stigma of an unmarketable ‘grotesque realism’ that corresponds to the kind of low-budget filmmaking that matches raw-boned form to rough-edged content, and thereby relates to Bakhtin’s observation that ‘during the classic period the grotesque did not die but was expelled from the sphere of official art to live and develop in certain “low” non-classic areas’ (1984a: 301–31). Yet what is grotesque about these films may be posited ironically as a deliberate affront to the conformist propriety of a society modelled on the ruling government. That is to say, the ‘grotesque’ is the threat of liberalism and the unhindered communication between members of an unregimented collective that is expressed in its creativity, music, dress, films and dialogue. Because the intellect perceives only an absence of logic when confronted by an image that confounds its scientific worldview, slackers were denounced as lazy wasters by those whose attention to competition, conformity and conventions could not countenance a world in which not working, not competing and not conforming could ever be worthwhile or respected.8 Moreover, because slacking upholds the value of philosophy and reflection, it could be denounced as an absence of corporate values in the context of the Republican hegemony that encouraged the post-Slacker reterritorialisation of Austin in the 1990s by more than 350 high-tech companies such as IBM, Motorola, Tandem, Texas Instruments and Dell. Instead of being respected and maintained as a valid, alternative lifestyle, slacking was turned into an insult by the media and redeployed accordingly by President Bill Clinton in 1994 when he told ‘cheering college students at UCLA that they ha[d] been unfairly maligned as “slackers,” but will be called on to prove themselves worthy of the nation’s promise’ (Farrell 1994). However, just by walking and talking, the cinema of Linklater celebrates non-conformity as the ‘new’ grotesque, for walking and talking, as recognised by the writer and psychogeographer Will Self is predicated upon movement and expression at ‘a pre-industrialised pace that opposes economic imperatives’ (2009). Consequently, for all its cultural activity, a place such as Austin may still find itself defined as a ‘low, non-classic area’, which tallies with the ethos of the slackers who maintain the carnival caught in Slacker, Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, Waking Life and other films directed by Linklater, including those that find metaphors for what is both valued and increasingly missed about contemporary Austin in Vienna (Before Sunrise), Paris (Before Sunset) and the New York of the 1930s (Me and Orson Welles). Indeed, this will always be so because, as Bakhtin describes, the function of the carnival-grotesque, which is explored in the cinema of Linklater, is:

To consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement. To liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted. The carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things. (1984a: 34)

Even if, as Anti-Artist explains in Slacker, opposition by inaction means that in this new order of things you ‘don’t do much really, just read, and work here, and, uh, sleep and eat, and, uh, watch movies.’

Notes

1    Many art historians have recently concerned themselves with the reconciliation of Cubism with Classicism. In literary studies, for example, the resolution has been pursued by such academics as Edna Rosenthal, who inserts Aristotle’s Poetics into Modernist aesthetic in Rosenthal, Edna (2008) Aristotle and Modernism: Aesthetic Affinities of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Another example is María Dolores Jiménez Blanco in her keynote address entitled ‘The Perception of Spanish Art in America’ at the conference on Hispanic Visual Cultures: Fractured Identities held at Cardiff University on 3 July 2009.

2    Les Lettres Françaises was the literary supplement of L’Humanité and Aragon was its director. The comment on Godard appeared in the issue dated 9 September 1965.

3    Along with Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2000), Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation fostered awareness and even inspired radical activism. An extensive interview with Schlosser can be found on the Region 2 DVD of Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me (2004).

4    For a relevant and revisionist appreciation of what it really means to be ‘Capraesque’, see Girgus, Sam B. (2007) ‘The Modernism of Frank Capra and European Ethical Thought’, in Paul Cooke (ed.) World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave. 86–102.

5    The main character in Finnegan’s Wake is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose initials H.C.E. serve as an acronym for numerous phrases (including ‘Here Comes Everybody’) throughout the book, which is written in a highly idiosyncratic language that includes puns and made-up words, literary allusions, free association and a stream of consciousness style that dismisses plot and evokes instead a highly oneiric sensation.

6    Bakhtin is responding to the official 1934 campaign to promote obligatory Social Realism in the Russian novel. Instead, he proposes linguistic and stylistic variety that might counter the ‘official version’ of Russia. Thus he advocates the inversion of categories and the development of satire, Surrealism, and independent thought.

7    This will be analysed in Chapter Four.

8    The term may have been common in the 1950s if we are to believe the spiteful refrain of Mr. Strickland (James Tolkan) in Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985): ‘You’ve got a real attitude problem, McFly. You’re a slacker! You remind me of your father when he went here. He was a slacker too.’