The Art of Doing Nothing (With a Little Help from Slacker)

Slacker - Richard Linklater (1990) Courtesy of Orion Classics

It's really no secret that most of us are taught to fear doing nothing. Idleness is suspicious. Productivity is the religion of the day. So, if you’re not grinding, optimizing, or “getting ahead” every second of every day, then what are you even doing with your life?

Me? I’ve always been on the other side of that equation. If ambition meant taking a straight shot across the field with a touchdown in mind, I would have been the person wandering around the edges, looking at dandelions and clouds instead. And for most of my life, I was told that made me a failure. A slacker.

Which is probably why finally getting a chance to sit down and check out Richard Linklater’s Slacker a couple of weeks ago – decades after it came out – felt like such a strange kind of homecoming.

Doing Nothing, Cinematically

If you’ve never seen it, here’s the gist. Slacker doesn’t really have a plot or any big, hairy point it's trying to make. There's no main character, no grand growth arc, no traditional payoff. It just drifts through a day in Austin, Texas, following one character until another wanders into frame a few minutes later, then shifting focus.

Most of the characters (if you can call them that) are, by conventional standards, “doing nothing.” They’re rambling about conspiracies, fiddling with art projects, spontaneously philosophizing, waiting for God only knows what, hanging out, talking about whatever. None of them are rushing to work or thinking about how they're going to reach that next rung on the corporate ladder.

And yet... it’s alive. Very much so. The whole film hums with this strange electricity, like the air between two people at 2 AM when you’ve both wandered way too far off the map of ordinary conversation.

It’s a movie that says, maybe nothing is something... if you look closely enough.