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Richard
Linklater by Brian Price Brian Price is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also Assistant Editor of Framework. |
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| Richard Linklater emerged at a vital, if dubious, moment
in American film. It is a period I am inclined to describe as the Rick Schmidt
era of the American Independent film. For it was Schmidt's 1989 book, How
to Make a Feature Film at Used Car Prices, published by Viking, a major,
mainstream American publishing house, that defined that moment as much as
the work of any one of its practitioners. Schmidt's book offered tips on
how to make a film for $10,000 or less. It became a bible (or at least a
self-help manual) for a generation of aspirant filmmakers who, by 1992,
had witnessed the low-budget successes of Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh,
Quentin Tarantino, Linklater himself and, most notably, Robert Rodriguez.
The story of Rodriguez's first film, El Mariachi (1992) is emblematic
of this moment. The film was made, the story goes, on a shoe-string budget
of $7,000, a sum he supposedly earned by selling his blood and submitting
to endless paid medical experiments. Miraculously, this low-budget film
found its way to major distribution and launched Rodriguez into the world
of economic solvency and big-budget filmmaking. As kids scrambled to apply
for credit cards with immodest limits, hoping to replicate the success of
inspirational figures like Rodriguez, Schmidt's book told them how to do
it. (1) The truth always leaks out, however, whether or not it spoils the dream. The version of El Mariachi that made it to theaters in 1992, for example, was improved in post-production after its sale and transferred to 35 millimeter, considerably raising the actual budget of this 'independent' film. However, such contingencies did little to sway the Schmidt generation, many of whom began to believe that one could simply make the $10,000 film as low-budget calling-card to mainstream production and distribution. Under the auspices of a culture of so-called maverick independent film, producers and distributors could make a lot of money with very little risk or investment, and the aspirant filmmaker could in turn gain entrée into the world of mainstream filmmaking. This shift in the industry had very little to do with changing modes of production to make better art possible. Lest you think I'm overstating things, try and imagine another period in which a film as thoughtless and styleless as The Brothers McMullen, not to mention the career of Ed Burns, could get made. Of course, Linklater was a key figure of the Schmidt generation, and the success of Slacker in 1991played no small part in the perpetuation of the increasingly mainstream fantasy of low-budget, narrative filmmaking. However, what remains most interesting about Linklater, as opposed to Rodriguez, is how studiously he has avoided the pitfalls of his own success, continuing to make intelligent, formally innovative films with relatively modest budgets (at least by industry standards). Indeed, Linklater is very articulate about the difference between his own work and those of the Schmidt generation who were merely eager to become the new Spielberg, the new filmmaker as power broker: Linklater, obviously, belongs to the latter. His films are marked by strong literary and philosophical sensibilities. Moreover, it is this studiousness that lends his films their formal interest, and that allows him to move away from simply replicating the styles and codes of Hollywood filmmaking, unlike the child who is simply eager to recreate Hollywood's explosions in Super-8, dreaming about a time of bigger toys and better looking actors. At the level of form and style, Linklater is both the most subtle and radical of his generation. Like their counterparts in the 1970s—the first film school generation (Scorsese, Schrader, De Palma)—this new generation demonstrated a high degree of cinephilia. And like the '70s film school-brats, it took this generation a long time to stop merely imitating, or merely name-dropping, their beloved directors, and to begin to integrate that knowledge of film history into a genuinely new style. By contrast, Linklater's first film, Slacker, not only revealed a sensibility shaped by an immersion in film history, but a filmmaker who was already doing more than imitating his beloved predecessors.
Perhaps most prominently, this characteristic of Slacker introduced the very idea of idleness that runs throughout all of his work. But at the same time, it is informed by Linklater's indebtedness, at the level of form, to European, especially French, cinema. Before Sunrise (1995), for example, bears the traces of the films of Eric Rohmer, of films like Ma nuit chez Maud (1969), where philosophical conversation is set at the fore, and talk replaces action. Before Sunrise is simply about the meeting of two young people (played by Julie Delphy and Ethan Hawke) on a train headed for Paris, who decide to get off in Vienna and spend an evening there getting to know one another. Linklater, however, sheds Rohmer's preoccupation with bourgeois life. Rohmer's characters can, because of their class background, afford to be idle; Linklater's cannot. They are often young, newly independent, and thus poor. Ethan Hawke's character, Jesse, for example, has to stay up all night because he does not have the money for a hotel room. Still, idleness is just as important to those who do not have the money to be so. In this sense, Linklater's work is akin the work of Jacques Tati, despite his interest in the content of dialogue, which Tati cared little about. Tati's Hulot is simply unfit for work, as in Mon Oncle (1958), when he falls asleep in the rubber hose factory, thus setting off a major malfunction in the assembly line. Tati's films, as his biographer David Bellos has noted, are celebrations of idleness: The link between idleness and culture, underemployment and creativity, is an idea about which Linklater is quite articulate. In a 1994 interview, for example, he addressed the difference between being lazy and being a slacker: Slacker, obviously, is explicitly concerned with this. Take, for example, the scene of the young man who is obsessed with television, who sits in front of a wall of televisions and discourses about the virtue of videotape. It is, he says, better than reality, better than the eye, since to see something without a camera is to lack the ability to rewind, slow-down and better understand what happened. A job would kill the lofty and amusing mission of this modern, Austin-based, Dziga Vertov.
What is most interesting about Linklater's concern with idleness, however, is the extent to which he is also skeptical about its limitations. The films are not merely an easy, democratic celebration of The Idea. Rather, idleness is not, it seems, for everyone. Or at least, the line between idleness and laziness is often blurred. SubUrbia (1996) concerns itself with a group of young people in their early twenties who hang out in the parking lot of an all-night convenience store. They spend their time drinking and eating junk food, and developing and exchanging ideas about the ugliness of the world. Here idleness generates hatred, suburban provincialism and violence. Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi), for example, resists change, refusing to see how his girlfriend might benefit from a move to New York to pursue a career in art; he hates his friend Pony, who has become a rock star, for succeeding, despite the fact that Pony's success simply implies (no matter how absurd he might be) that he is able to earn a living by doing what he most enjoys; finally, Jeff cannot prevent himself from attacking the Pakistanis who own the very deli outside of which he resides. His own lassitude is put in the service of a racist ideology, which equates immigrant-owned businesses with the death of the American labor force—hardly a progressive view of idleness. Along the same lines, Tape (2001) explores the ill effects of a life lived too long without structure. The film is about three former high school friends who meet up in hotel room. Vince (Ethan Hawke) has come to Michigan, ostensibly, to see his friend Jon (Robert Sean Leonard), who has a film playing in the Lansing Film Festival. Vince's high school sweetheart, Amy (Uma Thurman), now lives and works as an Assistant District Attorney in that same town. Vince is a beer swilling, drug-addled dealer who has, in fact, come to coerce, and tape, a confession from Jon that he date-raped Amy. Vince has been obsessed with it since he and Amy broke up, wanting only to punish both for what he perceives to be their various indiscretions—Jon, for his sexual violence and Amy for her 'choice' to sleep with Jon, having never slept with Vince throughout the entire course of their relationship. Vince is, in other words, someone whose development has been retarded by an idea about this episode and what it might say about him, Amy, and Jon. Interestingly, Linklater shot the film on digital video, a medium often used to hyperbolize the existential bond between the image and the thing to which it refers. Video, in other words, cannot lie. Linklater problematizes video as a medium that provides unmediated access to truth by introducing an uncharacteristic strategy of rapid cutting. The many camera angles not only underscores the shifts in momentum that are taking place in the conversation, but point to video-truth as a highly mediated construct. As a result, Vince's grand idea, not to mention the moralistic clarity exacerbated by years of idleness, is problematized by Linklater's editing strategy.
Interestingly, Linklater's greatest (relatively speaking) foray into mainstream studio-filmmaking, The Newton Boys (1998), is also one his most explicit statements about liberating oneself from repressive social structures and the exploitation of labor. The film is based on the real-life story of the Newton Boys, a group of poor, good-natured brothers from west Texas. In the 1920s, the brothers took to robbing banks on the understanding that bankers and insurance groups are, in the end, the real thieves. Linklater explained his interest in the group as follows:
Linklater is asking such questions, of course, from within the space of mainstream film production, within an industry not at all removed from the world of banking and insurance. And in this sense, Linklater resembles the key figures of his generation, especially Soderbergh and Tarantino, who have found a way to make exceptionally meaningful films within more popular structures. But whereas directors like Soderbergh and Tarantino finesse genres from within, Linklater tends to drift away altogether. His contemplative films satisfy only the most basic requirements of mainstream production (such as casting stars), and explore the many ideas that cannot simply be contained within pre-existing structures of dominant modes of production. © Brian Price, June 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography It's
Impossible to Learn How to Plow by Reading Books
(1988) 
Bibliography Richard Linklater,
“L'Argent” in John Boorman and Walter Donohue (eds),
Projections 4 1/2: In Association with Positif, London, Faber and
Faber, 1995, pp. 243–245
Articles in Senses of Cinema To
Live or Clarify the Moment: Rick Linklater's Waking Life
by
Kent Jones
Web Resources Film
Directors – Articles on the Internet
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