Slacker Fest is back!  We only have a couple more films left in this series, but they’re good ones! Slacker Fest is where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Funny Ha Ha

When I put out a call looking for slacker characters that weren’t White dudes, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was the most suggested film.  While this marks my first viewing of the film, I’ve long been aware of how children of immigrants—especially Asian immigrants—resonate with it.  So I wasn’t shocked to see it explore the pressure cooker of cultural expectations for bicultural Americans.  

What I was surprised to also find, however, was the first seeds of critique toward slacker films broadly.  With allusions to genre conventions and biases,  Harold and Kumar marked a bit of a shift in slacker films themselves1.

The basics

Release year:  2004

Premise:  Two Asian-American young professional roommates go on a late-night, munchies-driven quest to get White Castle, finding a series of absurd obstacles and detours along the way.  (An evolution of Cheech and Chong’s plot thirty years prior) 

Auteurs:  John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote this film (Danny Leiner directed it) with the express intention of representing high school friends that they never saw represented in teen movies.  I gotta hand it to them: their outstanding degree of insight when writing characters that don’t share their background is rare and gives me hope.  

Interesting side note: they also wrote Plan B fifteen years later, a very funny film about two girls who are also kids of immigrants.  Having just given the fellas their flowers, I must say they toned down the slacker when writing these analogues, instead making them overachievers who are dabbling with rebelliousness and sexual liberation.  Which is awesome, and they probably didn’t mean to make Plan B a  direct descendant to H&K.  But I mention this just to show how difficult it has been for the genre’s (overwhelmingly male) writers to cross gender anti-slacker biases even when they’ve been able to cross cultural ones.

Notable characters:

• Harold, titular slacker #1

• Kumar, titular slacker #2

• Dr. Patel, Kumar’s dad and voice of the immigrant work ethic expectation

• Billy Carver, Harold’s coworker who functionally functions as the “villain” and the “privileged” slacker (my term…more on that later)

• Cindy Kim, the seemingly prototypically careerist, studious international Asian student. 

• Maria, the girl next door who, in typical early 2000’s comedy fashion, exists to be hot and telegraph Harold’s figurative growth of a “pair.” 

Meet the slackers:  Harold and Kumar

Harold, the true protagonist, is very much not a slacker.  When we meet him, in fact, he’s being overworked by colleagues eager to exploit his “Asian” diligence (“I’m telling you, those Asian guys love crunching numbers.  You probably made his weekend!”) Accordingly, his “growth” arc is clear: get a little Big Quit Energy and learn to set some boundaries.

Kumar fully embodies the slacker archetype.  We meet him purposefully sabotaging his med school interviews (despite his high intellect) while milking his dad’s allowance as much as possible, despite pressure from his entire family to achieve a high-status career.

Their World: The NY/NJ Metro area

I.e. the work-humpiest region on Earth.  This isn’t small town Jersey a-la Clerks, but more of an office-park corporate hellscape a-la Office Space.  And like in the latter world, the specter of downsizing looms over Harold’s life, coercing him to grin and take exploitative assignments.  That and, for our slackers, of course a nice layer of the rude, racist, homophobic provincialism that the Northeast US low-key (not so low key?) delivers along with the best. 

Within this world, the film also finds time to poke fun at the obsessive careerism of Asian-Americans—both young adults and the families who pressure them. 

What does our slacker want and what’s in the way? (defining desire vs. opposing force)

At face value, just weed and White Castle–the whole purpose of their road trip.  But underneath they seek a more elevated form of hedonism:  the permission to slack, blow off steam, make mistakes, AND still feel accepted by the world around them.   In the way is, well, the LACK of permission that their culture and society (and, ultimately, their own “inner bosses”) grant them to do all this.

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

Of all the films in our series, I feel like H&K implies the most straightforward definition: someone who blows off work and responsibility, plain and simple.  Unlike other films in the series, our slackers have a fairly clear sense of their path in life (neither of them making drastic life changes at the end of the film), but are either burnt out by the way they’re approaching it (Harold) or avoiding getting started altogether (Kumar). 

Could anyone other than a White an Asian dude pull off slacking in this story world?

I think so!  Beyond centering two Asian-American protagonists, it actually–upon further reflection after I criticized the writers for Plan B–showcases some female characters who at least dabble in slackerism.  For example: Cindy, the girl who Harold dismisses as a boring and studious international student turns out to have it in her to throw a huge banger.

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement? 

This is not an anti-work film: no dismantling systems or questioning  basic mores here.  However, I think it approves of “pockets” of slacking as part of a balanced, healthy life, which puts it somewhat ahead of its time.  If the 2000s-2010s were peak millennial work-humperism and the 2020s are the disillusionment era where corporate lip service to self-care is in vogue, H&K feels more contemporary to today.  

Yet even if everyone conforms to careerism in the end, it’s hard to call the film conformist when it contains perhaps the most radical monologue in the genre: Kumar’s climatic speech that reframes the immigrant American dream from the duty to work tirelessly to the duty to enjoy America’s plentiful and delicious fast food.  

Finally, similar to The Big Lebowski, the film condemns slackers who do their slacking on the back of other people, and does so more explicitly.  

It’s very telling that Harold and Kumar doesn’t start with the protagonists (as most films conventionally do), but with two of Harold’s White colleagues.  The opening scene portrays them sympathetically, as one is trying to encourage the other to get over his ex, ditch his work, and have some fun this weekend.  If you didn’t know the film’s title and marketing, you may think the film was about them–until they make a heel turn and devise to have their fun by exploiting Harold’s work ethic.  

What I like about this introductory “red herring” is that it points to the genre and suggests that behind all those white dude slackers we cheer, there are people who labor invisibly (usually minorities and/or women) to pick up their slack.  This nascent critique of slacker’s “collateral damage” in H&K was explored more in-depth in the genre’s last notable entry, The Beach Bum (analysis forthcoming!).

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

Cultural expectations of work ethic, careerism, and perfect behavior as they’re projected onto ethnic minorities.  Both characters struggle with the pressure to be perfect, both from their family but (more insidiously) from a society that will only accept them conditionally as long as they “work harder” (something that’s given as “helpful” advice to marginalized people of all types). 

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Grant Cardone’s work-humper take

“You’re either an eater or a hunter. Folks, Harold and Kumar are just eaters, driving for miles instead of channeling their craving to seize the 10X opportunity of filling the market gap and franchising some new, more conveniently located White Castles. Play small, stay small!"

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Plotwise, I’ve already highlighted the “red herring” start to the story and the fact that Harold has a concrete “growth arc” (which, while common for protagonists in most mainstream films, is definitely NOT common in slacker films).  He “grows” to learn to set boundaries and not let himself be exploited (at least by his coworkers–bosses are absent altogether in this story).  He doesn’t become a slacker, but at least he’s no longer a workhorse for other slackers. 

The plot overall is very vignette-driven instead of linear.  While it shares this with most slacker films, I suspect this is primarily driven by seemingly EVERY mainstream early aughts comedy’s complete disregard for plot cohesion.  

Cinematography / Camera use / Color / Mise-en-scéne 

Editing / Pacing

Sound / Music

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave behind or improve?

KEEP

• The exploration of how different ethnic groups face unique pressure to justify themselves through work and careerism.  This remains the central theme of Sirena and the freedom from these pressures is shaping up to be her driver, just like it was for Harold and Kumar.  

LEAVE OR PUSH

• The gratuitous homophobia in Harold and Kumar (which to be fair to the writers, Plan B later tries to atone for).    

• As much as I like this film, it lacked a bit in the way of “slacker” innovations in its non-plot techniques and felt like a very conventional early-aughts comedy.  Not that this isn’t enjoyable, but if possible I’d like our film to feel different than whatever the conventions of today are.  

It’s a shame that the slacker genre more–or-less petered out after Harold and Kumar came out, because this film started to lay the groundwork for the genre to become more self-reflexive and self-critical.  I’m not saying there's been a revival of the genre in recent years, but if there is one, H&K may have laid the blueprint for the themes that guide it.

Next entry:  The Beach Bum

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Actual People

Funny Haha is a look at the ungrounded, anxious “between time” that bridges school and “career.”  Think of it a spiritual sequel to Actual People (though it predates it by two decades and helped inspire it), as it picks up following a female “slacker” right at college graduation, where the latter leaves off. 

I had never heard of this film before, so I was shocked to see how influential it was.  It’s considered the founding piece of the “mumblecore” film genre (don’t worry, I wasn’t aware of it either, and we’ll get into that later), and it’s a feast of excruciating, funny awkwardness made years before that form of comedy became an American staple.

I’m so happy I found this film.  Let’s dive in, and hopefully you’ll see why. 

The Basics

Release year:  2002

Premise:  Marnie, a recent college graduate living in Boston, slogs through, as Sean Burns from WBUR elegantly sums up, “an aimless summer of go-nowhere jobs and sub-par suitors.”

Auteur: Andrew Bujalski, in his debut film, which he also acts brilliantly in.  I haven’t seen any of his later work but may have to.  His thesis advisor was Chantal fucking Ackerman, only one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live.  

(Sidenote: The main actor, Kate Dollenmayer, acted in Bujalski’s first two films as an amateur, made a couple shorts of her own, and then basically peaced out to become a professor.   This is the type of amateur art that warms my heart.)

Notable characters:

• Marnie, our slacker

• Alex, boy she’s in love with and who alternates between ignoring her and tormenting her

• Dave, her friend with a serious live-in girlfriend who nonetheless makes brazen passes at her 

• Mitchell (played by Bujalski), a coworker who, when Marnie puts him in the friend zone, also becomes a whiny tormentor to her

Meet the slacker: Marnie

Marnie meets us by barging drunk into a tattoo shop, determined to get some ink, but quickly (and rather easily) being talked out it by the tattoo artist.  Soon after, we learn (as she tells a friend, chuckling) that she’s been fired for failing to say that she likes her job quickly enough after asking for a raise. 

It’s this floating non-conviction that gives her a slacker air, and tattoos aren’t her only spontaneous non-decisions:  Marnie’s the type of person who can be walking home and, on a dime, let friends whisk her into a car to go to a diner party.  As a friend notes, it’s an enchanted way to live.  But with Marnie, we quickly see its shadow side:  how it hinders a full slacker existence.

This lesson is especially salient when we see Marnie agonize with the more emotional domain of romantic relationships.  Risk-averse and afraid to get hurt, she spends the film equal parts rejected and used by dudes left and right—to the point that she fantasizes about becoming a nun.  

Her world: a town of drifting, clinging post-grads

It doesn’t help that Marnie attracts all the try-hards in town, as if her vacuum of conviction pulls them in. Unlike Riley’s guys, the men in Marnie’s life aren’t aloof and detached.  They’re grasping even harder than her, with as much uncertainty and with a desperate aggression that feels predatory.  

They’re not unique, either: everyone in this film is a sloppy mess flailing for control.  Especially the most brazen strivers.  Everyone is sidestepping and mind-fucking each other at every turn, never saying precisely what they mean. (kind of like a workplace!)  

Marnie, if anything, is the sanest. And what little character growth she experiences is learning that she shouldn’t have to put up with everyone’s shit–a testament to how obnoxious your life can get if you constantly let others dictate it to you. 

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What does she want, and what’s in the way?

Marnie wants self-knowledge: to get in touch with what she wants, what brings her joy, and her own sense of “purpose.”

In the way is her fear of displeasing others or setting boundaries. Her extreme malleability goes beyond spontaneous fun (the persona her friends project onto her)—it leads her to make choices she knows aren’t right for her. 

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

I’d say Funny Haha defines “slacker” as analogous to “drifter,” someone without set ambitions or a set direction.   “Drifting” has negative connotations in our culture, though I think the film sees things in a more nuanced way. 

Could anyone other than a White dude pull off slacking in this story world?

Though there are pretty much only White people in this film, I think in theory anyone in this world could be a slacker–not least of all because everyone in this film is drifting in some way or another.   Refreshingly, no one plays a “voice of reason” in Funny Haha–and those who try (mostly the men) are the ones who turn out to be most unreasonable.  

One note: like the other few female slackers I’ve encountered in the genre, Marnie is in the Dante self-loathing mold.  I don’t see this story-world making room for female slacking in a more brazen mold. 

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement? 

I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it doesn’t. “Isn’t this a film about becoming MORE proactive? Marnie’s big change is to make a list of goals,” you say.  “You hate goals!”

First of all, no I don’t.  But I hear you on this feeling like a slacker-rehabilitated tale.  However, I think Marnie is learning to be more proactive and assertive specifically in figuring out what she wants for herself and in setting boundaries against external expectations.  

Effective slacking takes a lot more intention and self-assurance than you’d think–the best slackers are people with a strong sense of who they are and a stronger spine to flick away the haters.  Marnie is especially apt for this arc, since women tend to be socialized to bend over backwards to please others. 

In the final scene, Marnie’s line to Alex (“It’s a beautiful day, beautiful sandwiches, let’s just enjoy our unobstructed view of these fucking dorks”) declares her actualized inner slacker peace.  And then, in one of the most satisfying endings ever, she bats away his bullshit—which she had been putting up with all film—the same way you bat away a shitty boss after you’ve given yourself permission to not feel ashamed.  

So yes, this film approves of slacking, while presenting us with the koan that it demands a good deal of intention and practice.  

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

People pleasing, especially when taken to the extreme that you’re gaslighting yourself–laughing off people being shitty to you like your life is an ironic joke not worth treating with respect.

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

A.O. Scott’s (real, non-fictional) take

“At one point, [Marnie] makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition -- ‘spend more time outdoors,’ ‘make friends with Jackie,’ ‘learn to play chess’ -- is both funny and sad.”

Yes, aspiring to friendship, health, and hobbies is sooo sad and laughable and unambitious and pathetic!  HAHA!  WHAT A LOSER.

I’m gonna cut dude some slack because this is from twenty years ago, and (almost) everyone is less of an asshole today than they were twenty years ago.  And, not gonna lie, I could have written that exact line five years ago, let alone twenty.  But still: what an asshole.   

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the film’s technique?

Here’s where we dive into the genre known as mumblecore--defined by Wikipedia as “characterized by naturalistic acting and (sometimes improvised) dialogue, low budgets, an emphasis on dialogue over plot, and a focus on the personal relationships of young adults.”

You’ll note it has a lot of overlap with techniques that I have been labeling as “slacker-like” in this series.

Plot / Story/ Writing

What I love most about Funny Haha’s treatment of story is its use of in medina res, ie. starting the story late and ending it early, plopping you in the middle of the action.  Both the beginning and ending scenes of this film have a simple efficiency that’s graceful and elegant.  The ending, especially, is a chef’s kiss—a simple “nuh-uh” and head-shake complete Marnie’s arc and we cut to credits.  It’s like Whiplash’s ending, but even more to the point.  

In between those scenes, the film is very vignette-like, as mumblecore films are known to be—something they share with slacker films.  

There’s also, of course, the signature mumblecore dialogue: mumbled, awkward, seemingly improvised (though it’s often rigorously rehearsed).  Characters in Funny Haha talk the way insecure people talk at parties, over-relying on quippy, dismissive jokes.  They feel very much like real people I know.  

The biggest thing to me, though, is that there’s no BIG emotion in the story,  no grandiosity in the acting, no scenes that feel like EPIC turning points. This is a movie that’s content to let the story run its course while using its inside voice. But Marnie DOES undergo clear growth, and you can feel that she’s a changed person at the end.  The fact that it sneaks up on you is the delightful genius of this film. 

Cinematography / Camera use / Color / Mise-en-scéne

Funny Haha is filmed in 16mm film, which gives it a little bit of a “lo-fi” visual aesthetic.  The camera doesn’t call much attention to itself.  The locations, all around Boston, are “dull” (as described by a critic at the time). It all adds to the film’s unassuming attitude. 

Sound / Music

The film’s mono sound also has a bit of a “lo-fi” feel. 

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave or push?

KEEP

To me, more than anything, Funny Haha serves as a reminder that scenes, character arcs, and emotions don’t have to be big to have an impact and feel relatable.  This is a thread in many movies I’ve enjoyed over the last year (slacker fest films for sure, but also check out any film by Yasujiro Ozu to see a master of making the understated feel incredibly emotional), and something that I personally struggle with as a writer. 

Also, it’s always good to know when to start and when to end, to trust the audience to piece things together with less context than you think they need. 

LEAVE

Mumblecore as an aesthetic is very “in” thanks to Greta Gerwig and the Duplass brothers, just to name a couple.  If I use it as a model, I feel like our film will feel like every indie movie made right now.  There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it would make it harder for it to stand out. 

It’s tempting, though, because it’s a very budget-friendly aesthetic.  It merits further study.

Funny Haha, that “your favorite filmmakers’ favorite film” kind of movie, may be my unexpected favorite from the genre.  There’s something about it that creeps into your subconscious and makes you laugh and feel horrified and tender all at once.  At the very least, it was my favorite movie discovery from 2023. 

Next entry: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: The Big Lebowski

(PROGRAMMING NOTE:  Big Quit Energy is on hiatus from regular essays on work culture and workaholism until the end of November.  Until then, enjoy our backlog of Slacker film analysis and “Friends With BQE” podcasts episodes!) 

I was on the fence about including this film, as I’m not sure that Kit Zauhar—the filmmaker—intended it for the genre.  She was kind enough to respond to my doubt by saying she didn’t mind the “slacker film” label, which to me says she personally didn’t conceive of it as one.  

But the best art takes on its own meaning inside the audience’s mind, and Actual People took hold in mine as a viscerally relatable story of the malaise that occurs when our inner slacker, sick of being denied, takes over by force.  This often happens in times of uncertainty—in the film’s case, the last weeks of school, when we can no longer ignore the work-humping world barreling toward us.  

If Actual People counts as a slacker film, then it has the distinction of being the furthest I’ve seen the genre dip its toe into character drama.  Let’s get into it!  (As this is a relatively new film, consider this your SPOILER WARNING) 

The basics

Release year:  2021

Premise:  A young woman spends her final week of college dealing with anxiety about her future by clinging to whatever she can, most notably a boy from her hometown

Auteur: Kit Zauhar—the only female auteur I’ve found so far in the genre—in her directorial debut

Notable characters:

• Riley — our slacker

• Leo — her crush from home 

• David — her ex

• Anderson — the roommate she sometimes sleeps with, who know wants her out of the apartment 

• Angela and Charlie — her parents

• Valerie — her younger sister and budding wild child

• Michaela, Paula, Jessica — her buds

• Benji — Another bud who’s pretty transparently in love with her the whole movie, but who she turns down at the end, a possible sign of growth

Meet the slacker: Riley

There’s every reason to believe that Riley’s dutiful, conscientious, and loves stability in all aspects of her life.  We happen to catch her, however, during a burnout response to extreme change and uncertainty as she’s shoved into the unstructured adult world.  Oh, and she’s also grieving a breakup that she didn’t see coming.  

Accordingly, we see her forget to write papers, fail a class, put off finding work, and passively accept that she’ll move back home after school.  Emotionally, she drifts from fling to fling, grasping for stability in other people, but constantly rejected there as well.  

Her world: American college when it stops caring about you

When, like Riley, I was flailing for stability and plunging into depression as graduation neared, I turned to my school community for reassurance, only to confirm there was no community there.  There had only been a feeling induced by the marketing team (one they still try to stoke during fundraising season), a mirage that dissipated once the last tuition check cleared and the school washed its hands of us faster than we could drag our baggage off campus. 

This mismatch between colleges’ promise of meaningful community and their actual commitment to it isn’t unique to my school, and I’ve never seen it explored it more beautifully than in Riley’s scene with a college-provided therapist.  Just when she thinks she’s close to understanding her anxieties, the therapist informs her that they can’t continue the process—not even as a meager text to check in.  But “good luck with graduation!”  Nothing screams senior year quite like your school severing ties with you when you feel least prepared for the future they sold you.

Riley’s therapist may genuinely want to help her—is the strain on her face frustration at their predicament?—but if she has cared in the past, she’s probably been scolded for it. I imagine interactions are similar any time a worker brings problems to HR (I can’t say I have…I don’t see the point).  Ironically, this is the one way Riley’s school is preparing her for the future, giving her a taste of capitalism’s unwillingness to make space for emotional labor if it interferes with business. 

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What does our slacker want and what’s in the way?

Riley wants what many slackers we’ve studied have learned to do without: stability and a sense of direction.  In opposition is a part of her that perhaps wants to be freed from the pressure of achieving them, that knows these desires are elusive social constructs which we only ever get to “have” in fleeting moments, if at all. 

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

Anyone who hasn’t figured out a rock-solid sense of where their life is going.  Or, if you pardon my corniness, any actual person with doubts that make them flail about. This film is a reminder that everyone, even the biggest workhumpers, have episodes where their bodies and psyches go on strike.  If you haven’t learned to accept and embrace these episodes (and most of us have not), they can be terrifying.  

Indecisiveness is a telltale sign of this. Actual People does a nice job of showing the pain those who constantly change their mind cause themselves and others, given that we live in a culture that doesn’t know how to handle (and often punishes) changes in course.  Riley is both “victim” and “perpetrator” in this regard—she unsettles her family with her indecisiveness, while she’s also deeply hurt by her ex’s change of heart regarding her (“how does someone just stop loving you?”).

Could anyone other than a White dude an Asian-American woman pull off slacking in this story world?

Zauhar doesn’t make it explicit, but anyone could (arguably, everyone must) go through what Riley’s going through. 

This is a rare slacker film in that it offers a non-derisive portrayal of a female slacker, one done in the “Dante” mold of someone who wrestles with guilt over their slacking.  The few women protagonists in the genre are portrayed like this, maybe because filmmakers find it’s the only “honest” way to portray them.  Given how intensely women in our society are socialized to stamp out any impulses to goof off, a female slacker who didn’t feel at least some guilt would have superhuman self-assurance. 

As far as ethnicity, Zauhar specifically said she didn’t want to focus on Riley’s Asian-American heritage. However, we do get to meet her parents through a bit of a “misdirect” scene, where at first they confront her in the authoritarian style we’ve been conditioned to expect from an Asian mom, but become nurturing when Riley has a breakdown and verbalizes what she’s going through.  This is a nice, tender bit of nuance I wouldn’t expect from Harold and Kumar.

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader antiwork statement? 

If Actual People doesn’t view slacking episodes “negatively,” at the very least it shows the suffering that occurs when someone isn’t ready to embrace them.  In a sense, the “purpose” of the slacker genre, if it has any, could be to help us lose our fear of these highly uncertain experiences, helping us dream up alternate ways to be with the uncertainty.   

Watching Actual People (which, it bears repeating, wasn’t explicitly intended as a slacker film) I found myself feeling weirdly nostalgic for what COULD have happened if I had flowed into my own post-college life with less anxiety.  Intentionally or not, it serves as a painful reminder that most of us are understandably incapable of resisting the pressures of culture and don’t give ourselves a chance to discover the gifts that “directionless” passages of life can offer.

What does the film see as the broader “enemy?”

Zauhar does a great job of not being heavy-handed with her agenda or grievances. 

I came away with a renewed sense of anger toward the collegiate marketing machinery that uses gullible teenager’s dreams and fears to dupe them into making expensive decisions.  But that’s my own baggage talking.  

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Sabrina Cardone’s take

“Riley, I don’t know why you’re so freaked out.  I wish I could be your age and get to work.  I CAN’T WAIT to work!  I’m happiest when I’m flooded with work.  Aren’t you?  I can’t believe you already wasted four years at college just sitting there thinking, and even NOW you don’t wanna to start? As crazy as you are for spending $100k on an art degree, you may want to spend a couple thousand more to have my dad inspire you into being normal.”

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Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Like much of the genre, Actual People utilizes a loose vignette plot that, while linear, doesn’t have hard cause-and-effect mechanisms.  Time also fast forwards in leaps between scenes, a nice “efficient” way to tell stories that trusts the audience to piece things together.

Cinematography / Camera use / Color / Mise-en-scéne 

I appreciate the unworried use of focus, letting people come in and out of blurriness.  It feels free-flowing and slacker in spirit, aside from presumably allowing shoots to rely less on highly choreographed blocking and lighting.  

(Related: I liked the use of rack focus to “cut” between speakers instead of classic over-the-shoulder setups.  This allows for longer, more natural-feeling takes.)

Editing / Pacing

Sound / Music

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave or push?

KEEP

Actual People  is a good recent case study for tactics that achieve quality look an feel without many resources.  A lot of shots seem to use available light artfully, even at night.  I also appreciate how composition makes sparsely dressed sets look interesting:

I also love the idea of serving jungle juice from the bathtub.  Not for our movie, just for the next time I host company. 

LEAVE / PUSH

As much as I love Zauhar’s rack focus “cuts” between speakers, it’s an example of something that may not be feasible if our film is micro-budget and uses even smaller crews (say, if I shoot it solo, Noam Kroll style). It’s simply too much for one person to watch the acting, keeping things in frame, AND work the camera’s focus.  

More importantly, as much as I understand why female slackers tend to come in the self-loathing “Dante” mold, I really want  to try depicting one in the unapologetic, I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think, Cheech and Chong/Randall mold.  

The most memorable art often brushes up against viewers’ wounds.  I have no clue about Zauhar’s intentions, but Actual People clearly brushed up against some of mine, wounds that also drive this blog.  I feel comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one. 

Next entry: Funny Ha Ha

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Slacker

(PROGRAMMING NOTE:  Big Quit Energy is on hiatus from regular essays on work culture and workaholism until the end of November.  Until then, enjoy our backlog of Slacker film analysis and “Friends With BQE” podcasts episodes!) 

Like Office Space, this “carnivalesque critique of society” has achieved staying power in our culture—but while the former mostly lives on in memes, The Big Lebowski has gone on to inspire an honest-to-god religion. Today we take on the heavyweight of the genre, the film widely considered its masterpiece—and while that’s “just, like, [the critics’] opinion, man,” I have to say I agree.  Let’s dive in!

The basics

Release year:  1998

Premise: When a case of mistaken identity leads to a wrongly-peed rug, a normally unmotivated slacker thrusts himself into a complicated kidnapping plot, to disastrous results.  

Auteurs:  The Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona, Fargo, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, No Country for Old Men) who are in the conversation for greatest American filmmakers since Stanley Kubrick, in no small part because of this film.

Notable characters:

• Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, the slacker

• Jeff Lebowksi, the “big” one, a rich workhumper who shares names with our slacker

• Bunny, big Lebowski’s wife, who owes money to powerful figures

• Maude, big Lebowski’s estranged, calculating, artistic daughter

• Walt, The Dude’s volatile and vindictive Vietnam vet friend

• Donnie, The Dude’s other affable and somewhat dim friend

• Jackie Treehorn, a powerful pornographer who Bunny owes her debt to

• Jesus Quintanilla, who has no effect on the plot yet might be the most iconic minor character in film history

Meet the slacker: Jeff Lebowski, AKA “The Dude”

The beloved “slovenly Christ” introduced—as he pays for milk with a check—by the film’s narrator, as “possibly the laziest man in LA County.” A mellow guy “with no use for himself” who “abides” and is happy to let things happen.  Except for the one time he becomes driven toward “compensation” for, of all things, an old rug that two goons ruined in a case of mistaken identity.  

While this break from slacker form proves disastrous for him (and it doesn’t help to have his vindictive friend Walter egging him on), it does make The Dude an interesting variation on the archetype: a slighted slacker with a bone to pick.

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His world:  Los Angeles, Reaganized USA

This story unfolds with two wars in the backdrop: the first Gulf War and Reagan/Bush’s war of personal responsibility against the social safety net.  This is a world led by (often fraudulently) rich White men with seething disdain for the the poor—especially those with full-on Gen X opt-out malaise, like the Dude. This disdain sometimes even crosses into harassment executed by cops and sheriffs (“stay out of Malibu, deadbeat!”). Of course, these same rich guys love to pat themselves on the back for helping a few select poor people. 

No one embodies this better than the “big” Jeff Lebowski, an outwardly successful gentleman who lords his “achievements” over everyone (he has a literal wall for them) and plays the role of benefactor to a few inner city kids he calls his “children.”

What does our slacker want and what’s in the way?

On the surface, of course, he wants compensation for his dumb rug (and later, the reward for helping recover Bunny and/or “big” Lebowski’s money).  This is the source of all his troubles, as he could’ve taken the L and have “just pee stains on my rug,” instead of his ever-escalating misfortunes. 

More deeply, he wants love or at least female validation.  This doesn’t only show up in his dream sequences, but also by how he tries to project his own status, bragging about his (probably over-exaggerated) past as an activist.  Of course, most elements of society deny him validation on the daily. Maybe the rug pushes him over the boiling point to demand “compensation,” more broadly, for how society treats and beats him out toward the fringes. 

What gets in the way are powerful people and the goons/cops they use to project their power.  They, like the “big” Lebowski, deflect blame for how their fuck-ups have affected everyone else, including The Dude, and couch it behind an ideology of personal responsibility (“every bum’s lot in life is his own responsibility”).

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

As you’ll see below, I think the film distinguishes between half slackers and fully realized slackers. Fully-realized slackers are people like like The Dude on his good days: those happy to be and let be, not striving to achieve status or, really, participate in society.

Half slackers are a broader circle that includes any fraud (especially males) who flaunts wealth created by others (usually the women in their life). The “big” Lebowksi, as it turns out, is the most notable example—though the film is littered with them.

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Could anyone other than a White dude pull off slacking in this story world?

Nope.  Behind most of the film’s male slackers are competent and hard-working women: again, the genre-conventional feminine voices of reason. The film has a deeper theme of gender relations, of neurotic men worried about losing their manhood, pretending to be big shots while women prop them up.  Keeping this in mind, this disparity is more excusable than in other slacker films.  

One interesting break is Bunny, who unapologetically and hedonistically enjoys her husband’s riches.  The bummer is that the film can’t help but add the typical label of “slut/goldigger” over her slacker identity, something they don’t burden The Dude with.  

The only non-White characters I can think of offhand (beside the little achievers on Lebowski’s wall) are the goon who pees on the rug, a maid, an angry cab driver, and Saddam Hussein.  

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement? 

I believe it does, and strongly. If there’s any moral in the story, is that half-hearted slacking won’t cut it.  

While counting the “big” Lebowski and other male characters as slacker-like would cast the term in a negative light, note that The Dude (a fully-realized slacker) typically displays a positive and life-affirming attitude.  It’s straying from this attitude that brings him trouble.  The rich frauds, of course, do not practice this attitude—they limit themselves to flaunting success while still buying into the artifices of work-humping.  

So you may say that the film approves of fully-realized slacking (when you really live it) and disapproves of closet slackers that cling to the status trappings of “success” without the work.  

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

What’s fun about a film of this impact is that there are a million different, thoughtful interpretations of if out there, and at least a few say the film’s main concern is mourning the “decline of masculinity.” There’s a lot of evidence to this effect— from all the ineffectual male characters clinging to their past (and fabricated) identities, to The Dude facing threats of literal castration. 

I sense the opposite, however. Instead of mourning these past strands of masculinity, the film parodies and ridicules them as narrow and toxic definitions of the male gender, vanities and insecurities that drive men to engage in petty-to-violent pissing contests (pun intended).  The Dude himself falls prey to these, and only seems to achieve emotional balance after he finds that his “successful alter ego” was never any worthier than him—that he was silly to play the same type of achievement game. 

Too bad that the forces already set in motion end up killing Donnie anyway. 

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Jocko Willink’s take

“I’ll give Walt this: he does NOT give up on the mission.  If it wasn’t for him, you’re damn right small Lebowski would have nothing more than pee on his rug.  Pee on his rug and a life of cowardice.  Now he can walk around, head held high, knowing his sperm is INSIDE a woman.  

And who pushed him out of his comfort zone to do it? Who was willing to DIE and to KILL for him to do it? Walt! Oh, and who DID die for him to do it?  Donnie!  Lebowski’s got these TRUE SEALS for friends, and he’s pissy because he had to get a little bit of his friend’s ashes in his hair in exchange?  Makes me sick to my stomach.”

Any slacker-like innovations in the film?

Plot / Setting / Character design

I love how The Big Lebowski subverts at least two genres (Film Noir, Westerns) by infusing them with Slacker film conventions as it lampoons old Hollywood.  

While other slacker classics mastered minimal and passive plots, the Coen Brothers built the complicated twists and turns of classic Hollywood whodunits into Lebowski to make it “hopelessly complex, [yet] ultimately unimportant”—a nihilistic joke with a hilariously limp and empty resolution, where everyone ends up going bowling as if nothing ever happened. 

Speaking of bowling, there’s the prominent role it plays in giving The Dude a mundane activity (with no bearing on the plot) to return to at the end of each major story point.  In the words of The Importance of a Rug, a great analysis that points this out, putting this in the film “tunes…the complex [plot] rhythm of the noir” to fit the  “casual rhythm of Dude.” 

As if that wasn’t enough plot meandering, the story also takes “dreamspace” detours where Lebowski interacts with the anachronistic cowboy narrator or plunges into highly psychedelic dream sequences. 

The characters themselves also make a mockery of traditionally manly noir and western heroes by embodying weak, incompetent, unmotivated versions of the archetypes.  Even the omnipresent narrator loses his train of thought two minutes into the movie.

Finally, the dialogue can be meandering and aimless, yet remains captivating.  Lebowksi shows how you can build amazing dialogue with characters repeating the same lines over and over, creating a fugue-like effect.  Or by having them go off on their own tangents, talking at each other but not having a conversation. (Honestly, both of these are closer to how people realistically talk…pay attention next time you hear a group bickering.)

Cinematography / Camera / Color / Mise-en-scéne

The Dude’s color palette, dirty earth tones, evokes an earthy-crunchy stoner, something we noted with Cheech. (By the way, him burning his dick with a roach also seems to be an homage to Cheech). 

Editing / Pacing

Lebowski displays some wonderful use of slow motion—most notably in the bowling scenes, but also in the dream sequences and Jackie Treehorn’s party.  Slow motion (as anarchist filmmaker Jean Vigo first discovered when making Zéro de Conduite) often works to heighten a sense of freedom and expansiveness, and the Coen brother’s use it beautifully to show slackers in their full flow.

Sound / Music

I haven’t mentioned sound or music much in these breakdowns, but I should shout out that Lebowski has some recurring songs whose lyrics and old-timey slow melodies memorably tie to the film’s themes and sequences. My favorite is Bob Dylan’s The Man in Me in the opening credits and in the first dream sequence. 

What would I keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave or improve?

Keep

I could keep everything from this movie if I could, but what’s most realistic to my budget and skill level is striving to emulate:

• The creativity with the rhythm of the dialogue (not to mention that I’d be thrilled to have even half the amount of iconic lines)

• Giving all characters, including minor ones, memorable mannerisms and visual details.  It really enriches the experience of the story

• A coded but seemingly coherent moral framework/organizing principle (maybe the rest of this blog can help me articulate it for myself)

• Above all, the cutting, witty, effective subversion of tired cultural (and film) tropes, but without being too overt about it

Some films manage to meaningfully comment on their societal context.  Others manage to innovate on cinema and genre forms.  Others manage to be entertaining for their audiences. This is a rare movie that manages to do all three at once, going on 25 years after its release.  While it may be trapped in the parameters and prejudices of its genre, it goes all out within them.

Next entry: Actual People

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Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Friday

(PROGRAMMING NOTE:  Big Quit Energy is on hiatus from regular essays on work culture and workaholism until the end of November.  Until then, enjoy our backlog of Slacker film analysis and “Friends With BQE” podcasts episodes!) 

This isn’t technically the OG slacker film (by decades, at that), but it may well be the spiritual OG.   Not only because it’s the genre’s namesake, but because it embodies slacking most thoroughly in both content and form, pushing the genre’s conventions to wild extremes.  I was going to open the series with Slacker, but after remembering how disorienting it is, I decided it was a bit much for a first entry.

(I must admit, I watched it in school and hated it because I was a moron with a Wes Anderson DVD box-set for a brain.) 

Well, here we are: six films in, warmed up enough to take in and appreciate this extremely weird, awesome film! 

The basics

Release year:  1990

Premise:  A day wandering around Austin, TX—the Mecca of the unambitious—meeting a couple dozen of its eccentric, apathetic, and disillusioned (sometimes violently so) citizens. 

Auteur: Richard Linklater, someone with great perspective who’s always willing to try crazy things.  You may know him from titles as varied as Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, School of Rock, Boyhood and of course the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy.  Slacker was his first major breakthrough.  

Notable characters: Because there’s too many to list (and none have names), I’ll use this space to celebrate that the movie consisted of cameos from non-professional local local professors, musicians, artists, as well as a bunch of Linklater’s friends.  

I know I wrote about my skepticism of using projects to maintain friendships, but I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that making movies with buds isn’t one of the funnest things in life. 

Meet the slacker: everyone (…but mostly the film itself?)

Depending on how you count, Slacker has 39 vignettes portraying different people, and no one features for more than a few minutes.  This movie is nuts.  

But here’s an interesting bit: notice that, despite its abundance of slackers, the film is called Slacker, singularly.  I interpret this as referring to the film itself, which feels purposefully designed in story and technique to embody the slacker attitude. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Linklater’s intention was to help us, as viewers, get into a less rigid mindset by denying us any of the linearity and predictability we’ve come to expect from films.  In the meta story of this film, we’re the straight-laced squares and Slacker is the sidekick teaching us to relax a little.  

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Their world:  late ‘80s Austin, Texas

A college city whose motto is “Keep Austin Weird,” and definitely was when this film was made. Full of intellectuals and drifters, it’s the perfect setting for a film like this, its history and politics intertwined in many of the vignettes. 

You’re excused for not recognizing today’s Austin in it, though, as the city is now marked by incessant construction, tech bros, and self-driving cars. 

What do our slackers want and what’s in the way?

There is no main desire or driving force here as far as I can tell.  Some of the characters may discuss minor desires, but they’re not doing much to pursue them.  

The film itself doesn’t explicitly build toward anything, though its ending (someone throwing a camera off a cliff) feels like the punchline to a manifesto that says…eh… it says….“fuck film convention”….?  “Fuck the usual structures through which we tell stories and to which we’re expected to mold our lives?”  I could buy that.

The recurring antagonistic forces that characters complain about include authority figures, the government, and societal pressure. 

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

Linklater himself defines his characters as “people on the fringes of any meaningful participation in society.” I think there’s a deeper character trait that underpins them and their lack of participation. They’re all, in one way or another, meandering. There’s a lot of ways a slacker can be meandering, and you see them all on display in this film.

It can manifest as indecision, not knowing where to go or what to be (for example, the guy whose band constantly changes names).  This isn’t necessarily bad: many of our slackers are open-minded, free-associative thinkers and artists attracted to the spiritual and the non-concrete.  Linklater himself plays a character who obsesses with parallel universes created by different decisions. His film shows creative “indecision” as well, starting lots of stories and never finishing any.  

For slackers who have chosen a direction, it often “meanders” from the “straight” path that mainstream American society expects its members to take.  You have an unhoused man who’s very proud of his lifestyle, people who advocate countercultural political systems (Marxism, Socialism), or whose vocation is pursuing conspiracy theories (I can’t help but remember that Austin produced Alex Jones).  In more menacing cases, these paths veer into the criminal: from petty thieves to aspiring terrorists who revere the UT tower shooter.

For others, the meandering path is not a choice, but a consequence of mental illness.  Linklater shows this most poignantly with a lady at the diner who keeps repeating “You should quit traumatizing women with sexual intercourse.  I should know, I’m a medical doctor,”  a line that implies the injuries that our rigid society inflicts on people, preventing them from being able to participate (the “medical doctor” part a sad parody of what a “respectable participant” would say).

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Could anyone other than a White dude pull off slacking in this story world?

This is a very White movie, even with all its protagonists.  I thought maybe it had the excuse that Austin was a very White city in 1990.  Unfortunately, I found that, even back then, 36% of its residents were people of color.  By my rough count, only 5% (two people) of the slackers are Black, and I didn’t notice any Latinx or Asian ones.  I guess the film reflects Linklater’s 1990 social circle more than it fully reflects the population of Austin.

As far as who the Black characters were, they’re not even THAT slacker-y.  One is an enterprising activist who sells shirts and zines.  The other, a woman, is trying to get her boyfriend to leave the house for once—a voice of reason role.  Shame.

To its credit, the film does show a lot of White women playing slackers.  This includes the most iconic slacker of the film, and maybe the most iconic female slacker of the genre (there aren’t that many): the titularly pictured woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear.  

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader antiwork statement? 

There’s one vignette in particular that lays out explicit antiwork sentiments: the unhoused person who turns his on-camera interview into a manifesto that casts working as “[filling] the bellies of the pigs who exploit us,” and tells workers that “every commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.”  I need this guy on our podcast!

That said, we can’t assume that the film endorses this gentleman’s POV more than any other in the film, which is full of highly subjective, “unreliable” narrators.  

Linklater has said that Slacker is a loving homage to people living in the fringes, so the film clearly doesn’t reject this type of life.  However, it doesn’t necessarily advocate it either.  I think it’s just trying to make us realize that lack of structure and aimlessness is more common than we admit, even in the most cravenly ambitious country in the world, and that we’re better off accepting it.

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms? 

There’s one cultural attitude that the film goes out of its way to critique: collective indifference.  It introduces this theme quickly, ending the first vignette with a hit-and-run in which the driver leaves a struck pedestrian (his mother, turns out) dying in the street. 

Onlookers come to see what’s happening, but they’re all clearly trying to evade the responsibility of helping while nominally checking to see if someone’s called for help.  One of them, a businessman with a nice car (so perhaps one of the only “non-slacker” characters), even tries to set up a date with another witness with the dead woman laying at their feet.

This is the most extreme example, but most everyone in the film has an air of nonchalance even toward their own troubles—perhaps feigned non-attachment to hide fears and anxieties.  This isn’t exclusive to the slackers–constant indifference permeates the whole world of the movie, and everyone (especially those who are destitute and/or ill) has to endure it.  

Maybe the “slacker” in the movie’s title is the world itself–society “slacking” on its responsibility and empathy toward the very people it calls “slackers.”   Maybe this collective lack of empathy is the very thing that drives them toward their slacker lifestyles and attitudes. 

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Tony Robbins’ take

“This movie was a drag. One huge bad day.  And I don’t have bad days.  I’ve trained my leader state to churn out testosterone.  But to get over this movie, I had to do power poses for 36 straight hours.  

“These seem to be bright kids. But all that wandering around with no conviction, that body language–it’s tragic!  We need to train them into leaders of their lives, their families, and their community.  We’re going to transform this dumpy city, one workshop at a time, one conference at a time!

“The next time they make a film about Austin, it shall be called Leader.  Keep Austin Leading!”

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Everything about this movie evokes meandering.  

Let’s start with its complete lack of plot.  Slacker denies the audience any linearity or continuity.  Ironically, this makes viewers “work” (or better said, “labor”) by making us sit in the ambiguity.  If you can relax into this lack of structure and take the vignettes moment-by-moment, coherent themes emerge in the recall between different conversations and situations. 

You become able to construct some meaning outside of a defined story path, kind of how would say you can construct your own meaning outside of a defined career path.  In a sense, slackers do the extra labor (which the rest of us run from) of finding a fulfilling path in places where none is apparent. As the film’s unhoused antiwork thinker says: “Hey look at me!  I’m making it.  I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it.”

Cinematography / Camera use / Color / Mise-en-scéne

Like the story, the camera constantly meanders from person to person and group to group.  There are tons of elaborate and often slow tracking shots that give the movie a sense of flowing to and from.  The characters are often walking in these shots, themselves meandering around town.  

Editing/Pacing

Though some of the vignettes are edited conventionally with multiple shots, many are composed of single long shots.  This centers long monologues or conversations, allowing you to explore the scenes without having your attention “guided” by the editor. 

Sound / Music

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave or improve?

Keep

Mainly, I want to have at least little of the meandering that oozes through this film.  Even the more conventional films I’ve watched in this series move leisurely, with at least a scene or two that doesn’t explicitly move the story forward.

Beyond that: the guerrilla scrappiness with which it was produced.  Namely, Linklater’s refusal to get permits or pay for any of the locations.  Casting non-professionals for at least some of the roles sounds cool too. 

Leave

Overall, this film is so one-of-a-kind, I couldn’t recreate much of it even if I wanted to.  It is inspiration more than a viable blueprint.  A true artistic classic. 

Next up: The Big Lebowski

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Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Boudu Saved From Drowning

Here’s another film I underestimated.  I’d seen Friday before, and enjoyed it as a goofy comedy, but didn’t think there was much substance there.  Rewatching it now, with this blog’s themes in mind, I see not only an innovative approach to plot, but also a nuanced (dare I say tender?) perspective on the interactions between marginalized slackers and their unforgiving environments. 

The basics

Release year:  1995

Premise:  Follows the Friday of a man who’s just gotten fired from his job and, instead of heeding his father’s demand to search for a new one, gets tangled in his best friend’s debt to a local drug dealer (among other hijinks that come with living in South Central Los Angeles). 

Auteurs: F. Gary Gray (director), Ice Cube (writer, main actor), and DJ Pooh (writer, minor actor).  They wanted to depict the lighthearted element of living in the hood, something they felt the gritty, menacing “hood films” of the time missed.  Knowing this intention proved key to me fully appreciating this film.

Most* notable characters:

*There are so many notable characters in this movie, a testament to its cultural staying power.  I’m listing the ones that appear in this review.

• Craig Jones, the slacker

• Smokey, Craig’s drug-peddling best friend (also a slacker)

• Big Worm, the drug dealer who threatens Smokey and Craig

• Deebo, the neighborhood bully feared by all

• Debbie, a friend of Craig’s sister, Craig’s love interest

• Willie and Betty Jones, Craig’s tough but caring parents

• Joi, Craig’s (correctly) jealous girlfriend

• Felisha, an addict who went on to become an internet meme

Meet the (main) slacker:  Craig Jones

Craig doesn’t give off classic slacker vibes.  Unlike the typical archetype, he’s not outwardly laid back or funny–not on this Friday, at least.  Today, he’s surly and in conflict with his entire neighborhood.  

But though he doesn’t seem fond of goofing around, he’s not very driven either.  He’s not particularly bothered by his unemployment, and doesn’t mind asking everyone around him to loan him money.  The bulk of his stress comes from his life being threatened by Smokey’s criminal entanglements.  Understandable! 

If Craig is closer to the “Dante” frustrated slacker-type, his sidekick, Smokey, is more in the classic stoner mold. 

His world: a marginalized neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles

For the setting of a goofy comedy, this world is complex and contradictory.   Yes, people dunk on each other with commands to get a job (“The word of the day is J. O. B.!” – Craig’s dad).  But there is more understanding and tolerance of unemployment in this neighborhood than in your typical slacker’s world. 

It’s telling that no one in Friday waxes poetic about big goals or dreams. Everyone’s just trying to survive and have a little fun along the way. Funny enough, you could argue that the biggest workhumper (aside from Craig’s dad) is the local drug dealer, Big Worm, tells his underlings “you’re not applying yourself” as justification for later trying to kill them.  

Don’t get me wrong, people here value jobs.  Craig’s mom denies him a loan and refuses to feed him more than cereal because he doesn’t have one.  But what’s important is that she still feeds him.  There’s no talk of shame, being a bad person, or anyone being put out on the street.  This is a community that understands that there are broader situations, and so is willing to carry each other when push comes to shove.  The vibes are, all in all, loving.

Of course, I don’t want to downplay the violent and unforgiving elements that also live here.  In this world, you’re constantly up against people who have no tolerance for “playing.”  As a frustrated Craig tells Smokey about Big Worm:

“That’s your problem.  Ain’t nobody playing but you…you think that man’s playing about his money?  Name one person in the hood that play like that.”

While this isn’t a workhumping world per se, there’s a survival pressure to repress the slacker’s usual playfulness and goofiness.  

I love that it’s the film’s nominal workhumper, Craig’s dad, who most tenderly expresses sadness at Craig having to grow up surrounded by more violence than he did.  Maybe that’s why Friday’s characters don’t spout workhumper buzzwords at each other–their violent backdrop does the pressuring for them, and any extra chastising would just be piling on. 

What does our slacker want and what’s in the way?

Before we get to what Craig wants deep down (beyond the straightforward money he needs to avoid getting shot, of course), it’s clear that he sees his neighborhood as what gets in the way.  His refrain is “I’m always caught in the middle of something,” and it’s true that he has a knack for letting others sidetrack him.  He’s also, ironically, constantly frustrated by how broke everyone around him is. 

Craig’s deeper, defining desire is unclear.  It’s decidedly NOT a job, but it may be the same sense of respect from the community that a good job tends to bring–respect often achieved through having means, toughness, or both.  The movie doesn’t really concern itself with making his inner life clear, but it’s noteworthy that his climactic “growth” moment is beating up Deebo, winning his neighbors’ respect in the process. 

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

I’m kind of at a loss on this one.  Going by Craig’s speech above, I guess it’s someone who “plays” in a world that demands a near impossible standard of serious focus and effort, upon penalty of death?  

Basically, if your environment is menacing enough, anyone who’s at all human is suddenly “slacking.”

Could anyone other than a White Black dude pull off slacking in this story world?

Most if not all men in this world have a little slacker in them, which is nice to see.  The local pastor has a relatable taste for weed and sex.  Minor Mexican characters have clear joie-de-vivre, especially when it comes to lacing weed.  Even Craig’s dad has enough sense to come home and indulge in some TV when he gets injured at work.  

As usual, it’s the women who get the short end of the stick.  Every female character either studies or works or otherwise has her life together.  The only exception? Felisha (of “Bye, Felicia!” fame), an addict who has gone on to become one of the most derided and mocked characters in cinema history. I mean, goddamn Smokey of all people feels justified in telling her “to borrow a job, with your broke ass.” 

Felisha doesn’t fare well even when compared to the other drug-addict in the film, a male who is at least shown to be resourceful and somewhat witty.  She’s decidedly pathetic, on the receiving end of everyone’s scorn (as well as Deebo’s violence, which btw no seems to give a fuck about). And like I said, this includes the audience’s scorn: thirty years later, people even disrespect the real-life actress who played her.  Rough.

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement?

Friday unambiguously makes the point that slacking is not a viable option in this world, but it also depicts slackers through a funny, loving lens. And on this Friday, at least, they all get away with it. 

I’m gonna say yes, it approves of slacking, and longs for a world that nurtures it.

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

In one word, violence.  Our slackers’ two main antagonists, Deebo and Big Worm, both use violence as their main calling card.   These are the guys you “can’t play” with for fear of your life. 

More broadly, you could say the socioeconomic forces that have made this neighborhood a pressure-cooker where slacking and/or “playing” is lethal.  I feel like a bummer writing this.  Ice Cube wants this to be a JOYFUL movie breakdown, and I’m failing him. 

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Chris Gardner’s work-humper take

“What on earth is this man doing, asking the women in his life for money?  Does he have no sense of manhood?  Has he at least tried selling his blood yet?  And why hasn’t he just marched into the financial sector and befriended some bankers?  

Come to think of it, why haven’t they all?  If the whole neighborhood just showed up downtown with a little eagerness and a commitment to never take bathroom breaks, I’m sure those nice white bankers would gladly give them all internships.  No one would be spooked and call the cops or defund public transit or expertly lay out a highway to make access to downtown harder for them.  I’m certain of it.”

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

First, there’s the cartoonish treatment of inner-city struggles and violence.  For example, the slapstick botched drive-by attempt on Craig and Smokey (followed by how casually Smokey patches things up with Big Worm in the morning).  It’s over-the-top unrealistic in the way only 90’s movies dared to be.  

My normal reaction would be to condemn a film for “making light” of these issues, to the point that I would have found it, to put it bluntly, minstrel-ish.  But after reading Ice Cube’s stated desire to show a more joyful side of the hood, I’ve come to appreciate this tone choice as in line with Tricia Hersey’s take on the importance of dreamspace (I swear I’ll do a more involved breakdown of this soon). This movie serves as an exercise in carving out joy and imagination in difficult circumstances, instead of being spiritually beat down by them.  

I also want to highlight the decision to have Craig and Smokey spend the whole film either at their homes or on the stoop.  Though they scheme non-stop about their next move, they never make a move.  The story comes to them.  Friday figured out how to make passivity interesting and entertaining.  

(I also appreciate that, despite the literally life-or-death deadline they’re under, our guys make time to chase women.  Tricia Hersey would be proud of this commitment to a little pleasure, even in the face of death itself.)

Cinematography / Camera use / Color / Mise-en-scéne

Visually, this film has a bright, cheery color palette, almost like a typical 90’s/2000’s music video.  It may just be a nod to LA’s bright color palette, but it definitely adds to the movie’s “lighthearted” “dreamspace” quality.

Editing / Pacing

Sound / Music

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave behind or improve?

Keep

• The contradictions and nuances of its film world.   It’d be easy to cast our slacker’s world as cartoonishly work-humping.  It’s more interesting to put them in a world that cares for them, yet feels the need to put immense pressure on them because they see it as a matter of survival.  

• Friday’s ambitions to innovate on genre, in its case pushing back against “hood film” bleakness by committing to staying light-hearted even when depicting the worst situations. 

  • Since deciding to go down the route of an immigrant slacker film, I see our film as doing the same in regards to typical immigration films and, more broadly, neorealist gritty-poverty films.  Maybe not in the main ways this film does, since it enjoyed an actual budget to control things like color palette, but emulating its more accessible choices. For example, breaking the fourth wall every once in a while for comedic effect.

Leave

The punching down.  I refuse to have a Felisha character whose actor gets shit on thirty years down the line.

If nothing else, Friday shows the interesting possibilities for genre innovation that arise when you lean with gusto into a specific community or identity, as opposed to trying to make everything “universal” and commercially viable.  Respect.

Next up: Slacker

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Clerks (I, II and III)

We’re throwing it back for this one!  Hat tip to for making me aware of this, the OG slacker film before the genre even existed.  It’s a relatively simple movie, yet one that has dramatically opened my mind to possibilities for what our own slacker film will be.  It’s a testament to how old movies can still contain variations and themes that feel fresh and exciting almost a century later. 

The basics

Release year:  1932

Premise:  A Parisian street tramp tries to end his life by jumping into the Seine river but is saved and taken in by a “benefactor” who sets to reform him into a model bourgeois citizen.

Auteur: Jean Renoir, the first filmmaker to be labeled an “auteur” and still one of the all-time greats.   The few other films of his I’ve seen all have a calming “day at the park” kind of leisurely feel to them.   Not exactly slacker, but nonetheless a nice antidote to work-humper brain. 

Notable characters:

• Boudu, the tramp and, for our purposes, “slacker.” 

• Eduoard Lestingois, the benefactor.  Someone who, whether he ultimately means well or not, has a penchant for performing comfortable martyrdom and self-congratulating as he does it.

• Emma, Eduoard’s wife who despises Boudu yet deep down has the hots for him. (This is revealed in a rape-turned-love scene. Yikes!)

• Chloe Anne Marie, the housemaid, Eduard’s concubine, and Boudu’s bride once he becomes fully “tamed.”

Meet the slacker:  Boudu

If we’re being picky, I’m not sure “slacker” is the most accurate term to describe Boudu (even if he doesn’t display great work ethic).  He’s more of a brute, a “force of nature” who isn’t used to living in polite society.  We can still treat him as part of the archetype–a (non-violent, mostly harmless) outsider who is unconcerned or unengaged with the rules of his society.  

My favorite trait of his, contrasted with other slacker characters, is his abrasiveness.  Your typical slacker may flake on you, but they’re funny and even pleasant to be around.  Boudu is a menace who complains about his host’s cooking, spits out their wine, and cucks his own benefactor with both his wife AND his mistress.  He’s the very picture of ungratefulness (or, you could say, self-respect in his refusal to kow-tow), annihilating society’s expectation for how the destitute are supposed to behave toward those “helping” them.

Did Renoir strike a nerve with this subversion?  Police had to be called to several screenings to quell audience riots.  That’s how you know you’ve got an innovative character archetype.  

His world: affluent, polite Paris

Boudu’s world doesn’t hump work like American-fare slacker film settings, but it does hump status through social signaling, and humps it hard.  As the Lestingois try to reform Boudu, they emphasize things like dress, a proper shave, and shining your shoes before you go out in the street.  It’s a world that, even if it doesn’t work people  to the bone, is spiritually exhausting enough to drive Boudu “back to the waters” of his old life. 

(The literal translation of the French title is “Boudu Saved from the Waters,” which I find more evocative–it makes me think of “less evolved” life forms emerging from water to land)  

Another fascinating wrinkle:  when this world pressures slackers to conform, it doesn’t bully and insult them a-la Clerks.  It takes on the soothing voice of a savior and calls it altruism to raise its own status (note how the minute Edouard saves Boudu, his friends are running to secure him an award for his valor).  This condescending, hypocritical dynamic rings true today, and I love that this film puts it on blast.

What does our slacker want and what’s in the way? (defining desire vs. opposing force)

Hard to say.  He starts the film attempting suicide after losing his dog, but minutes after he’s saved he seems happy to milk his benefactors for a comfortable life.  Yet after achieving that, he capsizes a boat at his own wedding and escapes back to life as a beggar.  This could be one of those “he wanted what he had all along” tales. 

Either way, Boudu isn’t meant to be a deep character study and Robert McKee wasn’t yet around to browbeat writers, so it’s possible Renoir didn’t give Boudu a consistent desire.  If I had to guess at one,  it’d be the freedom and comfort of not having to bend to other’s expectations, his suicide attempt a momentary lapse of grief and, ironically, ungratefulness for the the joys he enjoyed as a tramp.  

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

Someone who doesn’t care to understand or navigate the unspoken rules of social etiquette and niceties.  In extreme cases like Boudu’s, someone boorish and menacing to polite society.

While slackers in this world aren’t industrious (Boudu is a terrible bookstore worker), neither are non-slackers (seems like a great world in that sense), so “laziness” is NOT core to Boudu’s definition of a slacker.   

Could anyone other than a White dude pull off slacking in this story world?

No.  Not only are the film’s women absolutely prisoner to expectations of social etiquette, they also seem to do all of the actual work. Chloe’s always doing housework, and Emma actually tries to run the bookshop while Edouard gives away books.  This is a film from the 1930’s, and it has bigger issues anyway (read: rape-turned-desire moments).  Let’s move on.

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement? 

I don’t think it approves or disapproves.  It just shows two different worldviews clashing and going back their separate ways without overtly romanticizing or condemning either.

On the one hand, it’s hard to see it as endorsing Boudu’s way of life: he did try to kill himself, after all, and he’s not exactly an aspirational character otherwise.  It also mocks Boudu’s benefactors, but doesn’t fully caricature them into full-blown villains.  Edouard, Emma, and Chloe are highly hypocritical and self-indulgent, but you get a sense that deep down they mean well and are doing the best they can.  

My kind of film: no heroes or villains, just flawed humans.   

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

Given the above, I’d say the folly of trying to force your way of life on others, especially through “generosity” or “manipulative charity.” This 1930’s slapstick film is an unexpected ancestor to critics of capitalist philanthropy.  

It also goofs a TON on bourgeois etiquette, so if you want to count that as its enemy, I won’t argue with you.  

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Matthew McConaughey’s work-humper take

“Time to step up and take the leap, amigo!  Remember, this is YOUR life.  No one else’s.  So it's high time you start livin' it the way YOU damn well please.  No more settling.  You know there’s MORE for you–romance, wealth, respect–and let me tell ya, it's all waiting just beyond that leap.

Hold up, hold up!  Boudu, what IN THE WORLD are you doin' in that river?  Mon frère, I was speaking metaphorically! The leap I'm talkin' about is paying me a few thousand bucks and, you know, learnin’ some power poses and affirmations and shit like that.  Someone get this guy a towel.”

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Cinematography / Camera use / Color / Mise-en-scéne 

Editing / Pacing

Sound/Music

I can’t overemphasize how exciting I find the archetype of an “aggressively ungrateful” slacker–someone who actively pokes their finger in workhumpers’ eyes.  There’s a tiny bit of that in Cheech and Chong, but Boudu took it to level 11.  

Beyond that, the film’s use of telephoto shots stuck out to me, especially given how old this movie is.  It’s not really a “slacker” technique.  The opposite, actually…it gives shots a more serious, documentary, and tragic feel.  Within a movie that’s a goofy comedy, there were certain moments (right before Boudu attempts suicide, the boating accident at the end) where Renoir seemed to want a little more gravity and  empathy.  It’s useful to note that telephoto shots are how he achieved it.

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave behind or improve?

I already wanted our slacker to be someone who society would never tolerate slacking.  After watching Boudu, I know I want her (yes, looks like it’s going to be a “her”...I’m excited to share a treatment with you soon!) to, on top, act unapologetic to the point of being borderline unlikeable.  I read about the reactions to Renoir’s film and thought:  “my version of an Oscar is riots at the premiere.”

I also think the film’s “problematic benefactor” dynamic is relevant today, not to mention a very useful way to structure the story.  A lot of slacker films forego traditional protagonist-antagonist confrontations, but I think that A) I’m too attached to that structure/chickenshit to let it go, and B) we’re primed and due for a new exploration of this type of relationship.  

When I research for screenwriting, it’s always the unexpected movie I’ve never heard of and didn’t plan to watch that breaks the whole project open for me.  I’m very happy that Boudu cannonballed into my watch list.  

Next entry: Friday

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke

I was originally only going to watch Clerks I, but I’m so glad I went into all three films–there’s a whole world of fascinating virtues and flaws going on here.  If nothing else, CI-III serve as a catalog of the slacker genre’s core conventions, all while ultimately ceding to work-humper morality—a tragic flaw that, after you peel away the laughs, makes the trilogy feel somewhat self-loathing (though delivered with superior empathy and humor).  

I should warn you, given that CIII was a recent 2022 release: mad spoilers ahead.   Let’s dive in!

The basics

Release years:  1994, 2006, 2022

Premise:  Each film chronicles a day (several for CIII) in the life of two convenience store / fast food clerks as they annoy customers, discuss movies, play hockey on the store roof, and squirm through complicated romantic entanglements.

Auteur:  Kevin Smith, himself a convenience store clerk who filmed CI in his off hours with his childhood buddies, spawning a whole “Askewniverse” in the process. 

Notable characters:

• Dante Hicks, the conscientious but easily persuadable slacker

• Randall Graves, the more brazen slacker

• Jay and Silent Bob, the duo of whimsy parking lot drug dealers

• Veronica, Dante’s naggy “voice of reason” girlfriend (CI)

• Caitlin, Dante’s competing ex-gf (CI)

• Becky (played by Rosario Dawson), the mildly rebellious fast food manager reformed into being Dante’s wife (CII) and “voice of reason” from the afterlife (CIII)

• Emma, the more grating “voice of reason” fiancee who Dante cheats on with Becky (CII)

• Elias, their born again christian coworker (CII, CIII)

Meet the slackers: Dante and Randall

It feels weird to call Dante a “slacker” because he’s a fairly conscientious worker (“with serious periodic lapses,” a manager may say).  But he’s a slacker in his larger inability to “take charge of his life” and lift himself above what the trilogy (and most of society) considers a “low station.” 

Randall’s the brazen and (at least on the surface) empowered slacker–the one who proudly proclaims that he enjoys his lot, flicking his thumb at anyone who tries to shame him.  Of course, his vulnerable moments betray that he indeed feels bad about himself, which makes him complex and interesting.  

(You could say Jay and Silent Bob are also slackers, the variety that’s somewhat enterprising but only in socially unacceptable fields.  Unlike Dante and Randall, they’re blissfully oblivious to expectations or judgment.  I won’t focus on them because, despite their iconic status because, they’re bit characters in this film.) 

Their world: New Jersey (and all the Northeast US-ness that comes with it)

Especially in CI, you vividly sense the overall flavor and attitude of Northeastern Americans–one that, in my estimation, is stress-addicted and work-humping.  However, I can’t really say the specific setting played an active role in the story as an anti-slacker force or otherwise.  It just casts a shadow over the characters while lurking in the subtext.    

I do want to highlight an exception: the moments that feature old high school classmates of Dante and Randall reveling in the clerk’s failures, capturing the very American tradition of wanting to prove yourself to randoms from high school way too long into adulthood. (Extra points for making one of these a traumatized-kid-turned-vengeful-internet-millionaire, prescient of an archetype that torments us today.) 

What do our slackers want and what’s in the way? (defining desire vs. opposing force)

Unlike other slackers we’ve covered here, Dante and Randall’s desires (usually expressed only under psychological duress) are conventional. They want good jobs and to “leave a mark.”  This is the very tension that drives the trilogy:  slackers resisting the label, yet unable to shed it in a tragicomedy of inaction.  

What gets most in their way is their own their fear of making decisions and following through.  They also have secondary competing drives like friendship, camaraderie, and fun–objectively healthy desires that our slackers nonetheless resent in their down moments.   To the trilogy’s credit, the characters never “overcome” any of these “flaws.”

If you want to get really deep, the biggest desire underlying all films, attained by Dante only at death (never truly by Randall) is unconditional self-acceptance independent of one’s achievements or station.  I’d venture to say this is a desire we all universally share, which made this story feel especially poignant to me.

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

Using the trilogy’s own quotes, it defines a slacker as someone who settles for a job where they waste what was once “so much potential.”  Someone with lack of initiative, who talks but “never starts their life” because they’re “terrible at making decisions.” 

Interestingly, having a low-status job feels more core to the film’s definition of slacker than slacking at the job itself, although the film certainly depicts lots of the latter. 

Could anyone other than a White dude pull it off?  (or: did they have to do Rosario Dawson so dirty?)

While these films generally lack diverse casting, they go beyond that to unequivocally implying that no, someone who’s not a White dude cannot pull off being a slacker.   

First, there’s a glaring (if kinda funny) gag in CI where Dante’s love interest is engaged to an “Asian Design Major,” the inclusion of “Asian” meant to contrast with Dante’s lack of drive because, of course, anyone Asian is surely insanely industrious.  

(To 2022 Kevin Smith’s credit, CIII acknowledges what was problematic about the first films and tries to make up for it through self-referential, self-deprecating jokes about CI’s borderline racism and lack of diversity.  As far as mea-culpas go, it’s at least charming and entertaining.)

The films also HEAVILY utilize the woman-as-voice-of-reason trope (one that more seasoned critics of the genre have already noted), taking it to tragic extremes with Rosario Dawson’s Becky. You’ll note that Becky is in the same job and engages in the same “extracurriculars” that Dante does.  But while the film lets Dante be charming just as he is (though his philandering goes to arguably scummy extremes), it feels the need to make excuses for Becky.  

She’s not at this job by choice or character flaw: her dad got sick, so she put aside a presumably more prestigious career track to support him.  Her love for promiscuity is justified by a very serious political stance against romantic love and marriage (which  she immediately drops as soon as Dante proposes to her ).  Finally, the trilogy answers the question of what to do with her in CIII–will she accept Dante’s continued stagnation?–by killing her in the interlude and turning her into a ghostly “voice of reason” who scolds Dante in his visions.  

Could Becky have gotten by in the Askewverse if she was brazen about banging lots of dudes and having no ambitions beyond working dead end jobs with her friends, a-la Randall?  The masters of that world either didn’t think so or were too scared test the possibility.

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement?

No.  Clerks casts slackers in an empathetic and charming light, but ultimately buys into dominant culture’s mainstream framing of status and success.  

The protagonists voice this in their vulnerable moments (ex. Randall: “I wish I had a life worth fucking saving”) and the films force happy, tidy, endings where they achieve a version of “respectability.” Whether turning them into owners of the store in CII (right after the most bad-ass anti-careerist speech of the trilogy, no less) or granting Randall the prestigious side hustle of making movies into his 90s in CIII, the trilogy didn’t let its clerks find acceptance as employees with nothing else going on.  

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

The judgment and ostracism that society piles on people who take on “low station” jobs.  

While the trilogy never fully accepts these jobs as fine life choices, it reserves its harshest lens for assholes who punch down at those who take them. For all the disrespect that Randall throws at customers, they’re usually throwing a lot more his and Dante’s way.  (ex. “that’s why you’re jockeying a register at a fucking convenience store.”)

While this “enemy” isn’t necessarily central to the plot of the movies, it’s always simmering in the background and boils over into the clerks’ psyche in their moments of self-loathing.

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Gary Vee’s work-humper take

“I also used to grind away at a store.  Big whoop, cry me a river.  But you know what I DIDN’T do?  Play hockey and diddly-dance on the roof.  If I ever left my job, it was to HUSTLE my way away from that dump. And FORGET ABOUT banging my manager in the prep room.  Friends and sex?  Outta my face with that LOSER SHIT.”

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Camera use

Mise-en-scéne / Color

Editing / Pacing

Sound / Music

Like Cheech and Chong, these films are lush in non-sequitor skits which give the film a meandering, free-form feel.  However, Clerks sticks with discipline to cause-and-effect, setup-payoff plotting structures—it simply leaves space to fit adjacent, non-plot gags and pop culture debates.  Also notable: the films fulfill their plot without resolving their protagonists' established flaws (except perhaps in CIII, where they’re barely resolved, and only at death’s door). 

Beyond story and character, I enjoyed the inventive blocking of shots that sprung from constantly showing clerks doing non-work activities (reading the paper, playing cards, etc.) at their post.

Side rant: is it so bad if employees play games and read at their jobs?  Why the insistence of keeping a “ready” posture even when there’s nothing to do?  It reminds me of working at a restaurant where we were often empty (it was terribly run) and I liked to read while waiting for customers.  Even though I never failed to dutifully bus tables for whoever came in, there was always at least one narc coworker who complained.  It didn’t help that I made the reading extra cozy by helping myself to hot apple cider, but the point stands.  

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave behind or improve?

The main thing I love about these films is the introspection around what the “low status” label means and the inner torment it causes (I especially liked that CIII involves elder slackers reflecting on their life).  I’m definitely of the philosophical navel-gazing bent, so I wouldn’t be surprised if our slacker film has a similar element.

Slacker conventions aside, there is a ton to draw from Clerks as a master case in low-budget film techniques:

• The economical writing where, like a master short story author, Kevin Smith leaves the biggest events (Dante’s romantic entanglements, Becky’s death) in the backstory while still using them to impact the movie’s structure and rhythm.  This, in turns, allows for…

• The skillful use of one or two locations.  Kevin Smith puts on a clinic for how to give a single location multiple inventive visual treatments to keep things fresh and interesting.

  

  

  

• Great dialogue and a wealth of hilarious one-liners carrying the film.  Great writing doesn’t cost much.  

I’d love to discard the trilogy’s hedging on its support for slackers.  What if Clerks had fully embraced being a clerk (not an owner, not a clerk-filmmaker hybrid) as acceptable? What if Randall and Dante had come to sincerely, unabashedly enjoy their lives?  Why couldn’t that be OK?  

If we’re gonna bother creating a new slacker archetype, I don’t want to then apologize for it by having them find “respectability” as framed by work-humpers.  That’s my main pushback against an otherwise excellent entry in the genre’s canon. 

Next entry: Boudu Saved From Drowning  

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Office Space.

I must admit to watching this inaugural entry of the Cheech and Chong franchise with low expectations, only forcing myself to because they’re iconic slacker characters credited with establishing the stoner genre. Also, Cheech plays one of the only Hispanic/Latinx slackers I know, so I wanted to see how that influenced the archetype.  The scattered clips I had seen previously came off as basic sketch comedy, a-la Ernest or Mr. Bean, so I didn’t get my hopes up.  

I’m glad to report that I was wrong and came away from Up in Smoke impressed by its not-even-so-coded social commentary. Its portrayal of “slackers” challenges our culture more than other entries in the genre I’ve seen so far.  Either that, or I’m reading too much into a patchwork of bits that Tommy Chong himself said “doesn’t take a lot of brain.”

The basics

Release year:  1978

Premise:  Two southern Cali kindred spirits meet and get arrested for possession of marijuana, only to be released on the technicality that their judge is drinking vodka.  They form a band but, before they get much rehearsing in, set off on a quest to score pot that takes them on all sorts of misadventures. 

Auteurs:  Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin, with help from director Lou Adler’s very 70s camerawork.  The film brought to screen various of their “countercultural” comedy routines, which at the time were groundbreaking.  It’s amazing to think of today, but before Cheech and Chong no one was making mainstream entertainment aimed at stoners or “rock-and-roll kids.”  

Notable characters:

• Pedro de Pacas (Cheech), the Mexican-American stoner

• Anthony “Man” Stoner (Chong), the White rich-boy stoner

• Sgt. Stedenko, the hard-ass cop trying to bust them

• Jade East and Debbie, a pair of flighty women the guys pick up while smuggling pot into the US 

• Strawberry, Pedro’s ptsd-stricken cousin and drug connect

• Officer Gloria Whitey, the cool cop who lets Jade and her friends dip into confiscated drugs

Meet the slackers: Pedro, “ Man,” ...and basically every other non-cop

The film revolves around Pedro–an aspiring musician, broke even by the standards of his LA Mexican barrio–and “Man,” a privileged White hippie who recently abandoned his parent’s home.  Despite their different backgrounds, these two bond instantly over their common love for music and, above all, weed.   

While our heroes live in a society that overall rejects and persecutes them, their community of fellow stoners is surprisingly large.  In it, you could include almost every single non-cop character (and at least one of the cops).   It’s notable that, far from being lone misfits, they know a lot of like-minded people who are all together in conflict against more conservative, establishment forces.  Contrast this, for example, with how The Office’s Peter Gibbons is mainly solitary in his slacker beliefs.

What do our slackers want and what’s in the way? (defining desire vs. opposing force)

There’s a few ways to look at this.   On an external level, you have their desire for weed (the nominal engine of the story).  A layer below that, their desire for weed interferes with their desire to make music–a classic situation of “inner conflict.”  But, this being a stoner comedy and all, it’d be ridiculous to expect them to “overcome” their “internal flaw” of weed obsession.  

At the deepest level, I think what they really want is free self-expression, both in the form of music AND in exploring pleasures like weed and sex.  Their antagonist in this pursuit is a law enforcement outfit of repressed and reactionary officers obsessed with scoring a drug bust that will “take them right to the top [of their career.]”  

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms?

On the surface, Up in Smoke casts slackers as sloppy and clueless people (Pedro confusedly pisses into a hamper seconds after we meet him) who pursue desires like drugs and sex with self-destructive vigor.  But I think it’s more profound than that. 

Take, for example, the “naturalistic,” healthy sensibilities it assigns Man.  When we meet him, he’s being lambasted by his dad just as much for drinking a fruit smoothie as he is for being unemployed. He and Pedro are also partial to the arts, while their antagonists either hold or glorify military-adjacent professions.  

Finally, the slackers in the film are consciously and actively disdainful of authority (not clueless and unintentional menaces).  This is apparent in the glee with which Pedro fucks with the cops, for example by trolling them over their own intercom system.  These are people fully aware that they have a bone to pick with society’s institutions, even if you or I may not see how they go about it as constructive.  

With these extra layers, I see Up in Smoke defining a slacker more broadly as anyone who’s in any way “counterculture” and seen as deviant by established society: because of drug use, sure, but also because of the music they like, their religion, or their non-normative sexual/gender identity.  This last one surprised me the most (given that the film is from almost 50 years ago), but it’s right there in the guys’ winning battle of the bands performance.  While Pedro is dressed in a ballerina outfit, he sings these lyrics:

Daddy, he disowned me cause I wear my sisters clothes

He caught me in bathroom with a pair of pantyhose

My basketball coach, he done kicked me off the team

For wearing high heel-sneakers and acting like a queen

There are fans who interpret this scene as mocking 1970s rockstar fashion, basically Cheech and Chong joining in on punching down against people who dress like that.  But this song felt to me more like a fuck-you to the “daddy” and “basketball coach” elements in society, especially since it comes at the end of an entire movie’s worth of those archetypes persecuting Pedro and Man.

Could anyone other than a white dude pull off slacking in this story world?

Off the bat, duh: one of the two main slackers is Mexican-American.  But even beyond that, the film shows a very diverse community of slackers including women and Black characters (even if the depictions are thin and stereotypical).  Also, unlike in other slacker films, there’s no “voice of reason” character who’s friendly with the slacker but tries to get them to correct their ways (a character usually played by a woman).  In this film, the women are arguably even worse train wrecks than the lead males, and the film doesn’t apologize for them. 

I’m less enthusiastic about how Pedro’s heritage played (or more precisely didn’t) into the film. Beyond using it as a springboard for certain gags (his family self-reporting to La Migra in order to get a free ride to a wedding is hilarious), the film didn’t explore it much, even though it took time to show us Pedro and Man’s contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds. 

I guess that wasn’t the intent of these films, and getting too serious or heady about class/ethnic differences would have ruined what they were going for (I feel like I’m gonna be saying that a lot about every movie in these analyses).  

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

Beyond law enforcement, it’s the establishment’s rigid definition of “American normalcy,” which the film casts in opposition to everyone who doesn’t fit the mold.   An interesting moment is when the cops, to infiltrate the battle of the bands, arrest a group of Hare Krishna devotees and take their outfits to use as disguises.  That they see followers of eastern religion as blended with drug users and punk rockers betrays that their disdain isn’t for people breaking the law—it’s for anything that’s not “normative.”

(A couple of scholars take this further, saying the film holds “Whiteness” as the enemy and lays out the blueprint for its abolition.  If I’m reading too much into this movie, at least I’m not alone!) 

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement?

I have to say it “approves” of slackers, because it doesn’t hedge or attempt any sort of “redeeming” moment for them (it also relentlessly mocks non-slackers).   The film doesn’t get into WHY it approves, what positive “function” slackers serve, but I think its overall ethos is that there’s no reason to deprive people of the freedom to enjoy themselves and self-express however they see fit.

 At the same time, this is much more of a pure stoner movie than an “anti-job” one, as it doesn’t touch the matter of employment beyond a couple throwaway digs at the concept of having a job. 

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Grant Cardone’s work-humper take

“I also underestimated these guys.  I thought they were nothing more than stoner losers, until I saw their OBSESSION with weed. They hone in on it like attack dogs, baby! OBSESSION is the #1 INGREDIENT to success.  These young men could have a weed EMPIRE, as long as they cut their bandmates, hot girlfriends, family members–basically everyone they smoke weed with in the first place–out of their life.  NO WEED DISTRACTIONS, JUST WEED OBSESSION.”

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Camera use

Mise-en-scéne / Color

Editing / Pacing

Sound / Music

This is a sketch-driven movie, with very little plot even by slacker movie standards.  It contains none of the cause-and-effect, setup/payoff, or “character growth” narrative structures that classical Hollywood usually demands.  I wouldn’t say this is unique to stoner movies (countless comedies in the early 2000s dispensed with worrying about coherent plotting), but a story this unworried about linearity feels very slacker in spirit.  

Beyond that, the film has a very green color palette, with “natural” colors and textures often contrasted with more synthetic colors and rigid patterns on authority figures (parents, cops, etc.).  I doubt this was the first instance of using this contrast to separate free spirits from squares, but it’s cool to find this bit of “coding” early instances of the stoner genre. 

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave behind or improve?

Above all, I like that the film shows society’s aggressive intentional attempts to stamp out slackers.  The film’s antagonists are visibly, ideologically threatened by stoner culture (they'd make good Fox pundits today) which in my opinion makes them more interesting in their role than shitty bosses or dormant coworkers just going through the motions.

I likely won’t take the film's lead in its loose use of narrative–I think I’m too attached to cause-and-effect plots and enjoy the challenge of building them out.  I’d also like to do more character exploration and, it goes without saying, will want to hold higher standards in portraying the identities included.  It’s not the 70s anymore.    

But despite these “flaws,” don’t get it twisted:  this movie feels like one of the more radical, revolutionary pieces of film I’ve seen in a while. I did NOT expect to come away saying that.

Next entry: Clerks I, II, and III

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media’s “slacker” archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own.  Find our master list of entries here. 

Office Space is not technically the OG slacker film, and probably not the best one.  But it feels like the right one to start with, as it’s the most influential and meme’d movie about work disaffection (Elon Musk used it to dunk on an ex-employee, forgetting that the movie is a parody of people like him).  And people who’ve never seen it recognize its iconic printer destruction scene. 

If you can get past it’s 90s-ness (paper-thin female character, weird sexual moralizing, etc.), you have to appreciate its staying power in our culture.  Besides, legend has it that it single-handedly destroyed TGIFriday’s flair requirement for its employees.  So we owe it at least that bit of gratitude. 

The basics

Release year:  1999

Premise:  Left in a blissful state after his hypnotherapist dies mid-session, a corporate drone refuses to continue working.

Auteur:  Mike Judge (based on cartoon short, Milton)

Notable characters:

-       Peter Gibbons, the slacker

-       Bill Lumbergh, the dickhead boss

-       Joanna, the chain-restaurant waitress / love interest

-       Michael Bolton, Peter’s rap-loving sidekick

-       Samir Nagheenanajar, Peter’s talented, hard-working sidekick

-       Lawrence, Peter’s construction worker neighbor

-       Tom Smykowski, the obsolete colleague-turned-medical-lawsuit-plaintiff

-       Milton Waddams, the office weirdo/arsonist

Meet the slacker: Peter Gibbons

Peter, a disaffected and apathetic programmer at a dysfunctional tech firm (“every day is the worst day of my life, so today you are witnessing my worst day,” he tells his couples shrink, who can only answer “whoa, that’s messed up”).  He finally snaps after a botched hypnosis session with said shrink and starts blowing off his job without regard for getting fired. 

He's not special in his disaffection, as virtually all his peers are just as miserable at the job.  Everyone dreams of striking overnight fortune so that they never have to work again, whether through ingenuity (“Like that guy that invented the Pet Rock…the guy made a million dollars!”) or lucking into a juicy medical settlement. 

It’s worth mentioning that, despite everyone’s alienation, they still harbor a vigorously American disdain for those who don’t work and aren’t rich.  Ten minutes into the movie, the company is already getting ready to do layoffs, and one of Pete’s colleagues says, “I don’t want to stand in the unemployment line with these scumbags,” a sentiment that goes unchallenged for the rest of the film. 

What does our slacker want and what’s in the way? (defining desire vs. opposing force)

What sets Pete apart from his fellow salary drones is that he’s open about his desires to, in his own words, “do nothing.”  And of course, that he puts his feelings into inaction.  However, eventually it becomes clear that his deeper desire is to exact revenge on his company for treating his buddies unfairly (while also stealing himself enough wealth to do nothing). 

What gets in the way is the dysfunctional culture of his company, specifically embodied by his boss Bill Lumbergh.  He’s probably the most meme’d character from the movie, essentially the internet face of incompetent, insensitive, passive-aggressive bosses. 

How does the film define a “slacker” in broader terms (and could anyone other than a white dude pull it off)?

The film is narrow in this regard, stopping at the prototypical corporate office park chump at the mercy of bosses who’ve grinded him down to a husk of himself.  1999 was a BIG year for this character archetype, with Fight Club and American Beauty also coming out that year.  If these films didn’t invent it, they at least deeply carved it into our popular conscience. 

Beyond that archetype, Office Space’s sense of a slacker doesn’t extend to blue collar workers, for example.  It casts Pete’s construction worker neighbor as an unburdened, natural laborer who likes his existence, while Pete himself ends up at the same job as fantasy-fulfilment of true “honest” work.  The movie doesn’t entertain the possibility that construction workers suffer even worse abuses—not to mention probably heatstroke given the movie takes place in Texas.

There are other minor non-white-corporate-dude characters who you could say “dabble” in slacking, but they remain restrained.  Jennifer Anniston plays Joanna, a waitress who, despite quitting on her dickhead boss, serves as the voice of responsibility for Peter.  Samir, Pete’s Indian coworker, is convinced to carry out a white-collar crime, sure.  But he’s driven and hard-working even in executing it.

If either Joana or Samir pulled what Pete pulled, with the same nonchalant attitude, they would have been fired within the day.   Especially Samir, whose consultant-executioners made fun of his name while selecting him to be laid off.

Does the film “approve” of slacking?  Is it a broader anti-job statement? 

I don’t think so.  It obviously shows us slackers through an empathetic lens and uses their lashing out as a cathartic warning about the decay of our working culture.   But it morphs into a morality tale against trying to skirt work.  If it wasn’t for the deus-ex-machina ending where Milton sets the place on fire, Pete and friends would’ve been punished for trying to get retribution from their employer and cheat the system. 

It’s almost as if the movie’s telling us: “I’m letting these guys off because this is a comedy, but don’t try this at home.”  For all the anger that drove the film, in the end it takes most of it out on the poor printer and leaves the rest of the system untouched.

What does the film see as “the enemy” in broader terms?

Instead of our work culture per se, the real enemy here is broken meritocracies that don’t reward participants fairly.  Workplaces where performative do-nothings like Lumbergh (and, ironically, Pete himself after he starts slacking) get promotions while hard-working people who play by the rules get fired or exiled to the basement. 

As the ending implies, if we can fix or destroy these dysfunctional workplaces, one can find fulfillment through the right job. 

Walt Wiltman’s favorite line

Gary Vee’s work-humper take

“The moment I knew these guys were losers is when they managed to FUCK UP the virus that was gonna funnel the company’s money their way.   All that crying and whining, and they didn’t even have the HUSTLE to double-check their code?  I mean, COME ON.  Your dream isn’t worth shit if you’re not FIRED UP about the financial fraud you’re committing to seize it.  NO DAYS OFF: you must EAT, DRINK, AND BREATHE THE FRAUD.”

Are there any slacker-like innovations in the technique of the film itself?

Plot / Setting

Cinematography / Camera use / Color

Editing / Pacing

Sound / Music

Not much about this movie is unconventional in a technical sense.  I noticed visual motifs here and there that played with the drab repetitiveness of an office, though that’s been done for decades.  The color palate was bright and cheerful given the subject matter, presumably to make the movie work as a comedy. 

The one exception is the heavy use of aggressive gangster rap in the soundtrack to contrast with the stilted, passive, undignified niceties that Pete and his friends had to contort themselves into as part of their day-to-day.   That move feels overdone today, but Office Space is the first massively distributed instance of the technique that I can remember. 

What would I want to keep for our slacker film?  What do I want to leave behind or improve?

There’s not much I want to keep, and I mean that as a compliment of sorts—Office Space has been so thoroughly influential that everything about it has become basic-level “day one” stuff.

In the spirit of building on the foundation it laid, I’d like to critique our work culture more directly, not just dysfunctional workplaces as aberrations of an otherwise fine system. 

It’s disappointing that Peter’s most interesting feature, his desire to “do nothing,” turns out to be inconsequential and doesn’t get further explored by the film.  It would have been interesting to see him struggle with holding that desire while everyone around him condemned it, but I get that it would have been too heady for this movie, destroying its box office appeal.  

Luckily, we have no such aspirations for our film, and I have no issue sacrificing any (already low) chance at commercial viability to be more iconoclastic.

Next entry: Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke

Ah, the beloved slacker film.  I love slacker movies.  If you read this blog, I suspect you may also have a soft spot for them in your cold, barren, overworked heart. 

But!

Do you have the feeling that movie slackers are all very similar—i.e. mostly White dudes? (NOTE: after additional audience submissions, I must admit there are more examples of  Black male slackers than I thought.  We’ll see if my sense still holds for other identities). 

I started thinking about this after a few attempts to sell ad campaigns to clients who expressed fear of depicting Black or Latinx/o/a people taking it too easy, mindful of not feeding into the stereotype that they were “lazy.”  While this sentiment comes from a good place, it’s telling about who gets “permission” to slack in our collective imagination and who doesn’t. 

Which takes me back to slacker flicks.  While there are exceptions (Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, Friday, Half-Baked, possibly certain characters from White women-centered comedies I need to watch) most iconic, celebrated slackers in our media fit a very particular identity and experience.

Attempting a slacker film with a brand new archetype

I keep asking myself: who would America NEVER tolerate as a slacker?  I feel it in my bones that if the Big Lebowski were recast with an immigrant, brown-skin mother with a poor upbringing, it would be charred into a blacklist with the rage from all corners of our society.

I haven’t thought about this more than the above. I’m not sure what the ultimate taboo slacker archetype would be, or if you could bring it to life in a way that feels supportive as opposed to a stereotype-laden attack (Birth of a Nation, anyone?).  But I figure that taking this experiment on, and doing it publicly, is a great opportunity to:

1. Watch a ton of slacker movies, learn more about the archetype and genre conventions, and discuss them here with you

2. Reawaken my screenwriting muscle, which has atrophied over the last 5 years

First steps: diving into the slacker genre

I’ll be mainly focusing the next couple weeks-to-months on research and trying to flesh out the basic building blocks of what the story could be – main character, main foil, setting, “character arc” (if any), etc. As part of this, I’ll be doing periodic posts about seminal slacker films/characters, analyzing and discussing them here with you. 

I haven’t quite figured out the format for these, but for now I’m thinking of dividing them into an opening that’s focused on what the film says about slacking/slackers in society, and a back half with analysis that’s a bit more technical, for those of you (if there are any) interested in specific screenwriting and filmmaking craft—plotting, visual techniques, etc.

Feel free to send suggestions of what you’d like to see (or not see!) in these posts. 

How you can help

For now, my main need is help sourcing slacker movies!  Here’s a running list I have.  There’s no way I’ll get through all these before I start writing (nor should I) but I’m gonna try to watch a sizable portion.  I’m specifically interested in any films I might not know about that depict non-White, non-male slackers.  I’ve been googling a lot and haven’t found many at all.  (NOTE: I sent out a call for help on social media before posting this, and you’ve already helped uncover a few gems—thank you!)

I also made a shorter list of what I’m dubbing “work-humper” films—inspirational movies that sell the story of people (especially non-White-or-male) pulling themselves up by the bootstraps through sheer grit and hard work.   The Pursuit of Happyness, which I’ve already dunked on in this venue, is a perfect prototype.  I’m interested in watching some of those as antitheses, to find conventions that we can subvert with our new slacker film. 

Other than that, any initial ideas or thoughts you have burning in your heart about what slacker characters or settings you’d love to see are incredibly welcome.

So, when can we expect a draft?

Lol. I haven’t set any deadline or timeline, nor do I plan on doing so for now.  I’ve been jazzed about this idea for a while and have faith that casual progress can get us somewhere good eventually. 

It’s a slacker movie and this is a blog about liberating ourselves from workaholic attitudes—what did you expect?

I thank you in advance for your contributions, ideas, criticism, and company!

PS. If any of you out there are HIGHLY interested in screenwriting or filmmaking and this sounds like something you’d like to collaborate on more deeply, email me.  Projects are always more enjoyable (and better) done with a buddy or two.