INTRODUCTION

The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973) and Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) make an unlikely double bill, which nevertheless serves to frame Linklater in relation to the history of American independent filmmaking and to consider the evolution of a prominent trope in its history, one that links his cinema to that of Hal Ashby. Both films follow characters that have just met, choosing to disembark a train and killing time overnight in a city, while making tentative connections as they move toward inexorable separation. In The Last Detail Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Mule (Otis Young) interrupt their mission to take Meadows (Randy Quaid) to prison, while Jesse (Ethan Hawke) persuades Céline (Julie Delpy) to pause her journey home. They each play out as interludes of flânerie between trains and narrative resolution—in Washington, New York and Boston, and in Vienna, respectively. Both disembarkations create, as Gilles Deleuze would have it, intervals “between the action and the reaction” which are occupied, instead, by affection: affection-images. For Deleuze:

In discussions of Ashby, this interval has been likened to “spiritual drift.” In the films of Linklater, meanwhile, I have argued it assumes the “form and content of slack.” The interval is, as Céline expresses in her soliloquy in Before Sunrise, a “little space in-between”:

Importantly, however, 1970s spiritual drift and 1990s slacking are not the same, which results in their respective trains heading, one might say, in opposite directions: Ashby’s toward defeat and Linklater’s away from it.