Many of Richard Linklater’s films unfold like roadmaps, traveling through different landscapes and drawing assiduous attention to empty streets, apartment rooms, and urban architecture. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that we encounter the filmmaker himself in the first minutes of his cult film Slacker (1991) on the back seat of a bus, on the road and half asleep. After a few seconds, we see him slowly waking up, while a landscape of flickering neon billboards rushes up outside the large windows. The speed of the bus generates a feeling of fleetingness, fostering a scenery of blurry facades and urban textures. Linklater, whose character is later credited as “should have stayed at bus station,” gazes at the motels and fast-food advertisements that are flashing by, his backpack laid down next to his seat, on his way to a yet unknown destination. After exchanging a bus for a cab, he starts a semi-philosophical monologue on how taking a possible “route” or “direction” always precludes taking others, how we always miss out on other “places” that conjure up entire alternative realities. This verbalized stream of thought foreshadows the structure of the film, which offers one such a route across Austin, Texas from dawn to dawn, in which the viewer hovers over its streets and parking lots in a nomadic fashion. Slacker maps out many of the interlaced and molecular lives that compose this college town, presenting a collection of tiny little universes, yet associates them with one another via the unpredictable movements of an itinerant and swerving camera.

Linklater’s persona in Slacker could be taken as a metonym for a larger population of “drifting” youngsters, whose walks of life have turned into directionless wanderings. The film has often been discussed as mapping a morally bankrupt MTV generation of disconnection and moral relativism, whose members were young in the 1990s and whose attitude was one of sarcastic consumerism and ironic distance. These twentysomethings, or slackers, as many critics wrote at the time, had lost their belief in conservative middle-class values, in those master narratives and capitalist promises that did not bring them the same economic affordances as their parents benefitted from, and therefore exchanged political commitment for sarcastic disengagement.