The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Slacker
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this movie, they just turn on the camera and let things happen in front of
it.” So when I started shooting Clerks, it was with Stranger Than Paradise in
mind, in terms of the mise-en-scène approach.
Circling back to Slacker, one film critic wrote that the film was an
“anthology of eccentricities without a guide or even sort of a table of
contents.” To me, it’s one of the few American films that consciously
and determinedly has no plot. Linklater doesn’t come back to characters,
and certain things aren’t even explained, like a character’s black
eye. Were you prepared for this by the review you read? What was
that experience like?
Smith: I was used to watching pretty mainstream stuff at that point. So
here’s a movie, kind of looks like a movie, and we’re watching it in a movie
theater, and it’s populated by nonactors who are acting. I was not prepared
going in. It was one of the most wonderful and pure filmgoing experiences
I’ve ever had.
When I was sitting there, I wasn’t prepared for it at all. But it was amazing,
because it was such an insane, wonderful, and fresh experience. But at the
same time, the film was very mundane. It’s not like Richard Linklater took
us on a journey to space, but he might as well have because the people were
very strange. The idea, the whole idea behind the movie, was very strange
but insanely liberating for me and very inspiring. Because it was like, “So
you can make a movie about anything, apparently.” You don’t have to adhere
to the three-act structure, or it doesn’t really have to be a story. When I was
writing Clerks, I was very aware of the fact that I didn’t need a plot. There is
no plot. It’s just a series of stuff that kind of happens there, loosely hung on
the framework of a dude who doesn’t want to be at work.
A lot of the pieces first written about the film tried to describe or
define the title—what is a slacker? What did that term mean to you
at the time?
Smith: The only other place I had heard it was in Back to the Future, where
Marty McFly is referred to as a slacker and his father is referred to as a slacker.
And then in Back to the Future, Part II, a teacher fires a shotgun at some offcamera
hooligans and screams, “Eat lead, slackers!” So that was the only other