Read an Excerpt
Richard Linklater
By David T. Johnson
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03692-7
Chapter One
Time Is a Lie
Here are three moments from three different films, all directed by Richard Linklater:
1. In Paris, at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a group of journalists has gathered to hear a young writer discuss his book This Time, a semiautobiographical romance about a woman he met many years ago in Vienna. After deflecting a few questions on "what really happened," the writer describes his next project, a novel about a middle-aged man who, thinking about his life at present, suddenly finds himself pulled into the past, to a night in his adolescence. But this is not memory so much as two "nows," both experienced at once; as the writer explains, "it's obvious to him that time is a lie ... it's all happening all the time, and inside every moment is another moment, all ... happening simultaneously." Just then, a figure steps out from behind a bookcase: it is the woman from Vienna, nine years later.
2. In Colorado, a Mexican immigrant's husband has been injured on the job, and to make up for his lost earnings, she has returned to the slaughterhouse she had walked out of only months earlier, hoping never to return. To be rehired, she has submitted to degrading sexual encounters with the foreman, who now leads her, both dressed fully in white, through an industrialized killing floor, a Fordian nightmare of gears, levers, blood, and viscera that surround them while he shows her where she will be working. As she takes her position, her eyes, just above her white mask, well with first one tear and then another, the only evidence of emotion she permits herself on this, the first of many such shifts to come.
3. Somewhere in New England, at an apartment retrofitted for band practice, a group of junior high students plays a classic rock song—AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll)." Unlike the world it describes, however, their immediate concern is less about paying one's dues and more about their solos, led by a manic lead singer—their former schoolteacher, who faked his way into the classroom and was subsequently fired, but not without igniting in them a passion for music. And now, in the after-hours space outside of the official school, the students play on, having a good time as they await the chorus and, very likely, finding themselves in sympathy with at least one of the lines their teacher sings—that creating such music, even in a friendly atmosphere so unlike that of the original song, is "harder than it looks."
Many readers have likely already recognized these films, all released within a three-year period: Before Sunset (2004), Fast Food Nation (2006), and The School of Rock (2003), respectively. On first examination, they are quite different projects: Before Sunset is an unlikely sequel to Before Sunrise (1995), both of them small-scale romantic melodramas; Fast Food Nation is as straightforward a critique of American industry (here, fast food) as has been put on screen in recent years; The School of Rock is a studio comedy that features Jack Black. Whereas other directors have moved from project to project without a clear pattern in mind, Linklater's work offers a particularly satisfying trajectory in this regard, with the choices in subject matter as surprising and interesting as the eventual films into which they are made. Consider that The Newton Boys (1998) followed subUrbia (1997), or Tape (2001) followed Waking Life (2001), or Bad News Bears (2005) followed Before Sunset, and it can become tempting to view the films as not having any discernible relation to one another other than the fact that they all share the same directorial credits in their title sequences.
Of course, this defiance of a basic pattern of authorship fits well with contemporary film studies, which tends to view director studies with skepticism, despite the enormous amount of work that continues to be produced in this area. One reason is simply the sense that any film is a collective venture, and certainly, Linklater has had his share of talented collaborators over the years, including writers, production designers, cinematographers (Lee Daniel has shot seven of his films), editors (Sandra Adair has edited all of them since Dazed and Confused [1993]), music supervisors, performers (Ethan Hawke has appeared in six of his films), producers (Anne Walker-McBay, John Sloss), and so many other above- and below-the-line workers who, quite simply, helped make these films happen. But skepticism toward director studies goes beyond acknowledging fruitful working relationships; it has a much longer, more complex critical history. Early director studies drew heavily on Romanticism, from which many of our associations about the individual artist spring, and this reliance on a format more suited for authors (or auteurs) distorted other subjects, including, in addition to the collaborative nature of a film's creation, the industrial contexts that affect production and reception, the historical moments in which films are made and seen, and the economic and social conditions, as well as the ideologies, that cinema both reveals and obscures. Yet director studies, perhaps more than any other area of film studies, have never gotten as far from its early days as it would have liked; this volume is unlikely to convince readers otherwise, given its chronological structure and interest in articulating some shared preoccupations among the films (ones that themselves draw on Romanticism). That said, many writers who reflect the more recent concerns I just outlined have informed my thinking, directly and indirectly, in the preparation of this text. (I should also say at the outset that I avoid more extensive production history because of another book published during the writing of this one, Alison Macor's Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas, an invaluable resource on Linklater's career and Austin film culture more generally.)
When it comes to longer critical studies about Linklater, however, sustained writing on the director has been infrequent. Thomas A. Christie's Cinema of Richard Linklater, the only existing book-length study, mostly restricts itself to basic narrative surveys and summaries of reception in the popular press, though a conclusion productively draws out some of the films' larger concerns, including "the search for the authentic," a "fascination with society and social mores," "the potentially dehumanising aspects of modern society," and the "theme of journeying" (184–95). Many essay-length pieces, though not as extensive as a book-length treatment would permit, have shed light on the filmmaker's work. Within academic film studies, both Lesley Speed and Mary Harrod have written ambitious career-study essays, and other scholarly treatments of individual films, also well worth the reader's time, have been penned by Robin Wood, Steven Shaviro, Markos Hadjioannou, Lynn Turner, Jon Radwan, Glen Norton, and others. In a book written for a more general audience, Derek Hill devotes a chapter to Linklater, seeing him as "the cautiously optimistic Truffaut from Austin" (40), and some excellent writing about Linklater has emerged online: Brian Price's profile on the Senses of Cinema "Great Directors" database, for example, provides an engaging reflection on his work, including a longstanding interest in "idleness," and the online film journal Reverse Shot, in the summer of 2004, held a "Linklater Symposium" that included many provocative short pieces on the films and one of the best longer interviews with Linklater to date. Also, now that so much print has been digitized, readers can access material previously available only to local publications, and the online archive of Linklater's hometown arts weekly, the Austin Chronicle (edited by Louis Black, who appears in a couple of Linklater's films), provides reviews and interviews going back several years. Still, despite the intelligence with which these examples and others have approached Linklater's work, longer studies have been virtually nonexistent. Might the unusual pattern among the films be the reason for this absence? Is it that Linklater himself has been ambivalent about cinema studies and the academy in the past? Or is it just that cinema studies quite often lags behind films with which it is contemporary, so that critical volumes tend to emerge only after a definable moment seems to have passed—a movement's dissipation, a director's falling out of or coming back into favor, or some other intuitive shift? Whatever the reasons for this absence, this study hopes to take part in a longer serious conversation about Linklater's films that recent writing suggests is only just beginning.
One important facet of that conversation, as it has emerged thus far, has been its investment in taking the aesthetic experience seriously, and in that respect, this book is no exception. Although one finds this same impulse in the writing surrounding almost any director, in Linklater's case, I suspect that part of the reason for this interest is that the films themselves so often encourage deep intellectual engagement with—and a healthy curiosity about—art, books, films, music, and other texts, from anyone, not just a professor in a particular academic discipline. (Lesley Speed has discussed this aspect of Linklater's films at length ["Possibilities"].) In this way, they resonate with humanities education more generally, at a time when university budgets are shrinking and humanities courses are often the first to go—because, after all, what do they do? One could ask the same of many of Linklater's protagonists, who are nonetheless deeply and thoughtfully engaged with their world and the issues they are most passionate about. This study is therefore partly about aesthetic pleasure and locates itself among much recent writing about cinema that does not regard such pleasure with suspicion—or at least as more complex than it has often been considered. I am thinking of cinephilia, that impulse that animates so much past and current writing about film, in the work of authors who appear in this volume and those who do not (and even those whose work I have yet to discover). Furthermore, the origins of my approach might be put even more directly: I like these movies, and I have enjoyed writing about them. Robin Wood, in his essay on Before Sunrise, describes wanting to "shar[e] my delight in it with others" (318), and my own impulse with these films is very similar. My hope is that this text will find readers accustomed to more specialized academic discourse and readers who are not—and that both will benefit from this extended investigation.
When considering what aspects these films have in common, certainly one of their most prominent features is a self-consciousness about their own influences. The films frequently make both direct and indirect references to a number of filmmakers associated with the arthouse cinema tradition, ones whose work has been screened over the years by the Austin Film Society, an organization that Linklater helped found in 1985 that is still very active in the Austin community. The influence of Robert Bresson, for example, is one Linklater has acknowledged, a connection not difficult to make to his second feature film, Slacker (1991) (Bresson's L'argent [1983] is often cited). Other international influences would include Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chantal Akerman, to name a few. And like many American directors of Linklater's generation, one sees the influence of New Hollywood in his work: George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) hover over The Newton Boys; Bad News Bears is a remake of the 1976 film directed by Michael Ritchie; Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973) inflect Dazed and Confused; and Martin Scorsese's influence is also felt, whether in the specific allusion to American Boy (1978) in Waking Life, where Steven Prince retells a story from Scorsese's film, or Dazed and Confused, where the slow-motion sequence of Wooderson, Pink, and Mitch entering the Emporium to Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" recalls Johnny Boy's slow-motion entrance to the Rolling Stone's "Jumping Jack Flash" in Mean Streets (1973). Linklater also cites the importance of American avant-garde cinema in his work. Not only has he talked about the influence of James Benning on It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1989), but he has also discussed Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964) as the template for the opening of The School of Rock, a connection that arthouse cinephiles no doubt find humorous, given its preceding Dewey's failed stage dive. In this way, Linklater's richly allusive style takes pleasure in mixing, matching, and "remixing" the various cinematic influences that he and his collaborators have absorbed over the years.
Such allusions extend outward as well, into philosophy (Slacker, Waking Life), art (Before Sunrise), and especially literature. James Joyce, for example, is a figure frequently mentioned in relation to the films, given Linklater's repeated fascination with single-day narratives, much like Ulysses (a book read aloud from in Slacker). Also, as many commentators have pointed out, Before Sunrise takes place on June 16, or Bloomsday, the day on which the narrative of Ulysses takes place. Beyond Joyce, the characters of Linklater's films are often well read. Consider the way books inform Jesse and Celine's romance, whether in the initial exchange at the outset of Before Sunrise, where she reads a collection of Georges Bataille's writing, as he reads Klaus Kinski's memoir All I Need Is Love, or in the location of Before Sunset's initial reunion, Shakespeare and Company, which served as a hub of modernism (and which also originally published Ulysses). Jesse, himself a writer, also references Thomas Wolfe in the opening of that film—specifically, Wolfe's note to the reader, where he discusses the blurred line between fact and fiction for any writer. But Jesse and Celine are not the only characters for whom literature plays an important role. The protagonist of It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books leaves the library with a copy of Cesare Pavese's Burning Brand tucked under his arm; Louis Mackey's professor character in Slacker is surrounded by books when he turns a potential home invasion into an opportunity for Socratic dialogue on the state of Austin and capitalism more generally; Mike consoles himself after the fight with Cliff in Dazed and Confused by comparing his escapades to Hemingway's (and the fact that, when biographers note that he was involved in a fight, they rarely cite the winner); Waking Life is loaded with literary references, among others; a budding writer's obsession with Keats's literary urn—and a real one—informs Me and Orson Welles (2009); and many of the other films present characters who read or indirectly make reference to other texts.
Linklater's films also share a more general kinship with other previous literary figures. In fact, when casting about for other influences, I found myself returning to an unlikely one: Henry David Thoreau (the casting metaphor here perhaps all too apt). Putting aside the obvious caveats in such a comparison—the different historical moments, the extreme contrasts between writing journal entries by a pond versus marshaling ten, twenty, one hundred people to create a single scene in a film—an interesting thread runs between them, a set of concerns that is central to this text's investigation of Linklater's films, which might be put as a fascination with temporality, particularly in attending to the present, even if such attendance is impossible to sustain, potentially naive, and, at times, even dangerous. Thoreau captures the possibilities a present temporality might offer in Walden, with the writer noting, "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line" (10). For Thoreau, of course, this meant a meeting with the divine: "God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us" (67). While Linklater's work is hardly religious in a traditional sense, it is very much interested in the experience of temporality, for both characters and spectator, and in particular in what it means to inhabit the present, whether beneficial or destructive, elusive or inevitable. In order to explore such ideas, time becomes less rigid in these films (Christie notes the "temporal pliability" of both Before films [127]), even as they make use of traditional narrative structures. One finds this expressed directly on occasion, as when Jesse confesses that "time is a lie" or when Linklater's character from Waking Life describes a dream encounter with Lady Gregory, Yeats's patron, who explains that time is really just "one instant":
Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, "Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?" And we're all saying, "No thank you—not just yet." And so time is actually just this constant saying "no" to God's invitation. I mean, that's what time is—I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's 2001, you know—I mean there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in. And then she tells me that actually this is the narrative of everyone's life—that, you know, behind the phenomenal difference, there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from the "no" to the "yes." All of life is like, "No thank you, no thank you, no thank you." Then, ultimately, it's, "Yes, I give in. Yes, I accept. Yes, I embrace." I mean, that's the journey—I mean, everyone gets to the "yes" in the end, right?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Richard Linklater by David T. Johnson Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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