Grok My Enthusiasm (16)

By: Brian Berger
April 27, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

Sly and audacious still, Richard Linklater’s Slacker (filmed summer 1989, Austin premier July 1990, national release July 1991) is especially impressive in its examinations of historical memory. Take “Bush Basher” Ron Marks, seated beneath separate portraits of Engels and Marx, for example, caught mid-rant on the erstwhile “mandate” of President Bush after the 1988 election. Marks is correct — and so echoes Gil Scott-Heron’s 1980 anti-Reagan protest, “B Movie,” which begins “Mandate my ass!” one wonders. In real life, Marks was then bassist for The Texas Instruments, one of the era’s greatest political and poetic rock bands, so a knowing homage is certainly possible.

Later, a bookstore denizen and “JFK Buff” (John Slate) clad in a Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald t-shirt recognizes a former classmate (Sarah Harmon) browsing Mark Lane’s Rush To Judgment and volubly engages her with assassination lore. Lane, it will be recalled, was the attorney for Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and his four-hundred-plus page work, published in August 1966, a best-selling rejoinder to the Warren Commission’s massive but demonstrably flawed report. While subsequent revelations have expanded our understanding of the JFK cover-up — especially the FBI’s and the CIA’s myriad pre-assassination involvements with Oswald — Lane’s work remains important and the movie is wise to reference this ineradicable Texan scar. Note also: Myron Farber’s 1982 true-crime book Somebody Is Lying: The Story of Dr. X, its bright-yellow-and-black dustjacket too suggestive of Don DeLillo’s 1988 Kennedy assassination novel Libra to be “coincidence.”

Perhaps Slacker’s greatest sequence stars University of Texas philosophy professor Louis Mackey as “The Old Anarchist.” Walking with his doting daughter (Kathy McCarty), they pass a shoplifter being accosted outside a grocery store (“Well, I’m always glad to see any young person doing something” Mackey quips) and a Ron Paul Libertarian for President panel truck before returning home to find a burglar inside. Mackey disarms the youth with charm and a disquisition on the young anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in September 1901; Guy Fawkes, who conspired to blow up King James in 1605; and — most disturbingly, for this wasn’t a political crime — Charles J. Whitman, the 25-year-old ex-Marine and architecture student, who on August 1, 1966 murdered his mother, his wife, and later that day thirteen people, and wounded dozens of others inside and from atop the UT tower, a horror unrelieved by the discovery that Whitman had unknowingly been living with a walnut-sized brain-tumor. It bears stating that while Slacker was often improvisatory, and certain sentiments nearly “real,” Mackey is here in character, and a deluded one; for the true and beloved Mackey, read his 1971 book, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet and later essays on Thomas Pynchon and Gilbert Sorrentino for starters.

Two further scenes with political ciphers are brief but suggestive. In one, two young men in a bar discourse on Scooby Doo and the Smurfs while on the wall behind them, a small portrait of Lyndon Johnson slowly, inexorably creeps into the frame until LBJ himself becomes a third-party to their conversation. Slacker concludes almost like a musical, without dialogue, with a small picnic atop Austin’s Mt. Bonnell. The group has two books with them: 1980’s Max Apple-edited Southwest Fiction Anthology and, in the author’s greatest cinematic absence since Annie Hall, Paul Goodman’s 1960 Growing Up Absurd.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

Grok My Enthusiasm (16)

Categories

Tags