An Appreciation of Richard Linklater

Few filmmakers make me want to make movies more than Richard Linklater. Rather, few filmmakers make me feel like I can make movies more than Richard Linklater. Genre directors like Terence Fisher, Jack Arnold, Tim Burton, James Whale, and John Carpenter may have inspired me to want to become a filmmaker as a child, but Linklater is the one, and remains the one, who makes me feel like I can be making films.

This might be partly owed to his allegiance to independent film-making, his DIY origins, and his continued eagerness to experiment. But more fundamentally, there is something that feels effortless about a Linklater film, both in how they are made and how they are viewed. I recognize that that can sound derogatory, or worse, passive aggressive.  But I don’t mean the films feel lazy, or that they aren’t at all challenging. Afterall, how can you call a guy who patiently shot a film over 12 years, or who has helmed three rotoscoped films, lazy? Or categorize a director who sets out to expose the exploitative inner workings of the meatpacking industry as unchallenging? 

What I mean to say is that the end result of his films often exude a feeling of ease with the craft, a loving affection towards the material, and a cooly confident belief in the importance of the subject matter. I’m fawning a bit here, but from what I’ve seen of Linklater in interviews and live Q and As, he seems like a very cool guy, and if auteur theory still holds any water, his films are an extension of his personality. Even when a Linklater film features magnetic stars, it’s the film itself that emanates charisma. 

That’s it really: he makes charismatic films. They’re the Harrison Ford of movies. They’re good hangs. Yeah, yeah, it’s cliché to call Linklater the master of the hangout movie. You definitely get the sense that this categorization refers predominately to his cycle of time-focused films with no defined narrative or conflict (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, The Before Trilogy, Waking Life, Everybody Wants Some!!), but even his more clearly plotted films resemble a good hang. I never really want School of Rock to end. The best parts of Me and Orson Welles are watching Zac Efron become hypnotized by Orson Welles and New York’s late 1930s theater scene. In Nouvelle Vague, is there ever any mystery as to whether Godard will succeed in making Á bout de souffle and change cinema forever? Of course not. The movie, and Linklater, are interested in the process, the thrill, the joy of making a work of art. It’s a hangout film for filmmakers. Nouvelle Vague cares about how Breathless came to be, not what it became.

In the way that Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan can communicate complex astronomical concepts to the layman, Linklater has an exceptional ability to channel his passion for avant garde and experimental art into something much less esoteric and  more digestible. Breathless is probably the poster child for the French New Wave, and I suspect that today’s audiences might find it hard to grasp what makes it an important film. But the experience of viewing Linklater’s celebration of the film comes with the same ease of watching Dazed and Confused. When Nouvelle Vague ends with a freeze frame on Godard and Truffaut, I experience the same bittersweet feeling that I get during the closing shot in Dazed as Foghat’s “Slow Ride” fades up. Man, I don’t want this to be over yet.

Even his more tragic or cynical films (A Scanner Darkly, SuBurbia, Fast Food Nation) can sometimes have traces of his more meandering, lighter material. My memory of SuBurbia, having seen it as a teenager or possibly a preteen, was that it was Dazed and Confused for the 90s teens. I remembered it as being about a group of bored townies in small town America. But I recently rewatched it and discovered it was a much darker take on suburban isolation and disaffected Gen Xers. Perhaps I remembered it as similar to Dazed because, despite its grim ending and unflinching look at depression, addiction and racism, I mostly remember identifying with Giovanni Ribisi’s sensitive, self-righteous, and unambitious Jeff, or Amie Carey as the aspirational artist Sooze who longed for a creative life in New York. SuBurbia, which takes place over the course of one night (in typical Linklater fashion) of course gives us little resolution.. 

We don’t know if Sooze actually gets to design the album cover for homegrown rock star Pony, or whether she’ll make it to New York. It ultimately doesn’t matter. What remains with you is the identification with an artist so desperate to break out that her performance art is mostly just a screaming list of things that can fuck off. 

The universality in his films comes from his willingness to have his characters articulate ideas that are, well, not particularly original. Though that doesn’t make them any less thoughtful or true. Mason’s perspective on social media in the final chapter of Boyhood was a fairly common critique in 2014, especially among self-styled intellectually-minded youths. Hell, it’s still a common refrain today. A teenager like Mason, eager to be so above that which is trendy, would have that opinion and would probably think they’re the first person to come up with that idea. The way Jesse in Before Sunrise questions whether a word processor actually makes our lives any more convenient is very much a notion that someone in their young 20s would stumble upon and assume it was some secret that only they knew. Jesse and Celine’s relationship is so intoxicating to watch because the things they discuss are the things so many of us discuss when we are in our early 20s. His films are full of dorm-room philosophizing that reminds us of a time when we felt curious and excited about new ideas. 

I’ll give a lighter, more illustrative example: In Everybody Wants Some!!, Finn, played by a very charming and revelatory Glen Powell, uses the cliched expression “I’m a grower, not a shower” when hitting on girls. I even rolled my eyes when I heard that in the theater. A less confident writer than Linklater would probably feel the need to come up with something more original here, to make Finn more exceptional and less ordinary. But that’s just it: a guy like Finn in 1980 Texas would probably use an expression like that. 

Linklater’s insistence on the lack of exceptionality of his characters, is one of the most defining qualities of his films, and ultimately, what makes them feel so relatable. His characters are often existing in constant states of becoming: areas where they don’t quite know what it is they want. Yet, they know they want something. Randall “Pink” Floyd’s rebellion in Dazed and Confused illustrates this: He doesn’t want to sign any commitment paper, but he’s not even really sure why. It harkens back to Brando in The Wild Ones when asked what he is rebelling against: “whattaya got?”

Perhaps my favorite articulation of this sentiment is in Me and Orson Welles, when Zac Effron’s character Richard tells Zoe Kazan’s Gretta that he just wants to be a part of the art world: “music, literature, theater, films…” He may not have a chosen path, yet to him, it’s the act of expressing that attracts him and not necessarily the vehicle of expression. 

Linklater’s oeuvre is much like his characters: constantly experimenting, constantly reflecting, questioning, celebrating that neverending transition. Even in his 60s, he makes youthful films. Although you don’t have to be youthful to relate; you just have to be able to remember what it was like to be youthful and excited about something. To use the parlance of animators, his characters and stories exist in the in-between area, the frames between the key poses. And as any animator will tell you, those are the frames that create the real illusion of life. 

-Written on a lunch break in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan