What grandstanding point is there in a slacker film like Empire Records? Clerks?
Aside from a nice iteration of life, it’s Disenchanted from the insanity (save a few scenes) of a regular comedy. Where it ends is where it begins.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while not a slacker film, encapsulates this perfectly on a grandiosely existential magnitude. The search for meaning where there is none: it just is, in a vast void. Starting where it ends. Filling in the cosmic unease, is nothing for nothing on a Pale Blue Dot. At least in Empire Records he gets the girl, they save the store; but ultimately wind up right where they began originally… save Warren, who got a job. In Clerks, it’s literally just a “lifelong wait for a hospital stay” being portrayed in the third (and likely final) installment’s take on mortality. Dante (characterized in regards to the famous Dante’s Inferno) and Randal having their respective “widow maker” heart attacks; Randal surviving while Dante walks into the light.
Seinfeld is the magnum opus of the nihilistic telescreen. Self-aware as ever in its own meta-narrative, the show has a similar prerogative to Neurotic Nihilism; a point in that even such is pointless and a show about nothing. Obviously it’s an influence. Ending not where the cast began, but rather a solid prison.
In that the slacker cinematic series is less a model to attain to, it’s been reached. What it is, is capturing those moments of mundane extremes in gonzo fashion and smart-ass wit.
Liminal spaces in their used forms, would be the way to characterize such pieces of data. Transitory states: stepping stones. Clerks ideally isn’t an eternity. Absurdly this turns said comedies into horror films because they are ironically comedic. Creations confirming condition. Acceptance of assimilation, and Neuroticism in Mundane Extremes.
Horror as a byproduct is comedy, often, because it shows the actual, ‘stupid’ reactions to insane and implausible scenarios. Scenes might just be superstitions on a green screen, but the ‘stupid’ reactions of characters we gratuitously watch die act no different in observation than we in real situations do. Splitting up, falling and being too winded to get up, yelling to a friend— basic instincts. Horror is a comedy because of the reality in the implausible; comedy is horror in the plausible.
***
Irony: impermanent illusion
Ignorance as insight
Inviting intentional idiocy
Information is my IV
Stimulation,
Simulation,
Evaluation,
Revelation— reclamation and recycling.
A nap is a better revolution.
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