Slack Cinema: Notes on Genre and Style

This thesis examines films that attempted to cash in on slacker characters in cinema immediately following the success of Richard Linklater's Slacker. Chapter One adduces Slacker as prologue to discussing aspects of slack style and its origins. Chapter Two offers far more detailed discussions of Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats in light of Lawrence Grossberg's concept of "everyday life," a paradigm that helps account for the maturation of the Hollywood slacker from oppressed, indecisive store clerk to charming romantic lead. Chapter 3 discusses a range of slack-inspired films-Empire Records (1995), Singles (1992), Reality Bites (1994), and Knocked-Up (2007)-as a way of applying to slack cinema Rick Altman's theory of film genre and offers some tentative conclusions about the future of slack film as a genre.