No one shot JFK

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I don’t remember the first time I watched Slacker, Richard Linklater’s 1990 directorial debut, which follows a few dozen young men and women around Austin, Texas, over the course of a day or so. Probably I saw it in college a few years after it came out, when the independent film movement was starting to take off in a big way. At best, I can recall being charmed by the movie, by the deep and specific weirdness of the meandering characters, each of whom embarks on a quirky monomaniacal monologue. But with the exception of one character — a woman in shades and a trucker hat who tries to sell her friends Madonna’s Pap smear — those particulars never really lodged in my brain, instead blurring into a morass of “stupid shit we all rambled on about back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.” It was Slacker, they were slackers, who cared what they were talking about?

The other night, however, I rewatched Slacker, thanks to my daughter who needed to see it for her high-school “Film as Literature” class. And I was once again charmed. But also horrified.

What I had forgotten was that so many of the monologues were conspiracy theories. Secret colonization of the moon and Mars. JFK’s assassination. Parallel realities accessible through dreams. Women out to destroy men. The Smurfs preparing children — spoiler alert! — for the coming of Krishna.

I think I’d forgotten the theories because at the time they were simply entertaining. We all traded in them back then — they were amusing what-ifs, a way to exercise our brains and our imaginations, and they functioned as an easy Generation X fuck you to the systems of authority that wanted us to accept their version of history. But those conspiracy theories were — to me, at least — just goofs. We elaborated on them, and listened drunk, stoned, and giggling to them, because we didn’t fully believe in them. They were harmless diversions.

Except that they weren’t. Thirty years later, we live in a world defined by conspiratorial thinking. I’m not just thinking about those who truly believe in specific crackpot theories (microchip vaccines, QAnon, flat Earth, hollow Earth); they remain a mercifully small percentage of the American population, according to studies like this one and this one. Unfortunately, a far larger chunk of us see the potential for conspiracies everywhere, never quite crossing the line into fervent adherence but still suspecting the manipulations of shadowy behind-the-scenes powers in every aspect of our lives. We are ready to believe, and to believe the worst, and that cynicism is nearly as destructive as being flat-out crazy. How did we get here from Linklater’s gently warped Austin?

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When I rewatched Slacker, and it quickly became apparent how much of the dialogue would revolve around conspiracies, I tried my best to detect whether the characters really believed what they were saying. In other words, were they being ironic?

As with all good irony, it was hard to tell. The characters are generally exuberant. They’re talkers who relish the flow and feel of words from their mouths, regardless of how their interlocutors react. Mostly, those reactions are minimal. These aren’t Quentin Tarantino dialogues. The conspiracist expounds, and the other characters often remain nearly silent, their faces morphing from low-key confusion to mild worry to boredom to annoyance as they walk through the sweaty city until, well, it’s time to go into the shop or the house and get away from this loon. Still, though, you get the sense that at any minute, the tables could turn, the topic could shift, and the ranted-at could become the ranters.

Are any of them earnest? Are they all bullshitters, like the aging lecturer on political assassinations who claims to have fought with George Orwell in the Spanish Civil War? (He was 20 years too late, his daughter informs us.) Does Linklater, the director, buy any of this, or does he just enjoy it¹?

Whether or not they are honest crackpots or self-satisfied yarn-spinners, they are at least protected by irony — their own, if it exists, but also ours, or the irony of ‘90s audiences. Because we, too, could exist in that Schrödingerian state, believing and not believing in the characters and their theories simultaneously, at least until at the post-movie stop at the kitschy diner for cheap coffee and neon pie we asked one another who really killed JFK. For us as much as for the characters, The Truth™ mattered less than our ability to imagine multiple truths in opposition to those that corporations and politicians wanted us literally to buy. Irony was a game, but a game played in earnest. That’s what it meant to be a slacker.

So, what changed? Here’s an easy, if arguable, target: September 11, 2001. About 24 hours after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people, a columnist in Canada’s National Post was declaring “The Age of Irony died yesterday.” A week later Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter chimed in with a similar sentiment, followed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, followed by dozens and hundreds of other writers and commentators arguing for months and decades not just over whether irony was indeed dead but what irony had meant when it was alive.

The thinking behind “the death of irony” was this: that the attack was so horrific and so real that none of us could afford to play the cute games we’d been playing since the collapse of global Communism. Things™ were more serious now. You had to pick a side — you’re with us or against us. You can’t be both and/or neither simply because it’s amusing to your nonconformist pose. The terrorists don’t care. They’ll kill you either way. And death has a way of ironing out your clever little wrinkles.

I don’t know if 9/11 itself murdered irony, but this discourse certainly sent it scurrying wounded into the shadows. (The great Strokes song “New York City Cops,” hastily scrubbed from their debut album, was an early casualty.) As someone who lived through that era, I can say that for a while it did feel weird and culturally out of step to be silly, glib, hard to pin down. Luckily, Gawker came along to, uh, save us all or something.

Still, if 9/11 forced us to open Schrödinger’s box², it meant that some of us, entranced by conspiracy theories, began to look at them unironically — and remained entranced. In the face of this (we were told) generation-defining event, maybe in these tall tales lurked a secret history that would explain and organize our present-day misery?

We were helped along in this by reality itself. Over the past 24-plus years, the men who hold power in this country and on this planet have revealed themselves to be, far more often than not, craven and corrupt, greedy and glib, simultaneously secretive and shameless. In short, they have sucked and continue to suck. And they are so consistently awful in public, the evidence against them is so easy to access, that it takes no great mental strain to imagine that they are actually far, far worse than we know. From Kissinger to Cheney, from Gates and Ellison to Musk and Bezos, from Matt Gaetz and Jeffrey Epstein (the financier!) to whoever is president right now³, their crimes against humanity and morality are known and obvious. How can you not think those monsters might be hiding a bit more?

In our timeline, how can you argue against conspiratorial thinking? Are we seriously supposed to accept that what we see with our own eyes — tens of thousands of emails, videos and photos going back decades, well-corroborated victim statements, the perpetrators’ own public words and deeds — is the full story? What kind of naïve fool would be satisfied with (ugh) reality?

We are in a trap, one that we’ve devised for ourselves. But I’d like to think we can find an escape route that employs the tool that got us here: irony.

One way to think of irony is as an intuitive leap that connects what is said and what is meant. It connects the disconnected, substituting for the expected chains of logic linking our language and our reality. We know they cannot ever match up perfectly, there will always be some miasma of uncertainty between them, but we don’t actually need that perfect match. We can, through our human experience and understanding, simply believe in the connection — Kierkegaard thought of this as a leap of faith — and presto! there it is. What’s more, with time and repetition, we can hone the mental gymnastics of the metaphorical vault and come to enjoy that slippage. This is the delight of irony: We can anticipate the gulf and find pleasure in bridging it.

And so my solution is this: We can also leap back. If irony allows us to intuit hidden meaning from naked words, it also allows the reverse. Faced with a perplexing universe of possibilities lurking beneath the surface of our shared reality, tempted into descending further into teasing but unlikely caverns of thought, we can bungee-bounce back to daylight and the realm of plain language and dull facts. Things are what we say they are. What happened, what we have evidence of, is what happened. Words again have meaning, and subtext dissolves in the bright cold air. This is not to say we don’t maintain a sense of the other world, the veiled place where interpretations jumble and teem, but we needn’t always pay it the attention it craves. Instead, like John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, we can choose which reality to respond to, and craft the future we prefer. If one style of irony is the blind leap, its antithesis is the shrug — a gesture we Gen Xers are very familiar with.

I don’t know if this approach can pull us all back from the brink, but if nothing else it’s a start. And there’s a damn good chance the young people of Generation Z are there already. When I asked my daughter what she thought of Slacker’s conspiracy theorists, her response came quickly. “Reminds me of people on the subway,” she said, and then left the dinner table to do her homework. It’s a sample size of 1, I admit, but I also know when not to delve any deeper. I’ve got the answer I need. 🪨🪨🪨