the structure of the film "slacker"

The film "Slacker" was an independently produced film made in Austin, TX back in 1989. It was made through the director maxing out his credit cards and using wedding money from his parents, and being that he wasn't getting married he was able to raise over $30,000 to make this uniquely structured film. The film is a "kitchen sink" type film that compiles several different attitudes, characterizations, short moments of humor, moods, feelings, and the abstract but still moving the viewer along in a linear mode. While there is no sense of the age-old 3 act structure or standard narrative plot of any kind, the film's seemingly random set of events actually serve to immerse the viewers into the role of the passive observer. Another effect of this film's narrative style is similar to the way dreams work in your head, especially dreams where you're not necessarily yourself but you're still witnessing a whole lot of different events and characters. Whether or not this was the director's intention is irrelevant to the fact that this type of immersion, if you're a active viewer and not a close minded fool, further helps to perpetuate the feeling that you're present in the narrative (oblique as it may seem) on summer day stroll around Austin, TX circa 1990. The film is largely episodic and takes you from one set of characters and events in one part of the physical space of Austin, then tangents into another episode when either one of those characters or a passerby strolls past the scene and we're taken into a new, entirely different and unrelated scene with new characters and events. This happens over and over again, with each scene capturing specific people and their characteristics, themes, and concepts. Again, the effect this narrative structure had on me was that i felt like this could have been a dream with the variety of different locations, characters and events.