At various points in the story, she’ll be screened from the viewer by stacks of library books, by ravers in a crowded apartment, and even by the bars of a jail cell. One of the ways in which Party Girl presents the titular character as being mismatched with her environment is through its compositions that show Parker Posey’s body being blocked and constrained by objects within the film’s frame. Despite being very different in tone- Party Girl ’s comedy shot through with melodrama, and Safe ’s melodrama filmed as horror-each film presents a unique and challenging take on the archetypal 90s slacker. The films ask us to consider our own responses to feeling disappointed with, ill-suited for, or even physically threatened by the social and physical environments in which we live. The first two films in this series, Party Girl and Safe, can be read as movies about characters paralyzed by inaction, but more interesting is the way in which Party Girl ’s Mary, played by Parker Posey, and Safe ’s Carol, played by Julianne Moore, are depicted on film as being mismatched with their respective environments.
#Movies like slacker series#
When we were programming our upcoming film series at the Blanton, which begins on April 3, we were interested in films of the 90s that engaged with this cliché of the inactive, slacker protagonist. As one character in the film Slacker notes disapprovingly about another: “ of those neoposeur types that hangs out in coffee shops and doesn’t do much of anything.” Think Reality Bites, Slacker, or even The Big Lebowski.
There’s a critique of American films of the 1990s that calls out an excessive focus on slacker protagonists: the too-cool-for-school hipsters, always rolling their eyes, coolly mocking authority without actually challenging it, all affect and no action.
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