Richard Linklater

Time Is a Lie

Time Is a Lie Here are three moments from three different films, all directed by Richard Linklater: 1. In Paris, at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a group of journalists has gathered to hear a young writer discuss his book This Time, a semiautobiographical romance about a woman he met many years ago in Vienna. After deflecting a few questions on “what really happened,” the writer describes his next project, a novel about a middle-aged man who, thinking about his life at present, suddenly finds himself pulled into the past, to a night in his adolescence. But this is not memory so much as two “nows,” both experienced at once; as the writer explains, “it’s obvious to him that time is a lie . . . it’s all happening all the time, and inside every moment is another moment, all . . . happening simultaneously .” Just then, a figure steps out from behind a bookcase: it is the woman from Vienna, nine years later. 2 | Richard Linklater 2. In Colorado, a Mexican immigrant’s husband has been injured on the job, and to make up for his lost earnings, she has returned to the slaughterhouse she had walked out of only months earlier , hoping never to return. To be rehired, she has submitted to degrading sexual encounters with the foreman, who now leads her, both dressed fully in white, through an industrialized killing floor, a Fordian nightmare of gears, levers, blood, and viscera that surround them while he shows her where she will be working. As she takes her position, her eyes, just above her white mask, well with first one tear and then another, the only evidence of emotion she permits herself on this, the first of many such shifts to come. 3. Somewhere in New England, at an apartment retrofitted for band practice, a group of junior high students plays a classic rock song—AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll).” Unlike the world it describes, however, their immediate concern is less about paying one’s dues and more about their solos, led by a manic lead singer—their former schoolteacher, who faked his way into the classroom and was subsequently fired, but not without igniting in them a passion for music. And now, in the after-hours space outside of the official school, the students play on, having a good time as they await the chorus and, very likely, finding themselves in sympathy with at least one of the lines their teacher sings—that creating such music, even in a friendly atmosphere so unlike that of the original song, is “harder than it looks.” Many readers have likely already recognized these films, all released within a three-year period: Before Sunset (2004), Fast Food Nation (2006), and The School of Rock (2003), respectively. On first examination, they are quite different projects: Before Sunset is an unlikely sequel to Before Sunrise (1995), both of them small-scale romantic melodramas; Fast Food Nation is as straightforward a critique of American industry (here, fast food) as has been put on screen in recent years; The School of Rock is a studio comedy that features Jack Black. Whereas other directors have moved from project to project without a clear pattern in mind, Linklater’s work offers a particularly satisfying trajectory in this Time Is a Lie | 3 regard, with the choices in subject matter as surprising and interesting as the eventual films into which they are made. Consider that The Newton Boys (1998) followed subUrbia (1997), or Tape (2001) followed Waking Life (2001), or Bad News Bears (2005) followed Before Sunset, and it can become tempting to view the films as not having any discernible relation to one another other than the fact that they all share the same directorial credits in their title sequences. Of course, this defiance of a basic pattern of authorship fits well with contemporary film studies, which tends to view director studies with skepticism, despite the enormous amount of work that continues to be produced in this area. One reason is simply the sense that any film is a collective venture, and certainly, Linklater has had his share of talented collaborators over the years, including writers, production designers, cinematographers (Lee Daniel has shot seven of his films), editors (Sandra Adair has edited all of them since Dazed and Confused [1993]), music supervisors, performers (Ethan Hawke has appeared...