Heard of the new genre niche called slacker noir? Chris Wade, Chapo Trap House producer and former Slate writer, coined the term. What are examples of this sub-genre? The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers’1998 crime comedy, Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 film adaptation of Pynchon’s neo-noir tongue-in-cheek mystery and Under the Silver Lake, a 2018 film termed a surrealist mystery by some, a neo-noir black comedy by others.
Slacker + noir = a slacker avoids work or effort, participating in a culture either of aimlessness or deliberate protest of productivity. A noir PI walks the mean streets of a corrupted world seeking a semblance of justice or, failing that, a day’s pay. So slacker noir combines an unwilling, even apathetic, protagonist with a world where crime is winning. What motivates a slacker to pursue a dangerous uncomfortable investigation when he might rather get high or surf? And at the end, will a slacker bother to restore an order he never liked to begin with?
Classic noir of the 1940s and 50s is sometimes described as a nostalgic genre. Noir depicted people under economic pressure pursuing criminal schemes as a reaction to scarcity. So even though many of the most famous noir films appeared during the postwar era when corporate forces were reorganizing American society, offering a house and car in exchange for conformity, they referenced the Depression. The typical noir setting showed a privileged upper class minority, along with winners of the unofficial economy of the criminal underworld, enjoying wealth and leisure. Everybody else suffered privation, alienation, paranoia, futility.
The tainted white knight PI was a jaded individualist appearing at a time when the emerging dilemma (for white men anyway) was the predicament of the guy in the gray flannel suit, the imperative to conform. Women, the taxi drivers, super-secretaries and club singers of the war era were told to get married, stay home and keep house. So while American capitalism offered modest security in exchange for conformity and boredom, Hollywood served up dramatic narratives of economic desperation.
Slacker noir can be anachronistic as well. The Dude, hippie anti-hero of The Big Lebowski, is opting out like a 60s dropout even though the film is set in 1991. The Coen brothers used two people they knew as inspiration for the character, one who had been a member of the Seattle Seven and another who was a Vietnam War vet, both characterized by their 60s experiences. The Dude’s buddy, Walter Sobchak, is a trigger happy, apparently PTSD-crazed Vietnam vet, so also a product of the 60s. Likewise bowling, a hilarious feature of the film, blossomed in the 1950s and 60s after the invention of the automatic pinsetter.
Inherent Vice, appearing in 2014 and based on a 2009 novel, also evokes a 1970s Los Angeles replete with black radicals, Aryan Brotherhood gang bangers, massage parlors, crass real estate developers, heroin addicts and smuggling rings. Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello is a stoner hippie PI who fumbles his way through the usual noir territory of beatings, criminal gang encounters and casual sex.
The Dude lives in a decade devoted to the ‘miracle’ of supply side economics, capital accumulation at the top, junk-bond-funded mergers, scandals in the markets, the savings and loan debacle, Iran-Contra and globalization. The 90s decade isn’t worrying about communism in north Vietnam, it’s watching communist regimes implode and the celebrated triumph of capitalism. But the slacker trope works because, without explicitly confronting capitalism’s 80s imperative to grow at any cost, it says ‘not for me’ and offers a nostalgic alternative: expansion of consciousness through drugs and dreams, pleasant sex, hobbies with kooky friends and plenty of time to kick back. Call it slacker noir for aging boomers.
Under the Silver Lake offers a slacker noir for millennials with no cloak of nostalgia. Here we have another unmarried unemployed protagonist who doesn’t bother to comb his hair. He’s a borderline stalker who spies on women before and after having sex with his girlfriend, lies to his mom about his lack of a job and ignores eviction notices. This guy isn’t content like the Dude. Conditions in the second decade of the new millennium have stressed him near to a schizophrenic breakdown. While the Dude could preserve (a metaphor of) internal stability with a rug that really tied the place together, Sam’s home world is coming apart. His place is in eviction proceedings, and the missing woman he pursues disappeared in the middle of the night from another apartment in the same complex.
As he searches for her, he thinks he glimpses codes in old movies, songs, ads. In other words, classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, a way of saying the world makes sense in a secret language only I understand. How then does Sam pursue clues to unravel a murder mystery, an activity which presumes the ability to make sense of things? He finds clues, but they’re encoded in comic books or a bracelet engraved with a set of chess moves – not the type of clues usually found in crime fiction. The post-sixties slacker detective rejected capitalism’s narrative about what matters; the millennial slacker detective faces a world with no narrative left to reject.
All the slacker PI’s I’ve found (also mentioned are The Nice Guys, The Big Fix and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye) are white males. Makes sense. If a female PI refuses to work she falls into the passive dependent woman category. If a minority guy won’t work he’s a degenerate criminal. Other national cinemas or fiction titles may offer examples that make this trope work for women or non-white males. If you know of any, let me know. Meanwhile we’ll have to see if more slacker noir can arise out of the global disasters and domestic contradictions of the 2020s.
Think a rattlesnake can commit murder? Wanna find out? Rattlesnakes Strike Twice is coming in 2024! Meanwhile be careful where you walk…
Sara Paretsky (born June 8, 1947) is an author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the female protagonist V. I. Warshawski, who seemed to model your slacker noir in some ways. I met Sara at a reading in Toledo OH- she was delightful - entertained the audience.