Reviews

The Female Slacker

By Marie Chesaniuk

 

“The Demise of the Female Slacker”: The subtitle of Meghan O’Rourke’s review of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up in Slate confused me. At the end of the piece, O’Rourke bemoaned the paucity of female slackers in cinema. Her main point was that the women in Knocked Up were allowed neither the “luxury of not having to be relentlessly responsible,” nor the playful inner lives of their male slacker counterparts. She sounded as though a long and noble tradition had fallen by the wayside. The review left me asking: What female slacker?

Slackerdom is an attitude more than a given set of actions (or inactions). Take Peter (Ron Livingston) from Office Space; he works nine-to-five, but is an undeniable slacker. He does his job reluctantly and perfunctorily and, when asked what he would do if he had a million dollars and didn’t have to work, he replies, “Nothing. I would relax … I would sit on my ass all day … I would do nothing.” But, when you watch Office Space, you still want to hang out with a slacker like Peter—sometimes even sleep with him—because, when it comes down to it, he seems like an alright guy.

The tradition of slackerdom is a long and varied one. For the nineteenth century, there was Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur, the urban man-about-town who expressed his bohemian values by wandering the streets and waxing poetic and philosophic. The flaneur is the father of all Andrew Bujalski slackers: white, educated, directionless males thinking deep thoughts about life, the arts and themselves. As an unproductive member of society, the flaneur combines the stigmatized or marginalized existence of the beggar with the superior hauteur of the artist.

Also of this era was The Idler (1892-1911), a magazine founded by Robert Barr and co-edited by humorist Jerome K. Jerome, which bespoke the mod (hip, if you will) nature of the idle intellectual reader (who, like most slackers, was necessarily male). Barr’s title referred to his reader. It was inspired by Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (1758-1760), which had introduced writing itself as a form of idleness: something to do if (1) you have nothing better to do or (2) have something better to do but need an activity with which to procrastinate. (Let it also be known that Johnson started The Idler to avoid his more dignified projects.) But I digress … Idleness in early modernity is slacking today.