All films are ultimately an epitaph to a particular time, place and mood, with Linklater’s achievement in his second picture being his skill at seizing an ephemeral, homegrown authenticity before it disappeared. As suggested at the start, Linklater himself represented this ethos of a local, DIY ferment—not only through his character sketch of Should Have Stayed at [the] Bus Station (his role in the opening to Slacker), but through his autodidactic, stayed-in-Austin, decidedly un-Hollywood persona. He had the same presence at the book festival. Indeed, Linklater sharply contrasts with another Austin persona, Lance Armstrong, who introduced another ethos to the city in the 2000s—one literally and figuratively dependent on artificial enhancement, which regrettably displaced for a time the purer ethical vision held by Linklater that disregarded individual competition in favor of the virtues of collaboration and the forms of truth that can emerge from democratic filmmaking.
For sure, one should not confuse the sense of insouciance often witnessed on screen with the labor involved in creating that impression of casual indifference. By many accounts, Linklater is anything but a slacker, and his productivity attests to this. Still, as mentioned briefly in passing earlier, Boyhood has unwittingly captured another zeitgeist—a contemporary cultural trend centered on the local and an attendant appreciation for slow, deliberate craftsmanship.
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