Chapter 3 - The Little Space Between Hal Ashby and Richard Linklater

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973) and Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) make an unlikely double bill, which nevertheless serves to frame Linklater in relation to the history of American independent filmmaking and to consider the evolution of a prominent trope in its history, one that links his cinema to that of Hal Ashby. Both films follow characters that have just met, choosing to disembark a train and killing time overnight in a city, while making tentative connections as they move toward inexorable separation. In The Last Detail Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Mule (Otis Young) interrupt their mission to take Meadows (Randy Quaid) to prison, while Jesse (Ethan Hawke) persuades Céline (Julie Delpy) to pause her journey home. They each play out as interludes of flânerie between trains and narrative resolution—in Washington, New York and Boston, and in Vienna, respectively. Both disembarkations create, as Gilles Deleuze would have it, intervals “between the action and the reaction” which are occupied, instead, by affection: affection-images. For Deleuze:

The interval is not merely defined by the specialisation of the two limit-facets, perceptive and active. There is an in-between. Affection is what occupies the interval, what occupies it without filling it or filling it up. It surges in the centre of indetermination, that is to say in the subject, between a perception which is troubling in certain aspects and a hesitant action.

In discussions of Ashby, this interval has been likened to “spiritual drift.” In the films of Linklater, meanwhile, I have argued it assumes the “form and content of slack.” The interval is, as Céline expresses in her soliloquy in Before Sunrise, a “little space in-between”:

If there’s any kind of god it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in-between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

Importantly, however, 1970s spiritual drift and 1990s slacking are not the same, which results in their respective trains heading, one might say, in opposite directions: Ashby’s toward defeat and Linklater’s away from it.