It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books

It Is Impossible to Learn to Plow By Reading Books: There is a scene in Richard Linklater's It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books where the protagonist meets a woman at a train station. They nervously chat for a little while and fall asleep in the lobby of the train station. Then, our protagonist wakes up and leaves a note on the stranger's luggage. This scene has more poignancy in it, and a stronger feeling of isolation in it, than all one hundred and two minutes of Lost in Translation.

Here, Linklater is showing how such everyday things like traveling on a train, walking through a town, getting stopped by someone to see your t-shirt, watching TV, watching movies, reading, doing laundry, doing dishes, reading a Kafka quote, driving, listening to music, so on and so forth, can have some kind of interest in the initial disinterest in seeing this.

On the one hand the narrative is lax, and unlike Slacker there isn't even the framework of a bunch of characters in a small town. But on the other hand out of all of these seemingly random shots of a guy going through the motions in life, dealing without a job, the 'whatever' attitude of hanging out with friends or a girl, taking care of a car, becomes a narrative itself. It's experimental and as Linklater also has said certainly not for a large audience to see (and many haven't until the DVD of Slacker was released with this film included), but the visual language is rich in its detachment, and at the least is a curious effort that doesn't just keep the audience on a sort of line away from typical emotional involvement but is about the same thing.