London Film Festival Review - The Parking Lot Movie

I love slackers and slacker culture. I would like to be a slacker myself (I certainly watch enough television), but my work ethic and drive have always been just strong enough to get in the way. Spiritually, though, I am at one with these people. The Parking Lot Movie is a portrait of a slacker paradise that has been lovingly cultivated in Charlottesville, Virginia, for over 20 years. Like a documentary version of Clerks, it shows the titanic struggles and absurdities of the service industry through the eyes of these outsiders.

The Corner Parking Lot is a little car park situated opposite the University of Virginia owned by Chris Farina – a very relaxed guy who likes to wear shorts, and who also happens to be a documentary film maker himself. Chris only lets friends work in the car park, or friends of friends. This policy has meant that all his employees have been intelligent slackers – philosophy graduate students, musicians, dreamers. Director Meghan Eckman spent three years filming the goings on at the car park, and interviewing current and past attendants. The results are hilarious, moving and fascinating.

Working at the parking lot involves mostly just sitting alone in the ramshackle booth and taking money from customers. Eckman allows her subjects to go through the minutiae of all the tasks, the little rituals that have developed in this strange island of space-time. The job gives plenty of scope for these underachievers to analyse their lives, themselves, and the nature of the car park, producing many of the best lines. For example, one describes the role of the parking lot attendant as that of a “creator-destroyer god”.

Unfortunately the attendants’ philophising and mucking around has to be interrupted by those who want to use the car park. In the words of Randal Graves: “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers.” The interviewees do not prescribe to the maxim that “the customer is always right”. It’s more a case of “the customer is always a douche”. When you realise they deal with a lot of SUV-driving frat boys, it’s not surprising that they are cynical.

There is a sense of desolation running between the laughs, of course – no one dreams of being a car park attendant. However, for many it seems the job gave them time to find out what they wanted to do, and to grow as a human being while they did it.

Slacker culture held the Zeitgeist during the 90s, and so the The Parking Lot Movie seems to come from that decade – it’s so lo-fi that it should be soundtracked by Pavement. The low budget feel is charming, however, and doesn’t detract from the subject at all.

Eckman has found a wonderful bit of weirdness to focus her camera on, filled with droll and witty people. This documentary has everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, the mundane to the profound, the pitiful to the inspirational. And it has all been found in one little patch of concrete.