In case you were also wondering, no, current Portland resident Kelly Reichardt has not seen the Dream of the Nineties sketch from the pilot of Portlandia. But that’s fine, she doesn’t have to – she lived it.
The adamantly uncompromising film-maker behind First Cow and Certain Women got her start when independence was still a viable way of life for a generation of artists, young people who aspired to the modest goal of a minimally demeaning job to keep the bills paid and the space to make their thing their way. The media branded this demographic “slackers”, but their seeming lack of ambition belied a strongly held set of principles about the freedom to work unencumbered by commercial imperatives. Reichardt was there, she still recognizes the preciousness of this low-stakes creative latitude, and these days, she’s understandably uneasy about how difficult attaining it can be.
