Dazed and Confused (1993)

Written and Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring: Jason London, Matthew McConaughey, Wiley Wiggins, Christin Hinojosa, Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Michelle Burke, Anthony Rapp, Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi, Nicky Katt, Milla Jovovich

Richard Linklater loves to make films about time, where his stories are compressed into a particular time frame, which informs the nature of the film. His debut feature, the microbudget Slacker, takes place over 24 hours in Austin. The Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) each take place nine years apart, and each one takes place over the course of a portion of one day. Tape takes place in real time. Boyhood was filmed over the course of twelve years and tells the story of a family and a boy growing up over those twelve years. And his second feature film, Dazed and Confused, my second favorite film of all time, follows in that tradition.

Dazed and Confused takes place over fifteen hours during the last day of school in May of 1976, in a small unnamed Texas suburb. The film has an ensemble of approximately twenty-three actors, the characters comprising sixteen high school students about to enter their senior year and five middle schoolers about to enter high school, along with two "townies," alumni of the high school who like to relive their glory days by partying with the younger set. From about 2:00pm in the afternoon to about 5:00am the following morning, these twenty-three characters will attend school, drive around, party, fight, make out, smoke, drink, and generally discuss their various existential malaise. There's nothing else to the film, but there's so much there.

I believe I first saw this film when my parents rented it from Blockbuster right after it was released on video for the first time. My parents were around the age the incoming freshmen would have been, so they were interested to see the cultural aspects of the film (the clothing, the music, et cetera). I was completely bored out of my mind, but then again, I was ten and obsessed with vampires and Star Trek. I rewatched the film as a college student - an Irish roommate of mine for the summer was in love with the film, and it so happened that it was showing in a few Fridays at midnight at the NuArt on Santa Monica. I decided I'd go with her.

And I fucking fell in love with it.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love teen films and teen drama. That's not to say that I'm not discerning on the genre - I am really picky about it - but I love it a lot. It's one of my favorites. I love the idea that everything is heightened to teenagers, that every little event is life or death. That they are characters who are caught between being kids and being adults. And that even the most lascivious actions are tinged with a bit of innocence.

Michelle smoking a joint, presented with judgment or morality.

Dazed and Confused is such a film, and even a bit more avant-garde than that. Unlike most other teen films, there is no major story in this film. There are smaller characters arcs and beats throughout the sprawling ensemble, but a good plot descriptor is literally the one from a few paragraphs up. Kids being kids at the beginning of summer - drinking, smoking weed, partying, and being young generally. The character arcs are so low-stakes - things like deciding if you're playing football next year - but that's what makes them so authentic and relatable. The likelihood is that as teenagers, we didn't have to deal with friends getting murdered or rotating sexual partners or stricken with cancer or the kinds of plots we experience through most of the genre. Our highs and lows at that age may be related to romance, but also to what you were wearing on one particular day or one word you said to someone. The funny thing is that these kinds of stories are never told because they lack a dramatic weight that Hollywood seems to believe all stories involving teenagers must contain. With Dazed and Confused, the lackadaisical tone and mundane nature of the stories makes it most people's high school story.

The opening slo-mo shot of the film dictates the tone of the film.

While being incredibly universal due to its storytelling nature, it is also incredibly atypical for the genre in another way because of how it treats one of teen drama's favorite tropes - the class structure (I mean, in a societal way, not in the literal grade sense). A lot of teen films (The Breakfast Club is the most blatant example of this, but also in films like Clueless, Heathers, Brick and Mean Girls) concern themselves with the clique-y nature of being a teenager, which is a completely correct concern to have. High school might be the most stratified society left on Earth after the demise of Edwardian England and New York. But, while that is an aspect of high school life that is very true to life, the fact of the matter is that a lot of times, the class system is much more fluid than what one might think. Dazed and Confused follows this path, having the closest character we have to a lead, star quarterback Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), navigate his way through the various cliques without any reprisal (save from the head football coach, which causes the most conflict for him) from any of his peers. He is equally at home with all of them - and even more shocking for the genre, all of the students are pretty much okay with each other. We have various groups - the football players, the geeks, the stoners, the popular girls, and the mean girls - who all attend the same social functions throughout the evening, and no one is made to feel out of place. And this is helped by the film's loose three-part structure: 1) last day at school, 2) looking for something to do that night, and 3) the late night party at the Moon Tower. All the characters experience the same general beats during these three parts, showing that all of them are more similar than their strata might suggest.

Quarterback Pink's comfort with both popular cheerleader Michelle (left) and geek Cynthia is incredibly atypical for a teen film - as is the two girls' comfort with each other.

That's not to say the film is devoid of conflict, but the conflicts, typical of Linklater, are much more of a philosophical nature. Pink, along with the other football players, are informed by their coach that they have to sign a form promising that they won't drink or do drugs during the summer so that they'll be ready for "a championship season in '76." While the others guys recognize it as bullshit and sign it as a formality, Pink has an existential crisis over it - by signing it, he feels like the administration is holding much more control over him than he is comfortable with, a crisis that his friends don't understand. Other conflicts include standing up to bullies, confessing your feelings for someone else, and the debate between passivity and joining in. These are all common conflicts in teen drama, but the casualness of the presentation in Dazed makes them all incredibly realistic, if for no other reason because the stakes of these situations are the consequence of the actions itself. There is no outward pressure for any of these things to happen - no one is graduating, so this isn't the last time these kids will theoretically see each other, and there's no literal life-or-death Sword of Damocles hanging over anyone. These conflicts arise because they do organically, not because something in the narrative formula demands it.

Another reason why Dazed has such a laid-back feeling is the kick-ass soundtrack. The low-stakes narrative and relatively lax setting (suburban late-1970s life has less tension than the upheaval of the 1960s or the excess of the 1980s) provide a perfect jumping off point for a film that is wall-to-wall with great tunes. But why the soundtrack is especially awesome in this film is how the songs are used. Dazed isn't the only film to have a nostalgia-laden soundtrack, but it is one of the few films that uses the music almost like a musical does. Now, go with me on this for a second: Any good piece of musical theater has songs that further the plot or create atmosphere or do something else to enhance the piece as a whole, rather than using it as a filler or background noise. From the opening slo-mo shot of stoners Pickford (Shawn Andrews) and Michelle (Milla Jovovich) pulling into the school parking lot in a gorgeous Pontiac GTO to Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," the tone of the film is set: laid-back and nostalgic, but with a bit of an edge. Every other song comments on the scene it's accompanying, from the hazing rituals set to Alice Cooper's "No More Mr. Nice Guy" (for the guys) and War's "Why Can't We Be Friends" (for the girls) to the montage of all the characters driving around town looking for something to do set to Edgar Winter Group's "Free Ride" to freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) wandering around lost amidst all the seniors while Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time" blares at us. However, as appropriate as the songs are, the songs are never too on-the-nose, mostly because either dialogue is layered over the song in such a way that they never draw attention to themselves or because they're so fucking fun to listen to and Linklater is showing us equally fun images over them that we never think "Gee, that's fucking obvious."

One of the closing shots of the film, a slightly drunk Mitch listening to his headphones, reinforces the importance of music and the soundtrack to the film.

But just because the film presents a wonderfully chilled version of the 1970s doesn't mean that the film is wearing rose-colored glasses. There is a lot of existential dread in Dazed that gives it a bite that other teen films do not have. These kids are the last trickle of the Baby Boomer generation that sprouted in the decade and a half after the end of World War II, and growing up with the knowledge that the bloodiest war in human history was a mere thirty years prior and watching the horror and cultural upheaval of the 1960s firsthand, they are all in the habit of questioning everything rather than accepting the world at face value. Linklater is a master when it comes to stoner philosophy, and in Dazed so many of the characters, in particular the geeky trio of Tony (Anthony Rapp), Mike (Adam Goldberg) and Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi, question so many things that are expected of them. And they do it like maturing teens would, not bratty adolescents. Like Pink questions the nature of the document he's supposed to sign, the other characters question the necessity of the hazing rituals for the incoming freshmen, the idea that high school and college are presented as necessary steps to get to a point in life that is completely unknowable, the debate between college and working, the horror that your best years might be ending at seventeen, and, of course, the "every other decade theory," which Cynthia states as such: "It's like the every-other-decade theory, you know? The fifties were boring. The sixties rocked. The seventies, oh my God, they obviously suck. Maybe the eighties will be... radical!"

It's a hilariously ironic line. Of course, we know this is not the case, but it's completely accurate that a seventeen-year-old girl would espouse this theory. The sixties didn't rock - while the cultural revolution it ushered in was incredibly important and integral in certain disenfranchised groups getting their rights or respect (see: the Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution, the advent of feminism), the decade was littered with assassinations, bloodshed, and the nation throwing itself headfirst into the disaster that was the Vietnam War. And, obviously, the eighties weren't radical - the money-hungry excess brought in by Ronald Reagan's economics also separated the social classes in a way that hadn't been as blatant since possibly the Great Depression, and popular cultural became a strange mix of exemplifying Reagan's vision of America and more surreal and artificial displays of addictive but ultimately hollow shallowness. As Linklater stated in a documentary on the Criterion Collection DVD of Dazed, Cynthia would obviously hate the seventies because every kid hates the decade they're in the middle of, and it isn't until years have passed that you look back and appreciate the time period. But the seventies weren't fantastic either, with widespread drug use almost acting as either a numbing agent for the horrors of the previous decade or a way to connect with the more subversive aspects of the decade. Either way, Dazed doesn't present the seventies as either awesome or awful - just as happening.

Tony, Mike and Cynthia debate the nature of the importance placed upon high school and college while driving around looking for a party.

Another reason why this film is amazing because it served not just as a launching pad for a group of brilliant actors who are now a combination of box-office stars, Oscar winners, Tony-Award nominees, and veritable character actors. Casting director Don Phillips hit the jackpot in being able to cast Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey as pervy townie Wooderson (who offers up perhaps the film's most iconic line, when he comments on the girls wandering around local hangout The Emporium: "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age"), stars Ben Affleck and Parker Posey as the "villains" of the film, two seniors who get off way too much on ruling over their respective hazing rituals, character actresses Joey Lauren Adams and Christine Harnos as two different popular girls, Affleck-collaborator Rory Cochrane as the king of the stoners, and a variety of other well-known actors in some of their best work. And the fact that these actors were all unknowns when filming this adds an ease (and a lack of ego) that make all the interactions feel incredibly authentic. You feel like they're all friends and have been friends - or at the very least, known each other - for years and years.

Wooderson offering up his iconic lines while standing outside of The Emporium.

There isn't a whole lot more to say about Dazed and Confused, yet I can talk about it endlessly. It's more of a frame of mind film than anything narrative. It's a feeling I get whenever I watch it that I can't describe. It proves that you can make interesting, fun, and engrossing cinema out of something that is incredibly ordinary and mundane (which, frankly, is what Linklater has done with a majority of his films). And it also proves that you can make a film where most of your characters are stoners and not make a stoner film. This film has a reputation (and was marketed as such, with the stupid "See It with a Bud" tagline) for being a druggy film, but there is nothing further from the truth. This film doesn't poke fun at the stoners or glorify weed in any way. Like everything else in the film, it's just something that's there, that's a part of life. And isn't showing life in all its imperfect glory what art is all about?