Consider this: it’s been longer from the release of “Dazed and Confused” to now than it was between the film’s release almost 20 years ago and the time which it was set. To audiences of the 90s and afterwards, “Dazed and Confused” is more than just one of the great teen comedies, although it absolutely is. It’s also, hands down, as influential as any film in influencing the way modern audiences who weren’t around for the 1970s remember them. Dominick Suzanne-Mayer said in his review, “It’s a piece of the pop cultural lexicon that’s achieved an influence greater than itself, all while defining the “hangout comedy” while also being one of the most easygoing examples of the form.”
Suzanne-Mayer continued, “But to wax poetic for too long is to look past what’s made Dazed and Confused so endearing over time, more than anything: the slice-of-life, everyday commonality of its tone, story, and filmmaking. The follow-up to Richard Linklater‘s auspicious 1991 debut Slacker, Dazed and Confused took that film’s sprawling Austin eccentricity and rewound the clocks back to the mid-’70s, before technology became omnipresent and Jimmy Carter validated America’s anxieties regarding the nation’s uncertain future.” Linklater’s film occasionally looked at the outside world, but it’s only in outer ways, the ones that matter in high school. Alpha male cruelty. Love desperation and anxiety. Worries about the unknown future that’ll inevitably drain the enjoyable present. It’s also about the funny, desperate, embarrassing, memorable stuff that happens in between everything, but it’s there, and scary in a little more each day.
However, first, it’s 1976. Before the various criminals of “Dazed and Confused” go off to cruise the streets, break down mailboxes, and not forget that you’re celebrating a group of white males not wanting to pay their taxes on the 4th, it’s the last day of school. Suzanne-Mayer said, “Linklater’s film breathlessly dives in from this moment on, never stopping for hoary plot contrivances or adult interference (they barely exist in this Austin) on the roads to nowhere in particular, with the right tunes and the right buds. In addition to Foghat‘s “Slow Ride” becoming the U.S. national anthem of laying back and smoking a joint thanks to Wiley Wiggins‘ final moment onscreen, a passing listen to modern-day classic rock radio will cement just how many of the films have been entrenched in the national consciousness thanks to Linklater.” Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Aerosmith, Peter Frampton, Steve Miller, and a lot of other bands managed to connect the first major generational gap through Linklater making them universal, and timeless.
That timelessness carries over to the film at most. It’s no accident that some of the film’s best-remembered lines are made while driving around town in search of something to do, or loitering outside different nightlife areas and liquor stores and high schools. Suzanne-Mayer noted, “Dazed and Confused, in its rambling way, captures one of the things that all people actually miss most about youth: the ability to be completely aimless, at least here and there, without any kind of consequence. There’s an air of immortality that goes hand in hand with youth, a notion that sitting in the back of your friend’s car and blasting some tunes and messing around is as grand and important as life will ever get. It’s untrue in most ways, and it’s unwise to get stuck in that place as time passes on, but you always yearn for it even when you know it’s unattainable. Like so much of Linklater’s best work, the film is profound through its being deliberately unassuming. It’s sincere without being dopey, honest without being mean, optimistic without being oblivious of how hard the future can be.” Life can’t stay this way forever, but it’ll never be this easy again.
Importantly, the movie also remembers that life isn’t as easy from time to time, whether it’s in Pink (Jason London) finding out that people have expectations and demands of him won’t end with high school, or in guys like O’Bannion (Ben Affleck) who’ve grown early and won’t be sober enough to realize it for far too many years. Linklater’s screenplay clearly knows who the heroes and villains are, but it doesn’t necessarily attack any of them. Every character in a great Linklater movie has a clever inner life, and “Dazed and Confused” separates itself from so many cliched high school stories of social castes clashing by harassing out those lives in little moments.
Suzanne-Mayer describes, “Talking to people who love Dazed and Confused is like watching them work through a Rorschach test. It offers such a wide swath of personalities that every audience member connects with their own facets of it, from the uncertain Mitch (Wiggins) to Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a charmer who’s slowly growing into a Texas burnout more and more conspicuously by the hour. Yet it also renders its tiny ecosystem with such earnest affection that you can’t help but be seduced by all of it, even the gross parts or the unpleasant ones.” Everybody has their own favorite part, because everybody can find at least of part of themselves in someone, somewhere in “Dazed and Confused.” After all, it’s the experience of the American teenager in miniature. We all just had to , or have to, keep living.
What everyone knows about this movie is the famous Matthew McConaughey line, “That’s what I love about these high school girls. I get older and they stay the same age.” Also, this is what made him famous for “Alright, alright, alright.” If you haven’t seen this film yet, you’re missing out. You should see this because I think everyone will find it relatable.
Next week I’m going to look at a comic book movie that people really bashed on, but I actually enjoyed, in “Ben Affleck Month.”
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