Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater’s third feature Dazed and Confused opened in theaters 30 years ago September 24 — and closed not too much later. It took a while to become the beloved cult comedy it is now, but it’s in the canon — literally, it’s in the Criterion Collection — and the more years pass, the more touching it seems. Watching it as a 23-year-old back in 1994, when it hit video, I didn’t grasp the film’s wistfulness, its borderline melancholia. But it’s there. The then-31-year-old Linklater takes us back to 1976, when he was sixteen, and he gets a great deal of what’s in the air when kids are looking at their last year in high school. I was too young in ’76 to know whether Dazed and Confused is faithful to the details of being in high school then, but it feels authentic. It’s authentic whenever. At the end, when a few of the kids hop in a car the morning after a party to go snag Aerosmith tickets, I guarantee you you’ve been in that car. In 1976, 1986, whenever.

If the movie has a hero, or throughline character, it’s probably the freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), who’s clearly Linklater’s avatar. Mitch drifts through the action, taken under various seniors’ wings. There is bullying and a thriving hazing environment in this small-town Texas community, and some not-terribly-progressive views of sex and women, and Linklater acknowledges that. The senior girls are always chastising the boys for being pigs. Most of Dazed and Confused is a collective portrait, moving from group to group, from pool hall to party to bedrooms where kids just get stoned. (There’s no sex in the film, but a lot of talk about it.) It’s the last day of school, and we follow various kids as they make their way to one party that never happens and then another that gets organized in a hurry.

Despite the bullies, the prevailing mood is fellowship and good cheer. Mitch is due to be paddled as part of the hazing, and Linklater gets that out of the way fast so Mitch (and we) won’t have to spend the movie dreading the paddling. Linklater doesn’t really divide the kids by social cliques. Some of the boys are football players, but that’s Texas high school. Other than that, it seems to be a mix of kids who mostly get along, with weed and beer as their glue. Linklater films the kids hanging out, some of them knowing it won’t get better than this. The moral center of the jocks, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), Linklater’s other avatar here, even says that if anyone catches him saying these were the best years of his life, remind him to kill himself. But the movie’s vibe is warm and good-natured, and we feel welcomed along with Mitch into the world of the cool older kids.

There’s one thread of plot having to do with a pledge the jocks are expected to sign that they won’t get high. Pink refuses to sign, for reasons he’s barely able to articulate. Nobody gets any big speeches; the most quotable character is ol’ Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey, right at the beginning of it all) with his bit about getting older while high-school girls stay the same age. The way McConaughey plays Wooderson, though, he comes off less a sketchy statutory rapist than a guy who’s still, in his heart, a high-school senior and always will be. Linklater doesn’t rely on dialogue; we fill in the blanks of what’s not said, deducing, for instance, that Ben Affleck’s manically outraged two-time senior O’Bannion is nursing deep regrets and pain that he tries to work out by paddling the living shit out of freshmen.

I suppose it would take a woman who went to high school in the ‘70s to make a Dazed and Confused from the girls’ point of view, but Linklater, while kind of staying in his white-male lane, does well by the girls. He gets a vivid performance from Parker Posey as Darla, the senior who adores being sadistic to the freshman girls; he also has a habit of lingering on one girl or another for a few beats so we can sense their boredom or exasperation with the boys — or their interest in them. The wall-to-wall needle-drop soundtrack does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, giving the whole movie the tempo and mood of a breezy car ride on a mild summer night. It’s a beauty of a film and an instant pick-me-up, but with enough sad insight to recognize that the moments that shine the most fade the quickest.

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I didn’t quite have the right place to get this in, but it occurs to me with a chill that Dazed and Confused is now almost twice as many years past as the year 1976 was when the film came out. It is 30 years old, and when it came out in 1993, 1976 was only 17 years in the rearview (but seemed so much longer ago). 1976 is now, of course, of the Late Cretaceous Epoch.

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