If the best high-school movie is obviously the one that takes place during the years you attended high school, then why do I—class of ’92—think the best high-school movie might be Dazed and Confused, set in 1976?
Written and directed by Richard Linklater (Slacker, Before Sunrise, Boyhood), Dazed and Confused came out in 1993; while I saw and liked it then, the movie has only grown in my estimation since—even after watching the likes of The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, Cooley High, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, Mean Girls, Lady Bird, and Booksmart. This is a nostalgic, yet deeply nuanced, consideration of an essential American pastime that doubles as a treatise on the American experiment as a whole.
An ensemble movie, Dazed and Confused nevertheless circles—like the Pontiac GTO that slinks through the parking lot to the buzzy beginning of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”—around eighth grader Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins). Mitch spends his last day of school trying to dodge the high-school bullies who “welcome” incoming freshmen with a vicious paddling, all as part of a merciless initiation rite. After enduring his beating, Mitch is invited to tag along with the older kids on a school’s-out-for-summer night of cruising, playing pool, and partying.
Along the way Mitch encounters Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), the star quarterback who begins to question his personal autonomy when asked to sign a team pledge of good conduct; Slater (Rory Cochrane), the resident pothead, living life one toke at a time; Michelle (Milla Jovovich), his companion, who has a memorably intense moment with a lighter; O’Bannion (Ben Affleck), one of the more alarmingly invested brutes with a paddle; Darla (Parker Posey), a high-school cheerleader intent on issuing the eighth-grade girls their own form of punishment; Kaye (Christine Harnos), whose dissection of “Gilligan’s Island” as a male fantasy is one of the film’s more ingenious monologues; and Mike (Adam Goldberg), an anxious nerd who comes to the realization that he doesn’t want to be an ACLU lawyer but party instead (he promptly gets beaten up). There are plenty of others—all pitch-perfect in their roles—but the one who must also be mentioned is Wooderson: Matthew McConaughey’s serpentine prowler, who has graduated from high school years ago but still hangs around the pool hall under this mantra: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”
Like most of those high-school movies I mentioned above, Dazed and Confused distinguishes itself because it looks upon its characters with understanding—understanding that their foibles come from the fact that they’re at a stage of life when they’re still trying to figure life out. (Whether or not this should be extended to the fully adult Wooderson is debatable.) When Mitch, prompted by the upperclassmen, throws a bowling ball through the back window of a car, we understand that he’s just trying to prove himself. When Randall—smoking the last wisps of the night away with a small circle of friends in the middle of the footbal field—says, “If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” we understand that he’s not trying to dismiss his friends or their worth, but recognizing that even he, the football star, shouldn’t be defined by these four years.
Let’s return to the year the movie takes place: 1976, the United States bicentennial. With sly camerawork and clever visual details—something Linklater doesn’t always get enough credit for—the movie continually reminds us of that historical context. Consider the slight pan away from Slater, who has been skittishly outlining his plan to score drugs, that reveals the Uncle Sam mural on the hallway wall has been defaced to give him bloodshot eyes. For these relatively privileged kids in middle-class Texas, the land of the free is both a blessing and a curse, something they feel in their bones even if they can’t exactly articulate it. (Notice when Mitch and the guys are on their binge of destruction, one of the mailboxes that gets obliterated is painted to resemble the American flag.) These kids are hardly oppressed, as one of them even points out, but they are boxed in by the insistence—even after the social tumult of the 1960s—that America never change, that it remain “great” (or perhaps “great again”). For someone like Randall, this can make it feel as if his life—and perhaps 1970s America as a whole—had stalled; it’s why that piece of paper he refuses to sign has an existential weight.
Is living in the United States something like being stuck in high school? Because of its bicentennial setting, Dazed and Confused suggests that might be the case. With its unlikely melding of cliques and even races (Jason O. Smith plays another bully, but the fact that he’s Black goes unmentioned), the movie offers something of a melting-pot dream, an idealistic vision for America. At the same time, a teacher reminds them, as the final bell rings for the year, that “when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.” In Dazed and Confused, that legacy is felt in the provincialism of the expectations placed on Randall, to say nothing of the routine beatings administered to kids. The United States gets older, but even as of 2023, its fundamental flaws stay the same.
(9/14/2023)
