Viking Night: Dazed and Confused
By Bruce Hall
October 13, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
When I was a youngster growing up in suburban North Dallas, I had it pretty good. I enjoyed a comfortable middle class upbringing, I received the best education the public school system had to offer (which at that time was actually kind of good), and thanks to my environment, I had access to the sorts of adolescent hijinks that you usually only see in movies. Do you remember those John Hughes flicks from the '80s, where some kid would throw a wild party in his parents' 6,000 square foot house while they were in Europe? The place would get wrecked, nobody would call the police and somehow everything was back to normal when Mom and Dad got home? Well, these things really happened where I grew up. But despite those white collar surroundings, I can tell you that even in the most affluent parts of Texas there remains a rural aesthetic that unites even the most reluctant segments of culture from top to bottom. I have never owned a gun, driven a pickup or been to a rodeo, I don’t believe in the death penalty and I’d never send a six-year-old to a beauty pageant. But there really is something different about Texas, and I’m very proud to have grown up there. I just can’t help it.
I can also tell you that as a high school student in Texas, you have experiences that are somehow larger than life, but still pretty familiar to most kids across America. You drive for the first time. You fumble around with the opposite sex. You find creative ways to get beer. You hang around in video arcades – oops – I dated myself. Idle young boys engage themselves in petty vandalism and pointless acts of civil disobedience, such as trashing the school on the last day of class.
As a freshman you are often hazed relentlessly, although by my time it was mostly verbal. But being the Lone Star State, there were a handful of bonus features. Football was God, and so were the boys who played it. Good grades were encouraged, although intellectualism itself was looked upon with hostile suspicion. And there was always…always that one guy at the end of the block who graduated three years ago but still hung around the high school, prowling the streets in his tricked out Camaro Z28 and handing out beer at all the parties. In many ways I grew up inside a movie, and in many ways that make me glad my parents do not read this column, that movie was Dazed and Confused.
Richard Linklater’s freewheeling adolescent boozefest centers around three groups of friends in Austin, Texas on the last day of school in the summer of 1976. Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) and his friends Don (Sasha Jenson), Benny (Cole Hauser), O’Bannion (Ben Affleck) and Melvin (Jason O. Smith) are about to enter their senior year. As members of the football team they pretty much have the run of the school socially and can do no wrong. But this year, the party might be over – they have been required by their coach to sign a “morality pledge” for their senior campaign. Pink enjoys hanging out with his crew, boozing it up, smoking weed and chasing girls, so needless to say, he’s more than a little conflicted about being a role model.
At the bottom of the food chain, young Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) and his friends Carl (Esteban Powell) and John (Jeremy Fox) are incoming freshmen. By tradition, the seniors spend the summer chasing the incoming "frosh" with paddles, welcoming them to high school with a good old fashioned beating. The younger kids are expected to play along good naturedly but Mitch wants no part of this ritual for himself or his friends. As a result, he butts heads with the seniors, particularly the sadistic O’Bannion.
In the middle of all this are a handful of juniors to be – Mike (Adam Goldberg), Tony (Anthony Rapp) and Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi) are all brainy, analytical types who question authority as readily as the older kids yet despise the established pecking order as much as the freshmen do. They fret and scowl about the insular fishbowl that is adolescence, but they dispense judgment from the social periphery, just as eager as everyone else to find a way in. It’s really no different from any high school; despite where they are on the totem pole every kid wants the same thing every other kid wants – to be accepted for who they are.
The one exception might be Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey, in perhaps his greatest role). He’s the sleazy cradle robber in the Camaro I mentioned who should serve as the poster child for lazy parenting. His tight pants, over the top muscle car and porn star moustache serve as comic relief, but he’s also a walking public service announcement; the sort of rudderless punk YOUR kid could become if you don’t put your foot down. So on this, the last night of school, each child is about to embark on the next chapter of their lives and together they discover how much fun it can be, how scary it often is and how none of them really all that different. They all drink, smoke pot, and cruise around in their cars breaking things and making a lot of noise for no reason. They’re all just children, trying to figure out how life works.
Needless to say, this isn’t exactly the first film to open the lid on being a teenager and take a peek inside. But what makes Dazed and Confused a little different than most is that it spends absolutely none of its running time glamorizing or rhapsodizing about the teenage condition. The kids aren’t portrayed as valiant martyrs, fighting back against the oppressive, insensitive monolith of Adult Supervision. This movie is not trying to tell us that the hardest things you’re ever going to do, the greatest struggles you’re ever going to face will be from 8:30 to 3:30, five days a week between the ages of 13 and 19.
The characters in this story are almost caricatures of themselves – they’re a bunch of aimless suburban kids who think that having lots of free time to drink beer, take drugs and complain about their comfortable lives constitutes hardship. If anything, Dazed and Confused is less a coming of age film as it is a hilarious indictment of the offspring of middle class America. It’s the funny side of what can happen to an entire generation when they’re given more than they’ve earned and have never had to work hard, be challenged or set goals for themselves.
Considering all this, plus the timing of its release, it would be easy to consider Dazed and Confused a postcard to Generation X. But as with many teen films, the themes it explores are pretty universal because well, growing up is pretty universal. In fact, the whole film is itself much like the randy mind of an adolescent. It’s a very unstructured, chaotic, colorful and loud experience, set to the same jaunty classic rock soundtrack you can find on any FM dial between 99.1 and 106.5. The climax of the story takes place at an outdoor keg party where most of the subplots converge and then explode into nothingness, largely unresolved and unexplored. I have to say that it really is a fairly accurate representation of what was going on in my own head when I was 17 – lots of activity but very little resolution. But adolescence is an obligatory life experience, not a problem to be solved, because there really aren’t any answers.
Dazed and Confused is about exploring just one day of this transition in the lives of some pretty insignificant people, and if it weren’t a comedy it might be kind of sad. But a comedy it is, and its lack of direction is part of what makes feel so real for so many people. Despite its lack of box office success, it has managed to become a part of the culture it set out to lampoon and it has taken its place alongside such youth classics as American Graffiti and The Breakfast Club.
As I’ve already suggested, though, the primary difference between those movies and this one is that Dazed and Confused doesn’t attempt to teach us any lessons and it makes no effort to paint teenage angst as anything other than it is – just another phase of life. It’s not different, it’s not special and it certainly isn’t unique. In fact it’s quite possible that as a child, if I’d put more effort into doing something cool instead of wishing everyone thought I was cool, I might actually have been cool. It’s not that hard, all you need is a little guidance and a lot of love.
As teens, it’s natural for us to think that our lives are more complicated than they are and that we’re trapped inside our own heads with feelings that nobody can understand. And it’s normal to assume that the reason for it all is because our individuality is being suppressed by the adults around us, who can’t possibly understand how we feel because they’ve never been teenagers before. But when we’re that young what we – and often our parents – fail to understand is that those years seem so difficult only because we’re trying to reconcile emotion with intellect for the first time in our lives, and it always seems like the hardest thing in the world the first time you go through it. Believe me, if I could go back and tell my 16-year-old self that no, this is actually the easy part, I would. But that’s what the wisdom of age brings to the table. While being a teenager sometimes sucks, we all have to do it and if more of us adults were any good at channeling our own experiences as a teen when dealing with kids, there might be a lot fewer conflicted 16-year-olds in the world. And parents across America could take that European vacation secure in the knowledge that when they return, the Porsche will still be in the driveway and the Jackson Pollock will still be hanging over the fireplace. In the end, I think that’s all every parent wants.