Here’s a quote I lifted from another critic: “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?”
Being class of ‘78 myself and having lived it, I mostly agree—it absolutely nails the time period, zeitgeist, fashion, hairstyles, cars, high school cliques, and takes the cultural temperature with authenticity. “Dazed and Confused” was my high school experience exactly. Except for the shop class-manufactured wooden paddles with which seniors whack incoming freshman in a summer-long hazing ritual.
But many people, regardless of age, have said the same thing about “Dazed and Confused,” and that’s because high school doesn’t change much; it lives in it’s own time-space dimension. This revelation is nowhere more hilariously captured than by Matthew McConaughey’s borderline creep and former football star, Wooderson; one of those guys like John Milner in “American Grafitti” who continue to hang around the high school years after they graduate, hitting on girls, and refusing to grow up. As Wooderson puts it, “That’s what I like about these high school girls, man. I keep gettin' older ... and they just stay the same age.” Every American town with a high school’s got a Wooderson or two. I remember five of them.
The Loser ‘70s
Americans who came of age in the ’70s have always thought they were born a decade too late; and that the coolest decade of all was clearly the ’60s with its back-to-the land communes, Jefferson Airplane, acid trips, “Tune in, turn on, and drop out,” Woodstock, Janis and Jimi, peace signs, headbands, hip-huggers, and love-ins.
The 1970s was when the hippie culture of the ‘60s cool kids diluted and dispersed to the masses, leading to bell-bottomed three-piece polyester suits, platform shoes, porn ’staches, chocolate-brown shag rugs, lava lamps, eight-track cassette decks, olive-colored moc-toe bluchers and other amusing fashion statements, disco, Michelin Man down vests, “feathered” hair, puka shells, AMC Pacers, and keg parties.
High-schoolers in the 1970s felt a prolonged, anticlimactic, cynical hangover from the 1960s’ euphoria. They felt deflated, disenfranchised, sold out, and distrustful. The ‘70s seemed like a decade to be endured until the arrival of the ’80s (one hoped, as does a “Dazed” character at a keg party), not a decade to actually enjoy. Except for maybe Led Zeppelin, weed, Bruce Lee, Mark Spitz, and Billy Jack. And everywhere were vehement signs stating “Disco Sucks!”
The Non-Plot
Similar to his prior film “Slacker,” “Dazed and Confused” just meanders around the last day of school for Texas’s Lee High school and junior high. Teachers can barely contain the kids wanting to explode out of the school doors:
Doomed Freshman and Senior Jocks
To the tune of Alice Cooper hollering “No more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks,” junior high kids flee the schools grounds by bus, bike, and foot to avoid the incoming whackings. Big sister Jodi (Michelle Burke) inadvertantly seals her kid brother Mitch’s doom by asking the evilly grinning football seniors to take it easy on him.
But Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) has to pitch that evening’s baseball game, and the bloodthirsty seniors show up and rattle the fences and instill terror; especially left-back-twice, über-bully Fred O'Bannion (Ben Affleck in the role that made him famous). If the freshmen lose the ballgame, the beatings will be significantly worse.
Nursing extremely sore buns, Mitch is driven home by Randall “Pink” Floyd,“ the senior quarterback. Mitch is the younger version of Pink, and both are avatars of director Richard Linklater himself. We see in the hazing ritual, the last American remnants of the now long-lost tribal boyhood-to-manhood rites of passage: The seniors abuse the freshman and then welcome them into the fold of jock coolness by inviting them out for beers later after they’ve had time to acquaint themselves with ice-packs. Also, some girl advice: ”It‘d be cool to show up and let ’em know it doesn’t bother you.”
The Girls
While the male seniors mete out ritual violence, the girls are forced by the female seniors to lay out in the school parking lot, be sprayed with ketchup, mustard, eggs, and flour, before getting collectively car-washed in the back of a pickup truck.
The Nerds
Meanwhile, the nerd trio of Mike (Adam Goldberg), Tony (Anthony Rapp), and Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi) drive around suburbia aimlessly, listening to the radio, with nothing to do, as teens having been doing in America since the 1950s.
The Car Guys
There’s the 1970s’ ubiquitous parking lot muscle car gathering, where, with the hood up, Wooderson brags on his 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS to greaser Clint (Nicky Katt):
Wooderson: “Let me tell you what Melba Toast is packing right here: I got four-eleven Posi-track out back, 750 double pumper; Edelbrock intake; bored-over-30, 11-to-one pop-up pistons; Turbo jet; 390 horse power—we’re talking some ---- muscle.” Clint: “I know you got this thing out of a comic book, I seen the ad, right next to the Sea Monkeys.”
The Moon Tower
If there’s a monologue that succinctly sums up 70s’ high school in general and “Dazed and Confused” in particular, the honor would have to go Slater’s massively stoned monologue: “The whole country back then was getting high (when George Washington was president). Let me tell you man, ‘cos, ’cos, ‘cos—he knew. He was on to something, man. He knew that it would be a good cash-crop for the Southern states, man. So he grew fields of it, man. But you know what? Behind every good man there’s a woman. And that woman was Martha Washington, man. And every day, George would come home—she'd have a big, fat, bowl waiting for him, man, when he'd come in the door, man. She was hip, hip, hip lady, man.”
To Sum Up
Things that ‘70s’ kids hated at the time—Seals & Crofts’s FM-lite kitsch “Summer Breeze, makes me feel fine, playing like the jazz-man in my mind”—feel nostalgic, sweet, and relatively uncorrupted in “Dazed.” There was as of yet no crack or Prince singing about AIDS as in the 1980s, no 1990s’ meth, or 2010s’ opioid epidemic. None of that yet. The ’60s and ‘70s were still relatively innocent.“Dazed and Confused” has become a beloved American cult class because it’s arguably one of the best coming-of-age films in the pantheon of America’s obsession with high school movies. “Dazed” is aimless because the characters are aimless. By being technically about nothing at all, it truly captures the modern American teenage experience, which includes the boredom and suffocation of small-town life.
It’s a bittersweet pill regarding a time of slightly higher moral values. Bittersweet because “Dazed and Confused” implies that high school is just the party veneer hiding the bleaker American reality that spawned the F. Scott Fitzgerald phrase: “There are no second acts in American lives.” American high school is often the first and only act. As it was for Wooderson. It’s become a cult classic because it’s this underlying hint to seize the day that moves one to re-watch this film repeatedly.
