Dazed and Confused
June 18, 2006
Has there ever been a movie that so perfectly blends the shackle-free rebelliousness of Rock ‘n’ Roll songs with the everyday mundane of getting through life than Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused”? Sure “Forrest Gump” uses classic rock gems like “Freebird” during a drug freak out, and “Against the Wind” to suggest a kind of eternal beauty and freedom, and “Almost Famous”, perhaps the only modern movie to even come close to rivaling Linklater’s teenage opus for rock song perfection, uses melodramatic Elton John masterpieces in times of personal character struggle and crisis, but only ‘Dazed’, itself named after, or in part from, a famous Led Zeppelin classic, tells its story through music, not as soundtrack filler, but as the soundtrack to basic human existence, and what we do with that existence, whilst our time drags on infinitum. The story could be told without the songs, for it’s a universal study in teenagers being teenagers on the last day of school, that great moment when you know an entire summer beckons at your doorstep, but what good would the final school bell mayhem be without Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”, or for that matter, the final Junior High social without “Love Hurts”? So perfectly do these songs match their scenes, and their symbolically chosen lyrics match the characters motivations (no school = freedom; adolescent love = torturous longing), that it would seem inconceivable to think of the scenes without the accompanying standards, which is one of the reasons “Dazed and Confused” has remained a cult classic for the 13 years since its limited release in ’93, because everywhere you go in your own life music is ever present, but only with the magic of coincidence does “A Hard Day’s Night” play you home from a grueling double shift at the mill. In Linklater’s ode to 1976, partying, the philosophy of growing up, and the philosophy of marijuana as the all time teenage drug of recreational choice, something as innocuously meaningless as “Lowrider” can come to symbolize the bond between car, man, and unrestricted freedom, while something as politically potent as Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” can come to stand for the inner politics, and social structure, of a crowded night at the local pool hall. In Dylan’s epic Rubin Carter gets railroaded by the Man and pinned with a triple murder he probably didn’t commit, and though he wouldn’t exactly get the top game with the school bullies and jocks at the pool hall, he’d certainly fit in with the roustabouts, misunderstood misanthropes, and potheads hangin’ on the curb beneath Main Street’s glowing neon lights, and a wafting cloud of white, magic smoke.
“Dazed and Confused”, recently released by the Criterion Collection on a two-disk special edition DVD, takes place in a 24-hour span on the last day of school in 1976, the year of the country’s bicentennial, as evidenced by the countless flag images scattered throughout Linklater’s Austin backdrop to remind us that celebration and ritual come hand in hand with being a proud, red-blooded American. The celebration in the film is, of course, the last day of school, and the ritual, beside the dope smoking and nighttime keggers, is the hazing the juniors exact on the incoming freshman, a rite of passage that includes, for the girls, a humiliating series of public embarrassments by the soon-to-be senior girls involving catsup, mustard, and degradation (to the tune of “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”), and for the boys, a rich paddling of the behind by the cruel, spiteful senior boys, played, naturally, to Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy”. There is no specific plot to the movie, much like Linklater’s first film, the free form independent landmark “Slacker”, it moves from one scene to the next by dropping in on a handful of high school character types you’d undoubtedly remember from your own experiences; the popular quarterback (Jason London) who has an in with both the geeks and the jocks, the drunken bully (Ben Affleck) who has anger issues, the kind intellectual (Anthony Rapp) and his nervous best friend (Adam Goldberg), the town loser (Matthew McConaughey) who never seems to grow up, or lose interest in high school girls, the wimpy freshman (Wiley Wiggins) whose inclusion in the older kid’s party is some kind of awkward miracle, and the hopeless, hysterical stoner (Rory Cochrane, who shows up in Linklater’s new film “A Scanner Darkly” as a hopeless, not-so-hilarious heroine addict), who really has no purpose in life other than securing, rolling, and ingesting as many joints as possible in one 24-hour span. If you can’t find yourself, or your high school best friend, in any one of these characters, or their fringe acquaintances throughout the 100-minute movie, than you just weren’t paying enough attention.
There are personal dramas in the film, like the quarterback’s reluctance to sign the coach’s no drugs policy sheet before senior year starts, and the freshman’s awkward attempts to fit in with the older crowd that has accepted him for the night, but mostly “Dazed and Confused” is simply nostalgia about the teenage experience of unwinding after a long school year, before college, and the real world inevitably sneaks up, with its weight of responsibility, and the realization that most problems, post high school, probably can’t be fixed with a bong and a half dozen half kegs. But when you’re 17, going on what should be the best summer of your life, it’s not that bad, as McConaughey says in the film’s most famous bit of slacker wisdom, “You just gotta keep on livin’, L-I-V-I-N.” And when you’re livin’ is to the closing tune of “Slow Ride”, your end-of-the-year kegger is energized by the likes of “Rock & Roll All Nite” and “I Was in the Right Place”, and your drunken nightly wind-down is no more poetic than Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”, than your life, as tough as it may be, or become, is at least set to the tune of some truly great classic Rock ‘n’ Roll, and for this, “Dazed and Confused” will continue to remain one of the best pseudo rock opera nostalgia pieces of all time.
“Dazed and Confused” has been released by the Criterion Collection with a wealth of extras, including a director’s commentary track, a 50-minute documentary, a 71-page booklet, and over two-hours of supplemental material.
by Adam
Suraf