Introduction

This week we’re talking about Dazed and Confused. But before we get into it, I want to say thank you for checking out the Reels on Wheels Movie Club. If you don’t know what that is, I’m choosing one film a week to watch and dive into. I announce the Movie of the Week in advance so you can watch too, and I’m hoping to kick off a discussion by sharing my thoughts on the film.

We’ve spent the last few weeks in Austin, Texas, so I wanted to pick a film related to this place. Richard Linklater is probably the most well known Austin filmmaker. He even started the Austin Film Society back in 1985. I chose Dazed and Confused because it is Linklater’s classic coming-of-age comedy, and it also happened to be available on Hulu!

The film features an ensemble cast portraying a diverse set of high school personalities and cliques to broadly capture the sense of youth, mayhem, and angst associated with a typical small-town American high school experience. Linklater wrote and directed the film, drawing on his personal experience as a Texas high schooler in the 1970s.

Plot Summary

Set in 1976, Dazed and Confused centers on a group of high schoolers on the last day of school. The rising seniors are hazing the rising freshman. In particular, a group of rising seniors including the school’s quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), try to chase down a group of rising freshman including Mitch Cramer (Wiley Wiggins). The football players are also deciding whether to sign a pledge not to party, drink, or do drugs for the upcoming season. That night, many students meet up to party at a local pool hall and in the woods near a moontower. After his hazing, Mitch joins in on these parties. In the morning, Pink decides that he will not sign the pledge, even if he does play football in the coming season.

Setting: Austin or Anywhere, USA

As I mentioned earlier, we’re currently in Austin, where Dazed and Confused was filmed. In fact, at least some of the “Party at the Moontower” sequence was filmed at Walter E. Long Metropolitan Park, located just one minute down the road from our current campground!

The movie benefits greatly from filming around town at real locations, conveying the sense that these characters were real high school kids with real high school problems. It succeeds at portraying the Austin-area specifically, but also feels appropriately generic so it’s relatable to any one who grew up in a small town. Linklater’s humanist writing and style is amplified by setting these characters in recognizable places.

Having grown up in a small town myself, I can say that the setting of this film (as well as many of the personalities) felt very familiar. Dazed and Confused is over 25 years old and set in 1976, but there is certainly a through-line of the small town American experience that transcends many of the changes that have taken place over this time period. The film’s setting plays a role in this, but it’s the cast of characters we see on screen and their mostly hilarious interactions that form the core of this film.

Capturing that High School Feeling

Dazed and Confused is hard to capture in a plot summary because so much of what makes it great has nothing to do with the plot. There are some characters that are more like traditional protagonists, like Pink or Mitch, and some more like traditional antagonists, like the brutish O’Bannion (Ben Affleck) chasing down the underclassmen. But overall the movie tends to feel largely plotless – in a good way. After all, high school doesn’t have a set plotline.

What largely defines high school is different types of kids all growing up together. Sometimes that means butting heads, but sometimes that means coming together in unexpected ways. And Linklater does a great job of showing how these various groups – jocks, popular kids, intellectuals, stoners, partiers, upperclassman, underclassman, and more – can be distinguished but also overlap. He does so not by relying heavily on tropes that have become familiar in high school movies, but through clever writing and dialogue that have stood the test of time.

This movie is not grand. It’s not centered around anything particularly compelling. There’s not much in the way of significant motivation or character conflict beyond the hazing rituals and the decision about the pledge. But that’s also its strength. Many high school movies have the tendency to over-dramatize the experience. It’s tropes are pretty familiar – prom is the most important night of your life or it’s the football championship or graduation changing everything, to name a few.

By keeping the overarching stakes realistically inconsequential, Linklater keeps the audience’s focus on the personal. Just as in life, the high school experiences portrayed are really only important for these specific kids in these specific moments. And the slice-of-life shown here – just one day in these kids’ lives – allows us to go along for the ride with these characters acting as a conduit for the audience.

We don’t know any of the characters particularly well, but there are certainly enough for most people to relate to at least one. The movie transports you into this world, even for one fleeting, mayhem-filled day. And while some iconic moments and characters have pervaded pop culture, particularly Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson, by the end you’re left with mostly just a feeling – that high school feeling.

That’s what makes Dazed and Confused truly a cult classic that stands the test of time. Linklater manages to capture the high school experience genuinely while also infusing comedy at every turn. In a lighthearted way, the film deals with important themes associated with youth, like the difficulties of growing up, grappling with oncoming adulthood, and the impacts of the passage of time. It also portrays the mostly innocent fun of just being a kid muddling through your teenage years one way or another. Ultimately, as Wooderson says, “You just gotta keep livin’ man, L-I-V-I-N.”

But what did you think of Dazed and Confused? Did you find it relatable as a coming-of-age story? Let me know in the comments or @rvleaguers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Thanks again for checking out the Reels on Wheels Movie Club!