Dazed and Confused at 30

• Year Released: 1993

• Runtime: 103 Minutes

• Directed: Richard Linklater

• Produced: Richard Linklater, Sean Daniel, James Jacks, Ann Walker-McBay

• Starring: Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Matthew McConaughey, Rory Cochrane, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, Shawn Andrews, Adam Goldberg

• Oscars:

  • Won: None.

  • Nominated: None. But what do they know?

• IMDb Plot Summary: The adventures of high school and junior high students on the last day of school in May 1976.

The Daze of High School. Dazed and Confused is one of the most brilliant high school movies ever made because of its fidelity to the experience of being in high school. Despite taking place in the summer of 1976, the movie remains accessible to modern viewers by tapping into universal ideas about being the age of the characters. The movie doesn’t pass explicit judgement on Wooderson, freshmen hazing rituals, underage drinking, or drug use, and it doesn’t need to. This isn’t the kind of movie where one of the characters dies because of drunk driving or gets mixed up in criminality or the kind of hard drugs that would ruin their life. This also isn’t a John Hughes, Breakfast Club-esque movie where the jocks and the nerds are at war, and any crossing of the fabricated boundaries of social tribe is unheard of because Linklater believes, as I do, that that’s not the reality of high school. People run in different circles, sure, but besides a little behind-the-back talk here and there people generally respected each other. This movie succeeds because of its relatability, even if you didn’t attend this specific school in this specific town in this specific time. Remember the things that you cared about in high school? Did you ever feel a little lost in those four years? Ever say the slightly wrong thing, and have your friends pounce on you for it? Richard Linklater is inviting you to bring it all to the table and both laugh at its absurdity and wistfully yearn for it by showing you his memories and making them feel so euphoric. He calls you to pay attention by using slow motion to highlight all the details that were the biggest things in his life at the time – striking someone out in baseball, taking a beating from the seniors, being brought into their hangout spot as their guest, and the list goes on. It’s a brilliant trick that this movie’s specificity can evoke a universality of experience with its audience.

Ok. Less about the how, and more about the what, because watching this movie isn’t reading some pointy-headed essay about the social dynamics and fraught emotions of high school and how they never change, even if the specific trappings do. This movie is an absolute delight to revisit, and I don’t use the word “euphoric” lightly in the previous paragraph – I’ve got a smile on my face during this movie’s entire runtime, because it’s just too much fun. Linklater coats this film in the perfect soundtrack entirely comprised of songs that would be playing at the time. Some sequences of this movie play out like a music video in the perfect way, and it’s in those moments when the film hits like nothing else. It’s the perfect point of view movie, because what’s happening onscreen are the moments that the characters care about the most, be it walking into a pool hall full of your friends at the start of a memorable night, or enjoying the wind down of a great party, or trying to extend the feeling as far as you can into the next day. By filming it like he does and using the music that he does, he lets the audience participate in the highs of those moments, but he’s also successful in creating highs out of the scary times in high school, be they fears of a social faux pas, the fear that you’ve just started a fist fight that you can’t win, or the fear that the trouble you’ve just caused might get you killed. In this movie, Linklater turns it all into the thrills that are just one of the highs he’s providing every time you put this movie on. Another high is this movie’s outstanding comedy, which runs the gamut from slapstick to ironic to dialogue driven. Ultimately, this movie’s laid-back attitude suggests that all these forms of highs are the stuff of life, and aren’t just worth looking back on fondly, but worth re-experiencing vicariously, and that’s what I seek out every time I put Dazed on.

Linklater’s Legacy. I think that the key character of the film isn’t Jason London’s Randall Floyd, but in fact it’s Wiley Wiggins’ Mitch Kramer. Richard Linklater played both baseball and football in high school, but ultimately went to Sam Houston State University to play baseball. In 2016, he released an excellent spiritual successor to this film, Everybody Wants Some!! about a freshman baseball player who’s just moved to college in the early 80’s, which would put him closer to Mitch age-wise than to the seniors of this film. If you look at it that way, both this movie and Everybody Wants Some!! are effectively odes to the guys just a few years older than him who molded him into the man he became.

With his recent film for Netflix, Apollo 10 ½, Richard Linklater entered his fifth decade of making movies, and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Tarantino, either Wes or P.T. Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and the Coen Brothers in terms of seminal filmmakers who broke out in the 80’s and 90’s. In 2001, Soderbergh won a Best Director Oscar for directing 2000’s Traffic; Linklater remains Oscarless. He has five films to his name that are downright beloved, and plenty more that deserve to be: Dazed and Confused, The “Before” Trilogy, and Boyhood. It's worth noting that his films, despite some unconventional approaches, are conventionally entertaining to watch. The dialogue is always excellent and often funny, and he works in recognizable genres: rom-coms, romantic drama, family drama, etc. Though, it all started with his coming-of-age film and his most entertaining, Dazed and Confused. The movie struggled to earn back its modest budget at the box office, but persistent word of mouth translated into strong home video sales and countless rewatches turning it into THE cult movie. Retroactively, it fits right in with the same indie boom that created Reservoir Dogs, which was similarly underseen in its time. Just like Dogs, the legend of this movie grew throughout the 90’s as its filmmaker and cast branched out, and some even became all-time stars.

The Cast’s Legacy. The movie’s loose, mosaic nature prompted Linklater to fill out his cast with a young ensemble of performers, and it’s to the film’s credit that none were true stars in 1993. The movie gives several different actors significant speaking parts and character arcs that give the entire ensemble of performers a chance to shine. Dazed is stuffed with recognizable faces, and though many of these actors’ stars shine a little less brightly in 2023 than they did in 1998, this cast is still pointed to as a seminal introduction of a new wave of acting talent. I also think that it lends the film even more authenticity that not everyone went on to superstardom, and that some barely rose above their work in this film, which with a few exceptions is almost uniformly perfect. I’m not a huge fan of Wiley Wiggin’s performance in that he is constantly clearly out-acted by everyone around him, but it also works for his character to be constantly out of place – remember being 14?

To name a few of my favorite actors and characters that are likely best remembered for their work in this film, and never really seemed to top it: Shawn Andrews as Kevin Pickford, whose party gets busted before it can even begin and spends the night driving his friends and girlfriend around; Michelle Burke as Jodi Kramer, who inadvertently dooms her little brother Mitch to torment from the now-seniors and makes a serious move on Randall; Christine Harnos as Kaye Faulkner, who unloads a terrific theory about Gilligan’s Island in the movie’s opening minutes; and Jason O. Smith as Melvin Spivey, who makes every interaction he’s a part of feel much more vibrant and alive.

To name a few who you would definitely recognize from other projects in the 90’s: Adam Goldberg as the nervy and brainy Mike Newhouse, who just wants one crazy night and gets one; Joey Lauren Adams as Simone Kerr, who’s nominally dating Randall Floyd but their relationship feels a little strained from the first scene; Rory Cochrane as Slater, perhaps the most iconic of on-screen stoners with some iconic thoughts about Martha Washington and aliens; Cole Hauser as Benny O’Donnell, loyal teammate and thrill-seeker; Sasha Jensen as Don Dawson, who’s up for anything because he wants to “do high school the best he can”; and Jason London as Randall Floyd, the closest thing this film has to an anchor who is beloved by all his classmates yet feels conflicted about fully submitting to his football coach and is in search for answers and inspiration just like we all were at 17.

And finally, there are a couple of all-time, bona fide movie stars in supporting roles in this movie that are a genuine shock to see so young: Ben Affleck (yes, that Ben Affleck) as the near-maniacal Fred O’Bannion, obsessed with hazing the new rising freshmen; Parker Posey as Darla Marks, essentially the O’Bannion of the senior girls who steals the movie for the five minutes in which she’s leading their hazing ritual; Milla Jovovich as the artistic and always stoned Michelle Burroughs; and of course, Matthew McConaughey as the troublesome-yet-untroubled David Wooderson, an adult who spends his time partying with high schoolers who launches the film in a completely new and exciting direction when he shows up embodying the movie’s idea to just keep L-I-V-I-N and let the good times roll.