Movie: Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
With all the praise Richard Linklater has received for his intellectually curious and eloquent characters, it can sometimes be forgotten that there is also probably no better chronicler of youthful dumbassery. It's because he knows there are two ways of behaving when you don't yet know your place in the world, and aren't sure of how to find it in the first place. You can either go on philosophical tangents questioning the meaning of existence, art, love and knowledge, or you can throw a trash can out of a driving car. Dazed and Confused almost exclusively focuses on behavior of the second kind, exploring all the different reasons for teenage clowning. Some characters make a conscious decision to switch off their brain, to not miss a wild night. Others are insecure bored, nervous about meeting their crush, simply drunk, or a combination of all of this. It takes more than an hour until someone in the film has an actual conversation, but even that is just a minor respite in between scenes of high schoolers acting out, getting high, posturing, drinking, flirting, driving around, busting each other's balls and mostly hanging around aimlessly talking nonsense. What else should they do? School's out for summer.
Linklater did all of this better in Everybody Wants Some!!, as far as I am concerned his absolute greatest film. But even if Dazed and Confused sometimes feels like a dry run for it, it's an absolutely wonderful and funny film worth seeing. It's for everyone too; as always Linklater lets women as much in on the action as men. It is stil though, perhaps unsurprisingly, Ben Affleck who emerges as the film's MVP. This is very much not an insult; Affleck is probably my favorite contemporary movie star and I think one of the smarter people in Hollywood. He is great playing insecure numbskulls, in part because he is unafraid to show that deep down he gets them. In Dazed and Confused he spends most of his time running with a paddle after the younger students, as it is school tradition to spank the freshmen on the last day of school. Having flunked the previous year, Affleck's O'Bannion is doing this for the second summer in a row, and his angered frustration comes through the screen. He is desperate to humiliate the unluck freshmen, while both sensing that his fellow students find his despereation a bit pathetic, and that he himself doesn't get same gratification out of it anymore.
The most famous role in the film though belongs to Matthew McConaughey, who coined his catchphrase 'alright, alright, alright' here and in his first scene walks into a bar just when we hear Bob Dylan on the soundtrack singing "this is the story of the Hurricane". I think he is a good and fun actor, but that's an introduction he has never quite lived up to, in part because he is also a bit too self-aggrandizing. He is wonderful here though as an older city employee who tries way too hard to impress high schoolers, That hoary lines like "That's what i like about these freshmen; I keep getting older, they stay the same age" actually succeed in impressing them is one of the film's many great details. But it's one other very brief scene that may be the most wonderful example of Linklater's understanding of teens. Most of the film follows teenagers who are around 16/17 year old and is attuned to their chaotic, restless and semi-ironic attitude towards everything. But when the film cuts to the 13/14 year old freshmen innocently slow dancing under the supervision of teachers, it slows down a bit and imbues the scene with almost as much gravity as the serious faces of the boys and girls holding each other in their arms.
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