Dazed and Confused (95 minutes)

"Be a lot cooler if you did."

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Ok, so now here’s a fun fact… if you were to find me in a dark basement at a house party, I would tell you this:

And then I would probably tell you that Dazed and Confused is in one of my top ten favorite movies of all time. In fact, if you pressed me, I may even put it in my top five. I love this movie because of how it makes me feel, so naturally I’ve avoided writing about it. Feelings can be a hard thing to express when talking about the merits of a good film. Sometimes it’s easier to talk about a cinematographer or a casting choice than the simple fact that this movie makes me feel simultaneously very young and very old. 

Let’s get into it. 

Dazed and Confused (1993, 95 minutes) takes place over the course of 24-hours in Austin, Texas on the last day of high school, 1976. Rising senior and star quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) and his teammates are slapped with a letter their coaches insist they sign, pledging to not drink or do drugs over summer break so as not to “jeopardize” their chance at winning State. Everyone signs it except for Pink, who has recently been hanging around with the stoner kids -- Slater (Rory Cochrane) and Pickford (Shawn Andrews). This new crowd has given him a lot to think about. With the day loosely structured around Pink’s choice, kids from all different social groups spend it getting into trouble and letting off some steam. 

I’ve seen this movie a lot but something deeply troubling happened to me this time. Dazed and Confused was made in 1993. There is a 17-year gap between that and its setting of 1976. Do you know what happened 17 years ago? I graduated from high school(!) Now all the nostalgia videos on TikTok are starting to make sense to me. I’m getting older.

I want to believe not much has changed over the course of 17 years, but in reality my teen years more closely resemble 1976 than they do 2023. The major delineation of course being cell phones and near constant access to the internet. Outside of, well, Euphoria, I know very little about the lives of Gen Z. Like Pink and his friends I, too, drove around aimlessly looking for things “to do”. My friends and I sat in fast food parking lots, walked around the mall, and got into trouble in the woods. Most news traveled by word of mouth and you had to know someone who knew someone who had a brother who was throwing a party three miles down a dirt road. (And chances are that brother didn’t look like Matthew McConaughey.

The opening shots of Dazed and Confused play out these kinds of relays. The news of Pickford’s party moves easily from group to group as the kids start their school day. Pink and Slater ask Pickford for details, and then go on to pass them to Tony, Mike, and Cynthia. We’re also introduced to our key characters quite rapidly as we jump from group to group and hear snippets of their conversations. This opening is a great nod to Linklater’s Slacker which you’ll remember never stops hopping from group to group. In Slacker, we have no focus on the story other than the day itself. In Dazed and Confused we get a little more structure. It’s a nice trademark moment for Linklater.

The message travels fast because the groups are inextricably linked by being in school together. I always forget this aspect of high school. Yes, there are different social groups, cliques, and bullies, but groups always move and morph throughout the day naturally because of classes, teams, and extracurriculars. Linklater captures the nuance of this by using the laid-back and charming Pink, who moves through the high school hallways and parties like a chameleon. Everyone sort of knows each other, but Pink is the true through line. And he isn’t even a main character in the classic sense.

That’s because running parallel to the story of Pink and the other rising seniors, is that of Mitch, a rising freshman getting his first taste of high school. Mitch is the younger brother of Jodi, a beautiful rising senior who begs the boys of her class to take it easy on Mitch in their annual hazing ritual. This of course drives the boys to target Mitch, chasing him and following him to his baseball game to heckle him. 

I’ll take this moment to point out that the hazing rituals of the rising seniors (a paddle to ass for the boys, a humiliating parking lot scenario for the girls) demonstrate what little parental interference the students have. Mike (Adam Goldberg) puts it best during this hazing scene:

Most of the adults we come across are ineffectual, their voices like the whine of a mosquito during a party. The exception is Carl’s mom who pulls a shotgun on O’Bannion (Ben Affleck) which of course only makes Carl (Esteban Powell) seem like a total wimp and his mom over-the-top. 

This brings us back to Mitch, who in contrast to Carl, takes his beating and winds up falling in with the senior football players for the night. I always think of Mitch as a mirror of Pink’s younger days and imagine Pink falling into place in a similar manner. Both are pretty mild but open-minded guys with innate athletic ability that opens doors to them. In fact, Pink does point out early on in the day that the only reason he and all his friends play football is because of the girls they can land. He suggests they could quit football and start a band and do just as well landing dates. Similarly, Mitch ends his night with a Sophomore girl who starts speaking to him because he’s hanging out with the seniors. 

And all of this is just a taste as to why Dazed and Confused is considered one of the greatest coming-of-age stories of all time. Linklater captures the subtleties of a high school’s social stratification. High school stories and movies too often rely on boxing in their characters to specific groups with specific rules. Mean Girls obviously does a great job satirizing this, while a movie like Brick is another great example of fluidity between groups. I never felt pegged down into one group and I imagine most kids don’t. I think this is why Linklater is able to garner so much nostalgia from audiences of all ages, it reminds us how it felt to be in high school regardless of when. I am dying to know if someone in Gen Z or Gen Alpha for that matter would even recognize themselves in this movie or if it would feel more like American Graffiti does to me. (Which is more alien.)

The fact that Linklater is able to capture these subtleties in just 95-minutes is the final touch. The script feels natural and light but is actually incredibly tight. Relationships are established within a couple of lines, the movement of our characters across Austin is clear, and the final party feels very earned rather than random. And that’s kind of like high school as a whole. The most boring nights can end up being the ones you remember the most.