DAZED AND CONFUSED

by Kevin Koehler

Okay guys, one more thing.  When you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn't want to pay their taxes.  Have a good summer.

- Ms. Stroud (high school teacher), Dazed and Confused

Something has been lost.  It's been a gradual process; tolerant, live-and-let-live libertarianism giving way piecemeal to kiddie-proofing the world in safety and security (or at least a false sense of it).  Some monsters are real, but others are imaginary, even fabricated to keep us in collective fear.  Society is sick, our cultural guardians/warriors tell us, and here's your medicine.  Don't worry if the cure is worse than the disease.

Richard Linklater's best films are the ones where he eschews conventional structure for something decidedly more organic: meandering, episodic plots heavy on dialogue and non sequitur conversation.  Dazed and Confused might be the best example of this by virtue of how accessible it is despite the barest minimum of orthodox character and narrative arcs to which audiences are accustomed (see also A Scanner Darkly, which expands on this picture's themes of drug war hypocrisy).

It's the last day of school, May 28th, 1976, the year of the nation's bicentennial.  Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) is the popular quarterback of the football team; he moves easily between cliques, whether they be his football teammates (Jenson, Hauser, Affleck), egghead classmates (Goldberg, Rapp), or marijuana enthusiasts (Cochrane, Andrews).  His coach has requested every member of the team sign a "pledge" that says they won't use drugs; no one take it seriously, but Pink is the only one with a problem compromising himself by scribbling his signature at the bottom.  "Randall Floyd," Coach tells him, "I want that piece of paper on my desk before you leave here today, you hear me?" 

Meanwhile, there's a tradition at Texas' (Robert E.) Lee High School, where seniors flog incoming freshman boys with wooden paddles carved in shop class.  It takes place all summer.  The community, for all intents and purposes, has lent its silent consent: the prevailing view is of a harmless, manhood-building rite of passage.  Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) in particur lives under constant threat of assault; his sister (Burke) made the mistake of requesting mercy on his behalf, making him a prized mark instead.  Classmates seen with him become targets by proxy.  Girls, by contrast, experience a different hazing ritual, degraded by dominant, drunk-on-power senior hen Darla (Parker Posey) with a variety of sexually-charged insults and smothered in condiments.  It's mostly in good fun.

Much of what accounts for narrative suspense involves whether Pink will sign his pledge, whether Mitch will have his ass paddled, and whether an aborted party will be be reborn as a "beer bash" at the Moontower.  Dazed and Confused, however, is not a plot-driven picture; threads exist principally for Linklater to hang short episodes of blissful, prelapsarian adolescent endangerment, familiar to a bygone era before the country became so damn uptight about everything and anything that could maybe, possibly, under the right circumstances, kill you.

The world of Dazed and Confused does not exist anymore, dominated as it is by the contemporary bogeymen of teen sex, bullying, cigarettes, drunk driving and drugs.  If the picture demonstrated glaring cultural shifts between 1976 and its release in 1993, watching it now post-9/11 widens the gulf even further.  It's less nostalgia than anthropology: you lose track of the number of times characters are shown tipping the bottle in a moving vehicle (not to mention muscle cars with, gasp, low gas mileage); no one wears a seat belt.  Such would be unthinkable in a mainstream studio release (aimed at the youth market, no less) in this age of AIDS, Columbine, To Catch a Predator, M.A.D.D., and trick-or-treating at the mall.  In trying to protect our children, maybe we've taken their childhood away and replaced it with a clumsy simulacrum with the sharp corners sanded away, all because somewhere, someone might have put a thumbtack in some kid's Halloween candy.

"It's like the every other decade theory," says redhead intellectual Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi).  "The fifties were boring.  The sixties rocked.  The seventies, oh my God, they obviously sucked.  Maybe the eighties will be radical.  You know, I figure we'll be in our twenties.  It can't get any worse."

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