An ode to Dazed and Confused, and days gone by

When cars were cars... 

Whoo-man, I just watched Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) last night, and experienced an intense bout of euphoria, nostalgia, and escape from present circumstances. What a great film—a film about kids doing nothing, but nevertheless manages to be about something very important. It captures the ethos of the 70s, but more than that, it captures the spirit of being a teenager on the cusp of responsibility, but not yet—critically, not yet, and with their senior year still to come can still revel the pleasures of companionship in aimlessness, the joy of a summer night with a cold beer.

There is no politics in this film—thank you Richard Linklater. No heavy-handed moral message or sermonizing. There is the quarterback whose coaches are pressuring him to sign a behavioral pledge, essentially asking him to sacrifice a piece of himself to the team. The kid refuses—it seems he will still play his senior year, but he’ll do it for himself, and his friends, and their bond, and not the dictates of the coach and what he stands for—conformity, sober, serious, responsible adulthood. Which now that I’ve experienced two+ decades of it, isn’t always a noble goal or the best of all aims. We exchange paychecks and respectable homes and careers for servitude and mortgages and loans. We lose our ability to be in the moment like these kids are, as our life becomes a series of worries about promotions, our boss, raising our children and their struggles, watching parents age.

There is something in Dazed and Confused that’s hard to put your finger on. It’s a vibe, it’s a feeling of being in the present in a warm night in Austin, Texas, with a trunk of cold beer. There is a lot of beer in this film, and lots of weed. I was never a weed guy but man did I enjoy (and still enjoy) beer. Kids ordering kegs of beer. Underage kids buying beer in liquor stores. Kids pulling up in cars with trunks full of beer, going to baseball games with open beers. Beer is the tool that completes the passage into liberation.

I can’t ever return to those days. But I can revisit the emotional reality of those days. Dazed and Confused can get me there in a heartbeat, as soon as “Sweet Emotion” and that orange 1970 Pontiac GTO makes that slow roll into the parking lot (damn, cars were SO MUCH BETTER back then—that’s not even debatable). I didn’t have quite the same experiences as these kids, but I had many that were very close—out of control parties when my parents went on vacation, buying beer underage, ramming trash barrels with my car, playing football, ogling girls. What I did share exactly in common was the joy of just driving around doing nothing with my friends. Popping a cassette tape in the stereo and hitting the streets and feeling like anything was possible. Parking in some secluded area and rocking out into the night, windows rolled down, cigarette smoke. I did all that, and it’s a part of my life that I look back on with incredible fondness. And I’m grateful that Dazed and Confused can still get me there, instantly and effortlessly there, in its 102 minute run time.

"That's what I like about them high school
 girls"... McConaughey's finest role.

I remember, vividly, when getting concert tickets to my favorite bands—KISS, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, RUSH—was the most important “job” of my summer. And so for me the end of the film, with the kids grinning ear-to-ear, laughing, enjoying each other’s company, as they roll down the highway to “Slow Ride” (the ride is the destination—don’t you see?) with the hugely important task of scoring Aerosmith tickets, and summer just beginning, is impeccably well-done. And a perfect note to end on—anticipatory, but also reveling in the now. The ride will continue, that slow ride with nowhere important to go.