Dazed and Confused (1993)

4 months ago

PARTY AT THE MOON TOWER!

by Danielle Lee

Obviously a fond look back on “the best years of [your] life” is going to include getting wasted in the woods. Driving a car blasting “Free Ride” in your Chevy Chevelle Super Sport on your way to score Aerosmith (circa Toys in the Attic!) tickets on the first day of summer. Building a wooden bong in shop class! 1976.

Or your modern-day equivalents, which in my case substitutes “Plush,” Ford F-150 and… uh, Incubus. 2000.

Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) disagrees.

“If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” he laments on the 50 yard line of the Lee High School football field in one of the last scenes of cult classic Dazed and Confused.

Oh, Pink. The drama of your declaration is exactly what makes those four (or in the case of Ben Affleck’s O’Bannion or that guy perpetually slumped against a cloud of smoke next the vending machine on my campus, five-plus) years so achingly good. Even when not much in the way of objective plot happens, as director Richard Linklater smartly highlights by choosing to follow the kids through a realistically benign last day and night of school in ’76.

Maybe not the best years, per se, unless you’re one of the handful of people from my high school class posting multiple remembrances daily on the Facebook invite wall for this fall’s 10-year reunion. But, admit it: definitely some of the best moments. If only in operatic contrast to those pitiful, sniveling lows.

The S&M of high school gets pretty real early in the film, with Parker Posey as gleeful senior dominatrix, heavily armed with condiments with which to torture the freshman girls in the school parking lot.

The high school newbie boys have it even worse on their end of the new-student hazing rituals, evading paddle-wielding senior (and super-senior) guys that take them behind parked cars and flog them.

And yet… they kind of love it.

After Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) and Carl (Esteban Powell) narrowly outrun O’Bannion to hide behind Carl’s mother and her gun, they poke their heads back out to smile at his retreat, clearly egging him on.

The freshman girls are asked to demean themselves in ways that even resident stoner Slater (Rory Cochrane a.k.a. Lucas) calls “so degrading, man.”

But most underclassman are just honored to be noticed—when Sabrina (Christin Hinojosa) is picked out of the crowd to join the minions wearing pacifiers and rolling around in mustard and flour, you’d think she’d just been nominated for the Homecoming Court.

And, in the case of her and Mitch, this peripheral recognition quickly blossoms into a chance to party with the reigning kings and queens of the school and then through that trusty gateway—to after-party make out sessions with “experienced” kids on grassy hills and driveways.

And isn’t this the ultimate motivator for every high schooler? If it’s not something I can put on my transcript, is it someone I can put to my mouth?

Outlook is good when you roll with the seniors, young grasshopper.

These divisions were more explicit in the Greek system of my Southern California university than the halls of my Southern California high school, but they definitely existed.

They just more often took the form of puffy paint on Hanes shirts than paddles on bums. When I was an underclassman, the senior girls were “Queens” and the juniors “Princesses,” according to the Divine Right of Tulip® Dimensional Fabric Paint. They would combatively scream their rank at Friday pep rallies…and I think that was the extent of their duties at court.

But we lowly freshman handmaidens had to find our own identity, fast. Or risk forever holding our peace over the strains of some loudspeaker-garbled Nelly song. Some arbiter of such decisions, probably either a member of student council or cashier at Michael’s, both with equal access to the necessary crafting supplies, made a pretty brilliant one. Let those mortal fools sit on their bleacher thrones. Because by the time we strode in to take their place the first game day of our senior year, we were Goddesses.

By which, of course, I mean the royal (ha, sorry) we. Sure, I eventually wore one of those sparkly, decaying shirts, but only after some back-alley parking lot exchange of a fiver with a senior girl in a tricked-out truck that couldn’t have guessed my first initial. I bought my inclusion—but at least it was dirt cheap.

The price is a little steeper for the incoming freshman gang in Dazed. Little bits of dignity and pride are joyfully eroded by the seniors who’re probably giving as good as they once got.

Some mild bullying or shit-talking is better than complete invisibility, though, even for the upperclassman.

The senior girls seek validation by demanding to know who is talking behind their backs, even when that means confronting labels of “bitch” and “slut” (a subtle call-back to their earlier, exasperated discussion of the female Madonna-whore binary, exemplified by Ginger and Mary Ann).

Mike (Adam Goldberg), your archetypal neurotically self-aware pseudo-existentialist fringe senior, who, earlier, on a seemingly endless drive in search of a party and “good ol’ worthwhile visceral experience” with Tony (Anthony Rapp a.k.a. Mark) and Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi a.k.a. Mrs. Beck), lamented a lame law-school future, starts a fight after they find the film’s climactic beer bust.

(Side note: As epic as the Moon Tower party is, especially as a last-minute substitute to the thwarted kegger, I also appreciate its anti-She’s All That authenticity. Parties at my high school, at least among friends, more often congregated in dry creek beds and bowling alley parking lots than rich kids’ houses with live bands. The one, singular party that was at a rich kid’s house with a live band attended by everyone from school was on graduation night, and I spent more time suspiciously waiting for Rachael Leigh Cook to emerge than enjoying it. I was more drunk on reference than Smirnoff Ice.)

So, once at the party, Mike, fueled by keg beer and a sudden rebellion against a life that’s been “all preparation,” punches a townie dude that belittles him. Naturally, he loses the fight, but in his post-mortem over-analyzation, he can’t help fawning over his battle-scarred face and delighting in Cynthia’s consolation that, “After a couple of years, people won’t even remember, really, who won or lost.”

Mike too readily agrees: “Yeah, yeah, no. It’s true, you know, you’re right. ‘Cos I read about, um, like Jackson Pollock or Ernest Hemingway. You read about those guys. You never read about who won or lost, just that they got into a brawl.”

And now he can go bravely into the tedium of paralegal life—as, after a few right hooks, an unquestionable member of Lee High’s Lost Generation.

If such a cover-band cohort did exist in that town, I’d make the case for Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey)’s membership and presidency. His audition and/or campaign? Walking into the Emporium pool hall. Through a thin cloud of smoke, to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane.” In slow motion.

The story about how McConaughey scored the career-defining and jumpstarting role is almost as good as that scene, but a bit superfluous. Casting this perfect and rare is pure Cinematic Destiny. If you’re unconvinced, maybe you missed this refresher link. Here you go. And once more for good luck. Though we’ve already been briefly introduced to the city-employed high school creeper, this “entrance” rivals those of classic movie stars.

As Marissa Ribisi told Texas Monthly in 2003, “The first time I saw it I cried.”

The film’s soundtrack, of course, transcends the scoring of a single slow-mo star-making entrance. After pressure from the studio to rerecord the film’s classic 70s songs with MTV-friendly bands, Linklater famously gave up his royalties on the soundtrack to keep his expensive original songs in their rightful scenes (“Hurricane” alone cost $80,000).

The movie would be significantly dimmed without them. Some, like Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” scoring that triumphant final bell before summer, so iconically on-the-nose, while others, like Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way” playing on Pink’s car 8-track, so naturally of that moment.

With everyone from ZZ Top to Foghat to The Runaways to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Deep Purple taking a turn, it’s one of the best movie soundtracks of all time.

And a sliver of the reason I, all Midnight in Paris-style, would choose it as my decade to get whisked away to for a night by a magic VW van. Minus any Back to the Future parental rendez-vous weirdness.

Other reasons, in no particular order: wood-paneled basements, wide-legged pants, Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden, muckraking, four Minnesota Vikings Super Bowl appearances (ahem, zero wins, but this long-suffering fan takes what she can get), New Hollywood cinema, exploitation cinema, lingering ’60s social progressiveness, “right on,” the underrated twilight of Hitchcock’s career (including Family Plot, visible on a marquee at the start of Dazed), a greater acceptance of mind-altering substances, Al Pacino, Led Zeppelin in general, and the rose colored glasses through which to see an entire decade for its positive, pop culture footnotes.

Also, as supposedly authentic representations of the late 70s (and 1980) like this movie and Freaks & Geeks have led me to believe: the hugely popular pastime of knocking down mailboxes, from the seat of a car, with a baseball bat. And not exactly because I’d like to partake (fearing the similar old-man-with-a-gun consequence depicted in Dazed), but to confirm that this was really happening, in every neighborhood from Texas to Michigan. Bell-bottomed, rowdy teens leaving trails of letter guts behind their “Tush”-blasting Pontiac GTOs.

The phenomenon makes sense in the car-culture context of the time. The Dazed characters are separated into small groups during long cruises inside their “fuckin’ muscle” or not so muscle-y cars. They do intermingle in the parking lots of school, stadiums and parties—but first they’ve got to be invited.

And while socialization via front and back seats was huge then, it’s still vital for newly licensed teens today, especially in suburbia.

The second biggest hierarchical mark at my high school besides fashion (which, in addition to homemade T-shirts, included the requisite jerseys, letterman jackets and flaunt-your-parents’-money ensembles) was parking lots. There were three on campus: front, upper and lower. And they were the hangout spots before first bell.

Sure, you could wake up three hours before school started to score a premium spot next to the cool kids, but would you be slumping away from their eye rolls a half hour later? Better to be safe and stick to your kind. Front for the overachievers and honors kids willing to wake up extra-early for those few, albeit untrendy spots next to faculty. Lower for the smokers, new drivers and slackers unfazed by the hilly climb to class. And upper for the seniors, anyone whose name had ever been on any ballot (including unofficial, circulated ones ranking the girls, ugh) and those owning more than a passing few items of clothing with the school’s official colors.

I did my part to uphold the status quo, penning a strongly worded op-ed for the school newspaper admonishing underclassman who hadn’t yet “earned” a spot in upper. Forget bathing them in ketchup and insults, I wouldn’t even allow them that first step onto the asphalt.

Sometimes separate parking lots and cars can be good—as is the magic of entering new ones. Cliques, especially at that vulnerable age, do at least develop deep, internal camaraderie. Just as I will always remember the dawn pancake breakfasts on the back of my friend’s truck in the front parking lot, Mitch will likely never forget Wooderson asking him for a joint from the driver’s seat of his Chevelle.

The memories are hazy from substances, time and PTSD, but those great ones do take the sting out of the temporary bruises on your ass.

Having seen this movie countless times, Danielle Lee is ashamed to admit she only just discovered that Pink’s belt buckle and Wooderson’s necklace are both pipes—and will now have to promptly rewatch with an entirely new Where’s Waldo, man? mindset. She’s also in a cult that’s into aliens.