Richard Linklateris one of thegreatest filmmakers of the past 30 years, and ifhis upcomingHit Manis any indication, he hasn’t lost his touch when it comes to finding the joy and spontaneity in different people getting to know each other and coexisting between each other’s bubbles. The man has spent decades mining poignant art from the rhythms and hiccups of how people talk to each other, and one of the high points of his career has beenDazed and Confused, which isone of the greatest high school films ever made. The saga of ’70s kids rubbing shoulders, cruising for chicks, smoking weed, and planning to get Aerosmith tickets is Linklater at his rambling best, culminating in characters you’d never picture being together driving in the same car. Believe it or not, in an alternate universe, this scene could have been the entire film, if Linklater hadn’t had changed course.
What Is ‘Dazed and Confused’ About?
Dazed and Confusedis set at Lee High School in 1976 Texas. The film follows different groups of students on the last day of the school year, the most important being senior quarterback Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd (Jason London), stoner Slater (Rory Cochrane), over aged flameout Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), and first-year student and baseball hopeful Mitch (Wiley Wiggins). The teen comedy observes how each of them anticipate their upcoming adult lives and how they cope with the inevitable expectations that will come with that responsibility. Amidst many shenanigans involving pool halls, vicious hazing, and parties when the parents aren’t home, the film reaches its climax with Pink, Wooderson, Slater, and local girl Simone Kerr (Joey Lauren Adams) driving out of town to finally get Aerosmith tickets. While this is happening, Mitch is at home listening to Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” which becomes the non-diegetic soundtrack of the final scene — it feels as if the characters are vibing along with the music, even though it isn’t playing in the car. It’s one of the greatest needle drops in film history, the cherry on top of a scene that succinctly wraps all the threads together and unifies all the major characters in spirit if not in physical presence. It’s a mic drop so resoundingly satisfying that Richard Linklater wanted his entire film to be just this feeling over and over.
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‘Dazed and Confused’ Could Have Looked a Lot Different
In Maxim’s oral historyon the film and its legacy, Linklater shared that his initial idea for the film looked a lot different from the final product. He said, “I knew I wanted the story to take place on one day in the spring of 1976, but at one point it was much more experimental. The whole movie took place in a car with the characters driving around listening to ZZ Top.” CinematographerLee Danieladded that “it would have been two shots—one of a guy putting in an eight-track of ZZ Top’sFandango!and one of two guys driving around talking. The film would be the length of the actual album, and you’d hear each track in the background as a source.” Neither of them elaborated on this much past that comment, but the fact that Linklater had started from this position does showcase the unique perspective he has as an artist.
‘Dazed and Confused’ Is the Perfect Example of Richard Linklater’s Filmmaking Genius
One of the greatest attributes of Linklater as a filmmaker is how collaborative he is and how open he is to the fact that things change, filmmakers can’t always work according to a perfect plan, and they have to adjust to what happens around them. For instance, later in the same oral history, Linklater and numerous cast members mentioned the problems they had with an actor namedShawn Andrews, who never fit into the group and “didn’t want to interact with really anyone exceptMilla Jovovich.” He was a difficult person that no one wanted around, but he was supposed to be involved in important scenes later in the film. Linklater knew he wasn’t working, so he phased him out of the film with rewrites and some re-edits. This directly led to Linklater wondering, “maybe it’sWoodersonwho gets to go to the party at the Moon Tower.” In other words, Linklater’s intuition to phase out a bad actor for a better one, rather than just rolling over and sticking with bad results, led to him giving McCounaughey more scenes and further solidifying the start ofone of the most varied and prolific careers in recent memory.
It also shows how experimental Linklater has always been. While he is perceived by most people as a wholesomely traditional filmmaker in his commitment to telling intelligent stories of grown up people experiencing complicated emotions, a genre that people constantly claim is endangered in today’s entertainment landscape, he is arguablyas forward-thinking in his approach to form and timeasChristopher Nolangets praise for being. This is the guy who shot a film over the course of 12 summers to capture a child’s entire adolescence inBoyhood;who expertly used rotoscope animationto create a distorted sense of reality inA Scanner Darkly,Waking Life, andApollo 10 1/2: A Space Childhood; who dove into thedigital handheld camera craze withTape. While Linklater is at his core a humanist filmmaker with artistic inspirations from the likes ofRobert BressonandYasujiro Ozu, he is thrillingly attuned to the importance of framing and approach, that a good script and characters can only take you so far. The idea of a film about 1970s high school taking place entirely in a car ride and just having the characters vibe to the music of the time might be inherently limiting, but it does speak to what Linklater felt was honest to his experience as a teenager in the 1970s. It shows how naturally empathetic he is that his first instinct was to put the audience in the exact same state of being that the characters would have been most used to.
The Legacy of ‘Dazed and Confused’
Dazed and Confusedhas gone down asone of the most influential teen films of all time, full ofquotable momentsand pop culture references that still have legs. As a true ensemble film, it’s endured in no small part thanks to itsstacked cast of future starscongealing together with incredible chemistry and the pitch perfect attention paid to period detail that, if not done well, would have made the whole film feel like a bad 70s eraFast Times at Ridgemont Highknockoff. Much like that film,Dazed and Confusedis incredible for its ability to drift between the high points of the ever unfurling excitement of new experiences and the low points of the crippling existential dread of the inevitable future experiences so that youget a fully fleshed out picture of being a teenagerin a way that most films only choose one side over the other. This is to the credit of Richard Linklater and his open-minded approach to filmmaking, and I’m personally thankful that he took us on a mini epic yearbook tour as opposed to plopping us in a weed-smelling Camaro for two hours.
