Just Keep Livin’ – In praise of Dazed and Con­fused at 25

The pass­ing of time is per­haps the defin­ing theme of Richard Linklater’s career. Think of the Before tril­o­gy, which traced the devel­op­ment of the rela­tion­ship between two lovers at nine-year inter­vals between 1995 and 2013. Or Boy­hood, a com­ing-of-age dra­ma in which the actor play­ing the pro­tag­o­nist lit­er­al­ly ages from a young boy into a grown man before our eyes.

Dazed and Con­fused, the writer/director’s third fea­ture, which is now 25 years old, is at the oth­er end of the spec­trum in terms of its time frame. Begin­ning with the unusu­al­ly pre­cise on-screen text indi­cat­ing that this is the ​‘Last Day of School | May 28, 1976 | 1:05pm’, it is a film sus­pend­ed in the present, tak­ing place over the course of just one day from a final after­noon in class to the twi­light of a late-night party.

It’s easy to over­look the film as an enjoy­able but ulti­mate­ly friv­o­lous high school com­e­dy. It’s true the film is a rol­lick­ing watch with plen­ty of laughs and very low stakes, as char­ac­ters across a range of cliques hang out, goof about and gen­er­al­ly get up to no good. Yet Lin­klater depicts all this with his trade­mark human­i­ty and warmth, imbu­ing his char­ac­ters’ some­times obnox­ious behav­iour (par­tic­u­lar­ly ini­ti­a­tion rites car­ried out by the seniors) with charm as he has done through­out his career (see: loud­mouth jocks in Every­body Wants Some!!, self-absorbed lovers in the Before films, a show­boat­ing Jack Black in School of Rock, and even Coldplay’s music in Boyhood).

But for all its sur­face lev­el charms, it’s the way Dazed and Con­fused sub­tly explores how time shapes its char­ac­ters’ behav­iour that gives it a depth which still res­onates today. These high school­ers are all intent on liv­ing in the moment. All any­one is con­cerned about is what they are going to do that night: quar­ter­back Ran­dall (Jason Loudon) is reluc­tant to let the dilem­ma of whether or not to sign a pledge of puri­ty for the foot­ball team get in the way of a planned booze- and drug-filled par­ty; the fresh­men are pre­oc­cu­pied by how to avoid the seniors and their ini­ti­a­tion haz­ing; and just about everyone’s main desire is to get their hands on more booze or score anoth­er joint.

Their atti­tudes are best sum­marised by three more self-reflec­tive seniors who are eager to get involved in the kind of rev­el­ling they usu­al­ly pass up on. ​“Don’t you ever feel like every­thing we do and every­thing we’ve been taught is just to ser­vice the future?” asks Cyn­thia (Maris­sa Ribisi), who goes on to pon­der, ​“What are we prepar­ing our­selves for?” ​“Death”, is the droll reply offered by her friend Mike (Adam Gold­berg), but she takes his answer at face val­ue. ​“If we’re all going to die any­way shouldn’t we be enjoy­ing our­selves now? I’d like to quit think­ing of the present as some minor insignif­i­cant pre­am­ble to some­thing else.”

The spec­tre of the future inevitably hangs over Linklater’s film, even as the char­ac­ters do their best to avoid it. It is, after all, set at the end of a school year, an unavoid­able mark­er of time pass­ing as each stu­dent must con­tend with hav­ing grown one year old­er and advanced to the next step in their education.

The fore­most reminder of their not-too-dis­tant futures is the char­ac­ter of David (Matthew McConaugh­ey), a smooth but sleazy par­ty lover who grad­u­at­ed a few years ear­li­er but con­tin­ues to hang around with the juniors. He’s some­one who refus­es to move on from the heady days of high school, as expressed in the film’s most famous line: ​“That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get old­er, they stay the same age”. But with each pass­ing year his pres­ence becomes less and less appro­pri­ate – a stark warn­ing of what will become of these teenagers if they refuse to acknowl­edge the need to even­tu­al­ly grow up.

For us watch­ing, too, it’s impos­si­ble not to be aware of the pass­ing of time. As a peri­od piece made in 1993 and set in 1976, every unruly hair­cut, every retro car, every out­landish fash­ion state­ment and every clas­sic rock song played on a tape deck is a mark­er of how much things change. Watch­ing the film back now, the expe­ri­ence is even more stark – look­ing at the young, fresh faces of McConaugh­ey, Ben Affleck, Mil­la Jovovich and Park­er Posey, and know­ing what became of their careers post Dazed and Con­fused, adds yet anoth­er lay­er of retrospectivity.

Still, though thoughts of the future loom in the back­ground, the thrill of Dazed and Con­fused is watch­ing its youth­ful char­ac­ters enjoy the rau­cous high of liv­ing in the moment. The clos­ing shot of an open high­way from the point of view a car and its young pas­sen­gers is an obvi­ous metaphor for the way time march­es inex­orably for­ward, but cru­cial­ly Lin­klater allows his char­ac­ters the lux­u­ry of not hav­ing a future.

Unlike so many oth­er com­ing-of-age clas­sics, from Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti to Ani­mal House, he opts against a ​‘where are they now’ style sign off inform­ing us what fate ulti­mate­ly had in store for the char­ac­ters. Rather, Dazed and Con­fused sur­vives as a sealed-off time cap­sule, where every­one, for the most part, remains joy­ous­ly root­ed in a spe­cif­ic moment in time.