Decade(s) later.

You will die still bearing the scars ripped into your soul over a period of a mere four years. By the same token, you probably first discovered the strengths you're capitalizing on now while you were in high school. This isn't to say, of course, that college, work, marriage, parenthood or, going back, all the blessings and curses that can befall a childhood - a move, a death in the family, parents divorcing, what have you - aren't big, formative deals. But it's in high school that you get your first pretty solid idea of how you and the rest of the world are going to be getting along.

Thanks primarily to John Hughes, we know a lot about what high school in the US was like in the 80s - for upper middle class kids who lived in mini-mansions propped up in the gently rolling hills north of Chicago. Don't get me wrong, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) is a landmark comedy and The Breakfast Club (1985) is not only sweet and forgivable within its after-school-special generic context but has also taken on quite a load of nostalgic baggage over time. But I've always wondered how much materialistic envy these movies aroused in the vast majority of American high school kids who didn't have samplers in their rooms.

To be fair, there were exceptions to prove the rule. Rock 'N' Roll High School (1978) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) were a step downscale class-wise, but they also preceded the Hughes wave, were products of leaner, pre-Gordon Gekko period and, because they presented themselves as sort of food-fight comedies, they didn't claim the verisimilitude Hughes did for his comedies.

The idea of high school as a picturesque Ivy League training ground wasn't shaken in the 90s, either. Just think of all that burnt red brick, all those gated front yards in Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999). But there was a 90s high school movie that was like no other and, interestingly enough, it wasn't set in the 90s, but instead, just two years before Rock 'N' Roll High School.

In Dazed and Confused, we go back to the Bicentennial summer, the country still reeling from the OPEC-imposed global recession and getting ready to transition from one forgettable president to the next. Let me go right ahead and admit that there's a special place for Dazed and Confused in my own personal pantheon because 1976 was my junior year, and an eventful one it was all around, and I was in Texas. Not Austin yet, but in Texas.

In 1976, high school kids hated the hippies because their youths had been so much more exciting than ours and we didn't yet know we had punk to look forward to. But ultimately, as Kimberly Jones writes in the Austin Chronicle, Dazed and Confused still works (it just made number 17 on Entertainment Weekly's top 50 cult classic movies list) because it has what she calls "staying power" - in other words, it's timeless because, to raid the pantheon again, nothing ever happens. "But that's really rather the point," explains Jones, "the plotlessness of adolescence."

Plotlessness to prove its own point is always a risky strategy, but it works for Richard Linklater here. As members of the cast and crew gather today near Austin to celebrate the film's 10th anniversary, Jones also reminds us how many faces we know so well now - Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich, and briefly, Renée Zellweger, to name a few - were first seen in Dazed and Confused. They made a memorable impression in a memorable film partly because Linklater gave them room to play of almost Altmanesque proportions, but also because, ultimately, while the film may be set in the 70s, it's not irrevocably rooted in them.

A quick whiplash to a not entirely unrelated story on a not entirely unrelated film: a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that took seven years and next to no money to pull off. It's a remarkable story.



Posted by dwhudson at May 31, 2003 10:20 AM