If ... Linklater has presented something so specific in its sense of time and place, that specificity necessarily will exclude as well as include certain viewers.
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I just can´t connect with "Dazed and Confused." Not in any way. I might as well confess that up front because I am aware of the considerable passion this film generates among its most devoted fans. "Dazed and Confused" is a certified cult classic, the sort of film that viewers tend to watch over and over again, if not as compulsively as "Rocky Horror" then at least often as, say, "The Big Lebowski," a movie I watch at least five or six times a year.
Writing a negative or even a mixed review of a cult classic is strictly a losing affair: uncommitted readers will probably just remain uncommitted while those who love the movie will only dismiss the critic as someone who "just doesn´t get it." Fair enough. I pity the poor souls who "don´t get" great movies like "Eraserhead" or "Dead Alive" too, so I can empathize.
Admirers of "Dazed and Confused" proclaim it a dead-on depiction of 70s high school life; I have even seen it described as a "near-documentary." Kent Jones, a critic whose taste normally aligns closely with mine, calls it "a wholly accurate… portrait of life as it was lived by people of a particular age and a particular class at a particular moment in time." For Jones, "Dazed and Confused" conjures up a highly specific sense of space and time. How odd then that, to me, the film feels so generic and rootless.
It´s the last day of high school in 1976 somewhere in Texas, and kids from all grades are out to party like it´s… well, 1976. The seniors are mostly interested in getting drunk (or stoned) and beating the living hell out of the incoming freshmen. The freshmen, appropriately enough, are interested in getting drunk (or stoned) and avoiding getting the living hell beaten out of them. Like many of Linklater´s films, the movie is compressed into a brief time frame: the film begins as the school day winds down, lingers through a sprawling outdoor beer bust, and wraps up in the early hours of the next morning.
"Dazed and Confused" fans seem to identify closely with many of the characters in the movie, but I find them alien and somewhat superficial. These are not people that I knew or ever knew, and the only familiar characters are recognizable simply because as stereotypes from other Hollywood teen movies: the jocks, the geeks, the cheerleaders, the stoners, the dreamers, etc. As the movie progresses, all of the characters´ paths converge in the park where everyone tries to chug as much beer or smoke as much pot as possible. That may be "true to life" but it only feels "true to life" in a cosmetic movie kind of way, not in any way that really resonates, at least not for me.
Yet the movie does resonate on a deeply personal level for many people. That´s no great mystery. There is no such thing as a universal high school experience, no way to capture "the" essence of high school life, but only "an" essence, one that will speak loudly to some, but not at all to others. As cultural theorists have been saying for some time, there is no such thing as a movie (or any work of art) that "speaks to everyone." There is no single audience (no matter how much Hollywood marketers wish it were so), but many different audiences. If, as Kent Jones claims, Linklater has presented something so specific in its sense of time and place, that specificity necessarily will exclude as well as include certain viewers.
"Dazed and Confused" has many strong points, starting with its motley cast of characters. There´s high school quarterback Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), far from your typical jock, deciding whether to sign coach´s behavior pledge or to take a stand for personal freedom. Amateur discovery Wiley Wiggins turns in an endearing performance as Mitch Kramer, a long-haired freshman who negotiates a delicate path that starts with an ass-beating by rabid seniors and ends with him holding his own with the cool kids and, more impressively, even with his mom. Then there´s Darla (Parker Posey), the senior cheerleader who takes out years of repressed anger (and perhaps other repressed issues) on the poor frosh girls; "Dazed and Confused" strikes a blow for women´s rights, proving that women are every bit the equal of men when it comes to tormenting the weakest members of the herd.
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