Review of Dazed and Confused (1993) by Ed H — 04 Apr 2011

I'm the same age as the freshmen in the movie. They got a LOT right. Some bemoan the lack of plot, but the suburbs in the mid-70's DID lack plot. We hung out. We drove around. We played pinball and foosball. We got stoned, and by "we", I mean pretty much everybody--it was a rite of passage, not a moral transgression. You had to be Slater to be a true stoner, and even they didn't necessarily move on to the hard stuff.

Big parties were rare, though. Mostly it was just small groups of friends hanging out at people's houses or the arcade, bowling alley, or whatever.

Today when a parent says to a teenager, "You have your whole life ahead of you," the implication is that anything you do now could screw that life up forever--a modern-day "This is going on your permanent record," except that the record really is permanent, and what information about you Trans Union and Google don't have, you've probably put up on Facebook anyway.

Back then, having your whole life ahead of you meant that it was AHEAD of you. It hadn't started yet. We all worked at McDonald's or something similar. Unlike the thirtysomething underemployed who work there now, our jobs paid for gas and pot (what pre-employment drug testing?), not food and shelter.

If this sounds like a homage to the Good Old Days, it's not. We were BORED. Our parents were still trying to figure out what the 60's really meant. Moral and social guidance from all sides (parents, clergy, peers) was some combination of hypocritical, wishy-washy or woefully misinformed (in contrast to the information overload teenagers face today--at least the hypocrisy hasn't changed).

Dazed and Confused shows you what the good times were. The pot was cheap and plentiful, the girl or boy you liked actually noticed you, the losers stayed losers and didn't grow up to be billionaire hedge fund managers. It didn't show you that the pot was was ditch-weed, the girl or boy would give you the clap (or worse), and the losers switched from beating up freshmen to beating up their wives. None of us had that perspective or foresight, and the movie is stronger for not pretending to have it either.

I watched Dazed and Confused last night, for the first time since I saw it in the theater in 1993. I haven't seen American Graffiti (which takes place the year I was born) in at least that long; I'll have to watch it again to see which one is better.

(Postscript: I attended my 30-year reunion last summer. Most people have mellowed, none of us know how to tell our kids not to do the things we did, and most of the Clints and O'Bannions are already dead.).