Jeremy’s Tophunder №4: Dazed and Confused

8 min readApr 20, 2020

Does a movie need to have a conflict?

Apparently the answer is no, because Dazed and Confused doesn’t really have one.

There’s barely even a plot —sure, the characters exist in time, and time moves forward, but it’s not like any specific element of the story is necessary. It’s just a 16-or-so-hour window of time compressed with snapshots of a few minutes at a time.

Director Richard Linklater seemed to design it this way. He knew he wanted to make a high school movie, but intentionally set out to make one noticeably different from the John Hughes-esque high school movies that were popular in the 1980s. He wanted there to be a distinct absence of drama. At a 20-year anniversary event for the movie, Linklater said “I don’t remember [my teenage years] being that dramatic. I remember just trying to go with the flow, socialize, fit in and be cool. The stakes were really low. To get Aerosmith tickets or not? That’s a big thing.”

That’s one of the reasons I love the movie so much, and one of the reasons its so re-watchable for me — I can jump in any time, as often as I feel like it, and just share these moments with these characters. There’s no tension that you need to let build to experience the movie properly, no conflict to resolve that you need to pay attention to. You can just be. It feels like you’re in high school and your summer is starting — you have literally nothing to worry about.

Linklater is perhaps best known as a director who places his movies into a very specific context of time, and feel realistic in relation to the window of time that the story inhabits. Think of a movie like Star Wars: A New Hope. How much time elapses over the course of the movie? A few days? A few weeks? More? It’s unclear. It doesn’t really matter, but it’s never even really hinted at. That doesn’t happen with Linklater movies. Movies like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset almost take place in real time. Waking Life was inspired by (and is meant to replicate) a single lucid dream that Linklater had. Boyhood was famous for being filmed in segments over the course of 12 years to depict multiple snapshots of one boy’s childhood. Dazed and Confused has that element as well. The movie starts just before the end of the last day of school, and it ends around dawn the following morning. Nothing that takes place before the movie starts is all that relevant, and neither is anything that takes place after it ends. The entire universe is just the one window of time when the cameras were rolling.

I didn’t go to high school in the 70s, and I didn’t even really go to a high school that had defined “cliques.” Sure, there were decidedly cool kids and decidedly not cool kids and some kids kind of in the middle (that’s where I was), and everybody had their preferred circle of friends, but for the most part, everyone got along and everyone inter-mingled more than what you see in movies about high school. So while the specific social breakdowns of the movie don’t really line up with how my high school experience was, the individual characters absolutely do.

There were people at my high school like Ben Affleck and Parker Posey’s characters that were both way too into being seniors. There were underclassmen like Wiley Wiggins and Christin Hinojosa’s characters that hung out with seniors and were resented for it. I knew people like “Pink” Floyd who were phenomenal athletes but didn’t play sports because they didn’t like the coaches. I knew people (and occasionally was myself) like Adam Goldberg who didn’t quite understand why the douchebags were so popular. I didn’t quite know them personally, but I certainly knew of local has-beens who still hung out with high schoolers even into their early 20s.

For every single character in the movie, there was someone I knew in high school to parallel them. I feel like that’s probably true for a lot of people. The characters in Dazed and Confused feel real, even if they’re only in one or two scenes. Part of it is that the characters are extremely well-written and developed, sure. But part of it is the casting. People like Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey and Milla Jovovich are good actors, so it’s easy for them to disappear into their characters. Meanwhile, actors like Jason London and Sasha Jenson and Michelle Burke and Wiley Wiggins were (for the most part) never seen again, so of course they seem real, because there’s no other major movie role to shatter the illusion that they existed in 1976 as their specific character. Then in the middle you have the incredible character actors like Rory Cochrane and Parker Posey — maybe you’ve seen them in other things, but their characters in Dazed and Confused are so iconic and lasting that it’s all of their other roles that seem out of place.

The most important character, by far, is “Pink” Floyd. As mentioned, the movie doesn’t really have a central conflict. There are a few small ones that pop up here and there, but they’re disparate and ultimately not that meaningful — Will Floyd sign the football pledge? Will they drive to go buy Aerosmith tickets? Will they be able to get a keg party thrown together at the last minute? Will the eighth graders avoid getting paddled? The movement of the movie comes through just the movement of time, following the characters through the afternoon and night after their last day of school. That’s why Floyd is ultimately so important — he’s friends with the football team, he’s friends with the nerdy kids because he’s smart and likes to play cards, and he’s friends with the stoners. He keeps everything tied together and keeps the story moving.

It’s hard to pin down who my favorite character in the movie is — I legitimately came up with eight different names and depending on the mood I’m in when I watch the movie, someone new might take the lead. Usually, my favorites are Don Dawson (played by Sasha Jenson) and Benny O’Donnell (played by Cole Hauser).

(Just as a long aside — yes, I know Dazed and Confused is technically classified as a comedy, and I suppose that’s correct. It’s a movie that is funny on purpose. But to me, it feels more like a movie that imitates reality, and this specific reality just happens to be funny. It’s perhaps a weird distinction, but I wouldn’t classify Dazed and Confused as a comedy, even though it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.)

That being said, Don is one of the funniest movie characters I’ve ever seen outside of a true comedy movie. I don’t think anything he says is all that funny, but everything about his mannerisms and the way he carries himself is hysterical. Maybe my favorite moment in the entire movie comes from Cole Hauser’s character, when the party in the woods starts to wrap up after the keg runs dry. Benny, sitting in a lawn chair in the bed of his pickup truck, stands up too quickly, realizes he’s way too drunk to be standing up at all, and immediately sits back down. It’s a three-second shot randomly thrown in with other shots of the party breaking up, and it kills me every time.

The music in the movie is the real star. They were incredibly careful to make sure that all of the music used in the movie had been released by the time the movie is supposed to take place (May 1976). And from start to finish, it’s an incredible lineup of songs that perfectly encapsulate specific moments throughout the night, but more than that, the feeling of being in high school during a time when legendary music was being recorded. Everybody romanticizes the music that came out when they were in high school, but imagine being in high school during one of the most impactful time periods in music history. It takes everything to a new level.

It’s not a perfect movie by any means. Wiley Wiggins, who plays Mitch Kramer (probably the second-most important character in the movie), is an unequivocally abysmal actor. It’s unclear how or why he was cast, considering every other role in the movie is near-perfect casting. There are multiple scenes where you can’t quite tell if he’s a bad actor or just a weird kid, but then there are several scenes where you can tell that the kid is just in way over his head.

It’s also a bit jarring to see the intensity of the hazing and initiation rituals that the seniors take pride in with the incoming freshman class, and just more generally the way kids from different circles interact with each other. Obviously, it’s a movie that came out 25+ years ago, about a moment in time 40+ years ago, so we can’t really judge it by 2020’s standards. But that doesn’t make it normal. In fact, I’d argue that the way the older guys act towards younger girls can be judged by 2020’s standards — it’s fucking creepy. Wooderson’s famous line, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age” sounds way more troubling in 2020 than it did when the movie was released or when it’s meant to have taken place. It’s still funny (kind of, barely, in a perverse way), but I don’t feel good about it.

Ultimately, the reason I love Dazed and Confused so much is kind of ineffable. It’s just a feeling I have when I watch it. It reminds me of high school, even if my high school experience really didn’t have much in common with anything depicted in the movie (other than an ongoing general motivation to find beer and drink it). I don’t even really have some stable of legendary high school stories — my high school years were pretty mundane, and even kind of shitty at times. But for some reason, Dazed and Confused triggers a lot of positive memories of being younger and having good times with friends. It’s a movie I saw for the first time in high school, and loved it immediately. I’ve seen it easily 20 or 30 times since, and every time I watch it, I just feel comfortable. I think it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about the movie’s lack of a central conflict — I can just sit and spend the last day of school with these characters, and not worry about whatever is on the other side of the credits. I can’t think of a time in the last 15 years or so where Dazed and Confused wouldn’t have been one of my 10 favorite movies. Today, it’s №4.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

21. The Other Guys

22. Remember The Titans