Defining Favourites: Dazed and Confused (1993)

We get older, this movie stays the same age.

Photo: Universal Pictures

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Richard Linklater
Screenplay by Richard Linklater
Produced by Richard Linklater, Sean Daniel, James Jacks
Starring Jason London, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, Shawn Andrews, Rory Cochrane, Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Sasha Jenson, Marissa Ribisi, Deena Martin, Michelle Burke, Cole Hauser, Christine Harnos, Wiley Wiggins, Esteban Powell, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Matthew McConaughey, Nicky Katt
Premiere Date: June 4, 1993
Running Time: 102 minutes

Dazed and Confused is not just one of the great high school movies, but in its freeform structure without any need to confine itself as a plot, it earned its own reputation as a “hangout movie.” As one of the Richard Linklater’s earliest efforts, it’s also a film that feels like it represents how he wants to allow everyone around himself to have a voice following the nonchalant approach of Slacker. Which not only allows for everything in Dazed and Confused to feel so inviting, but it also feels like a lamentation for what’s left of one’s own youth. All those funniest moments in the movie don’t at least come with at least some form of melancholy, and it’s all part of why Dazed and Confused resonates far beyond just being another high school comedy.

There’s only so much that one can experience over the course of a single day – as is the case with many of Richard Linklater’s most famous films. Dazed and Confused is a film that unfolds over the course of 24 hours the moment when school ends for the year and summer and thus an ensemble consisting of the school’s students and other people they know come forth from there. But no two students ultimately have the same experiences or worldviews, so a moment that they can all unite would paint a bigger canvas at that: one that eschews the cliques established by many other high school movies and instead allows its many characters to exist as people navigating their way through the world.