Hacker Cinema
Dazed and Confused
1993 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Richard Linklater
The adventures of a group of Texas teens on their last day of school in 1976, centering on student Randall Floyd, who moves easily among stoners, jocks and geeks. Floyd is a star athlete, but he also likes smoking weed, which presents a conundrum when his football coach demands he sign a "no drugs" pledge.
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16 comments on Hacker News
I don’t buy that as the or even a reason. I’m older and we had raves before any legit venue would touch them. I remember once a venue was forced to cancel due to local law enforcement pressure. It happened the day before. Word spread real quick that we would just meet in a field on someone’s private land, a place we regularly had keg parties and most teenagers were aware of. We always found a way to party in those days. It was the number one objective every week, knowing where we would party on the upcoming weekend. This all was in 90s before anyone I knew had a mobile phone and the internet was not very useful yet.
My observation is that we were just bored a lot. It has been a long time since young people have been as bored as we were back then.
Totally different decade, but my 90s high school experience was very similar to the movie Dazed and Confused. It’s odd how similar those experiences were versus what has come with the tech disruption of youth.
I very much relate to the SLC Punk experience. The movie that came to mind for me as I was writing my comment was Dazed and Confused, it brings back that same feeling. One of the big questions I have now about Kerouac and On The Road is how much self-awareness he found. My understanding is that he was an essential part of the vanguard of American counter culture, a flawed prophet that can still be appreciated on some level.
70s and 80s movies come to mind where girls would be getting ready and lie down on the bed and suck in to get the button buttoned. Dazed and Confused comes to mind where they literally use a pair of pliers to put up the zipper because its so tight. Until you break it in, you are just having to suffer. Once they put elastic into jeans, people jumped on it because its just easier. I love my old-style selvedge denim, but it is more work and care than throwaway stuff.
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
The list of films that use that song are (at least according to IMDB):
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls072864571/
I guessed "dazed and confused" and was told that was incorrect. From the hint it would appear as though they were looking for "gone in 60 seconds"
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
I wouldn't believe everything you see on tv. While young men in particular, full of testosterone and out to make their mark on the world, are prone to aggressiveness, when I listen to kids in our community, I talk with teachers, etc, or even just observing kids, bullying isn't anything like a generation or two ago. In my grandparents house hangs a "frat paddle" from the 1920s. You've likely seen movies like "Dazed and Confused." Yes, that kind of hazing was a real thing. There's no way anything like that happens today (at least not in my neighborhood).
I sympathize 1000%.
The last 20 years have been very hard on me as a software developer and environmentally/politically conscious person. I've watched just about everything not work out the way I had hoped for. I believe that we've hit an inflection point where enough people have realized that the emperor has no clothes that we have a real chance to start over and correct our course.
I don't know how to help with your specific situation, but I can share mine. I went to college from 1995-1999 and it was similar to movies like PCU, Hackers, Dazed and Confused. I got to watch the internet go mainstream, which I wouldn't trade for anything. Anyone could make money then doing web development, and I was working on a shareware game business. It was just such an alive time, vivid in my memory. The future was so bright we had to wear shades.
Then the DMCA. The Dot Bomb. Bush v. Gore. 9/11. The PATRIOT Act. Middle East wars. Who Killed the Electric Car. The death of research. Outsourcing. Privatization. 100,000 US factories closed. The student loan crisis/bankruptcy exception. The housing bubble. Underemployment. Wealth inequality. Clinton-Trump. COVID-19. Billionaires..
In the hangover of the early 2000s, I felt guilty for partying it up in the 90s and ended up moving furniture for 3 years to support my floundering shareware business. Which shook my faith in humanity and almost broke me. Then a good friend passed which gave me PTSD. I was in financial ruin by the 2010s. Worked a bunch of dead end jobs under continuous burnout and depression to survive. Almost found myself homeless a few times. I continued self-flagellating all the way until the 2020 pandemic, when finally the whole world seemed to break too.
Now a lot of people landed on either side of these issues and hundreds more. Half the people reading this won't share my context or conclusions. But as a whole, I feel that the last 20 years have been a textbook example of what not to do. They're the dying gasp of 20th century thinking. For a long time, I felt that they ruined my life.
But all trauma all the time is no way to live one's life.
I've been going through a healing and growth process due to some health issues, a spiritual awakening and a dark night of the soul.
Now I see:
Faith, hope and love. Service to others. The divinity of all living things. Communication. Boundaries. Mindfulness. Meditation. A forgiving and supportive inner monologue. Showing up for yourself so that you can show up for others.
I have my sights set on solarpunk, decommodification, basically lengthening my runway outside of the status quo because I no longer believe that tech as we conceive it now serves the human condition. Somewhat ironically, we've become slaves to idiology and dogma under this secular system.
My current approach looks like listening for anxiety when I'm troubled by a choice, and leaning into the choice that expands possibility. So many of our choices each day are in conflict with what we feel is our life's purpose. But I've found that when I make the choice aligned with my heart, reality reforms around me to support it. Now I look back and see that much of my suffering was due to my own attachments, that I held on too tightly and dwelled on the negative, and didn't see the miracle of life unfolding. I didn't know that we had the power to manifest our dreams.
When in doubt, it's good to turn attention from doing to listening for a calling. That's where I found my faith again.
It's been a hard two decades, I still get overwhelmed and exhausted sometimes, but I truly feel optimism for the future in spite of everything looming over us and the planet. Hope something in this helps you give yourself the permission we all deserve, to start over again and be here now in this moment together.
I would be interested to know what teen film people consider most representative of their experience. I love “Dazed and Confused” because it seems like the archetypical US high school experience. I was shocked that the director intended it to convey the boredom of that lifestyle because it seemed approx 1000 times more exciting that my teenager lifestyle in the 00s. American Pie was popular at that time but faaar from reality.
I wonder what films teenagers these days relate to.
E-readers glow like squids. Priority people, sheesh.
Life is nanotech.
- - - -
Total tangent: When that movie "Dazed and Confused" came out the character Slater looked exactly like me. I wore my hair long and had that same cap on backwards, like the exact same color and pattern. I didn't mind so much being exposed as a walking stereotype, but everybody started saying, "Hey! You look just like Slater!" and that was really annoying because, no, Slater looks like me, I was here first. LOL I got a haircut and a different hat. LOL
But yeah, squids are cool.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Dazed+and+Confused+Slater&atb=v110-1&ia=images&iax=images
I think of movies like Dazed and Confused as essentially without conflict.
Oblique strategies made a brief appearance in Richard Linklater's Slacker film.[1] Linklater is more well known for films like Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and A Scanner Darkly, but in my opinion Slacker is by far his best.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_%28film%29
Richard Linklater (Slackers, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, etc) leads the Austin Film Society and screened the full European cut then led a discussion of the film (video of that here: https://youtu.be/irYXKADAKjI)
Attending that screening caused me to discover one of my favorite American films.
Your take reminded me of this reminiscence from a (now) 30 year old woman who went to a large LA public high school (http://natashavc.tumblr.com/post/80647186942/hey-guys-i-just-saw-dazed-and-confused-for-the):
"I just saw Dazed and Confused ... Even as an adult, the movie is great. It perfectly captures the intensities and subtleties of the social hierarchy at a large public school; it’s akin to prison.
"And for anyone who has gone to a large public school then you know that it is likely the closest thing to prison you will ever experience (and because of that, you are my brother). I was at the mercy of the hierarchy but then of course ritually enforced it. Nothing ever mean or nasty but there were circles and power, mystique around certain cliques and I respected it. We chased that power, reacted against it, then exerted it.
"That power between social groups in school, it never breaks down neatly as it does in the other teen comedies. It’s not the nerds versus jocks. The jocks usually didn’t have enough charisma to be truly popular. It was always the dual edged, cross pollenating ones that carried the most glamour. The jock-stoner; the hot-nerd; the dangerous-attractive dude-who graduated but you would still blow; the shady mean girls who were the ultimate enforcers of social power — they come in many forms, sometimes even in overalls."
Wiley Wiggins is an actor - he played the kid "Mitch Kramer" in Richard Linklater's (excellent) 1993 film _Dazed n' Confused_ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazed_and_Confused He's been in several other movies including Love & a .45, The Faculty, Waking Life, and Sorry, Thanks.
Now he's working on a kickstarter project, an iPad game called Thunderbeam! - check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wileywiggins/thunderbeam-for-the-ipad
There's also Ashton Kutcher, who said at TechCrunch disrupt that he had learned a bit of programming in college, but I'm not sure he would consider himself a programmer.
Awesome. But have you ever seen the movie "dazed and confused"? Remember that scene where the geeky, brainy guy figures that he can punch the dude who belittled and threatened him, on the assumption that he just needs to survive the next 10 seconds before someone breaks it up.
The nerd gets in a good punch, and the fight eventually gets broken up, but not until the nerd has been through a nice, fat beating.
I'm going to guess that you were a pretty good fighter, because in many of the public schools around San Francisco (no, folks, it's not all peace and love here) you could get seriously pounded for that.
The movies love to push this asinine, feel good notion that bullies are really cowards at heart, and all you need to do is crack them in the nose once and they start mewing like little kittens. What crap. You punch a local badass, he'll punch your ass 100 times. You better be ready to back that shit up. I'm not kidding.