Happy Sunday night — or, most likely, Monday morning by the time you’re reading this! Hope you had a great weekend and that the week ahead is a significant improvement on this one last year.
For those who attend services on Sunday or not, I think this New York Times opinion piece by Leigh Stein is worth mulling over: “The Empty Religions of Instagram.”
Also worth reading this clear-eyed New Yorker view of what could be the waning days of COVID-19: “What the Coronavirus Variants Mean for the End of the Pandemic.”
Finally, if this isn’t reason enough for you to fork over $20 and watch Minari already … I really have nothing for you.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 360: Dazed and Confused (available on Amazon Prime)
So I had initially planned to recommend Dazed and Confused after finishing Melissa Maerz’s oral history of the film, but I may not do that in the next week. (It’s superlative thus far, by the way.) So, I figured why not go ahead and remind everyone that it’s available to stream on Amazon Prime? Whether it’s your first watch or 420th, you’re guaranteed to get something great out of Richard Linklater’s high school classic.
Dazed and Confused is a bucket of contradictions, just like the experiences of adolescence and growing up themselves. It’s a Gen X classic, but Linklater is technically a boomer. It’s a patently anti-nostalgic film, yet the film itself is often held up as a nostalgic object. It’s a film deeply rooted in the bicentennial year experience of 1976, although the film doesn’t feel attached to a fixed historical point in the slightest. As someone quoted in the oral history states quite nicely (and I paraphrase), the movie connects because it is about high school as a time in life rather than a time in history.
No one makes a hangout movie like Linklater — no one. He’s the master of observing casual conversation and how it gently reveals interpersonal dynamics. His films, Dazed and Confused chief among them, see the poetry in the profane moments of everyday life without feeling like banal drivel. What is this movie but a collection of moments headed nowhere in particular but a good time, just like the jumbled memory of youth itself?
I rewatched Dazed and Confused at about the point in the oral history when the film went into production so I’d have it fresh in my mind. One thing I found most interesting this time around was to see it not as an ensemble film of all the crazy characters you meet in any given Texas high school, which seems like the default mode of enjoyment. Rather, I watched it more as a two-hander between rising senior “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) and incoming freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), two outgoing but relatively easygoing guys maintaining an even keel amidst some of the craziness that surrounds them.
Linklater said he envisioned their dialogues as his older self talking to his younger self, and that really took the film to a higher plane for me. Through this lens, you can latch more easily onto the anti-nostalgic wavelength of Dazed and Confused. Pink and Mitch almost stand outside and above the film, already kind of over the whole experience of high school even as they’re still stuck in it. They have a clear-eyed view of who the people around them really are … a lot of whom are just not very bright or interesting. But since you have to be stuck with these people anyway, you might as well just try and make the best of the time you have with them while trying to cling to some semblance of personal integrity and principles. Alright, alright, alright!
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall