4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused on the Criterion Collection

An unimpeachable American masterpiece receives a gloriously shaggy and vital 4K upgrade.

Dazed and ConfusedRichard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused is blissfully free. Just as its teenage characters are free from the mandates of adult life, partying the first night of the summer of 1976 as ascendant high school seniors and freshman, the film itself is free of two shackles of conventional cinema: three-act plotting and moralizing.

Indeed, Dazed and Confused’s teen characters don’t learn a very special lesson by the end of the film. Their parents aren’t founts of supernatural wisdom gifted to them by a screenwriter, but simply older people who remember all too well the hedonism of a few months between school years in which there are few social expectations to live up or down to. The kids of Linklater’s masterpiece get drunk and stoned, drive around, listen to the greatest soundtrack in the history of American teen movies, make out, and raise a little hell. The meaninglessness of it all is the meaning of the film.

In this age in which we expect art to teach us how to be better people, it’s impossible to overstate the power of a movie with the confidence to devote itself to people screwing around. Watching Dazed and Confused again, I thought less of George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and more of Joe Dante’s Gremlins. Dante pushed aside the heartwarming obligations of a holiday film and reveled in the anarchy of the monsters’ rampage. He thinks the gremlins are funny and doesn’t pretend not to. Linklater similarly refuses to sentimentalize the actions of his teen characters, who revel in their unholy energy, sometimes vandalizing property and hazing one another with surprising viciousness.

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There’s a lawlessness to Dazed and Confused, a sense of “win some, lose some,” of kids being allowed to honor their inner nature, that’s increasingly alien to our age of self-pitying, helicopter parenting. The film’s young characters are charismatic and funny but not always likeable, as Hollywood would define the term at least. Like Dante’s gremlins, and like many actual teenagers, they’re concerned primarily with satiating their own hungers. Linklater’s not blind to the perils of such selfishness, but he respects its intoxicating purity.

Linklater orchestrates his large and storied cast with a fluidity that rivals that of Robert Altman, and with an anthropological obsessiveness that would become a defining trait of his work. As the characters in Dazed and Confused drift in and out of fast-food joints, emporiums, schools, baseball diamonds, football fields, and those great ungoverned expanses of country that kids always manage to find for the sake of drinking and fucking, it seems as if anything can happen in this film. There’s a democratic joy in how jocks, writers, stoners, and older and younger kids mingle freely, evoking overlapping attitudes of the ’70s. Indeed, the film has an obsession with an ecstatic American weirdness that recalls Altman’s Nashville.

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Throughout, the camera is sneaky, always sidewinding around to discover a new character or a new detail. Many moments large and small are unforgettable, such as a scene, shot in rapturous slow motion, in which a freshman girl is sprayed inside a carwash; or an entrance in which a few studs walk into an arcade to play foosball as Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” blazes in the background, the song turning them into momentary icons; or the comeuppance experienced by a bully, O’Bannion (Ben Affleck), when his freshman prey out-smart him; or the “Totally Illogical” bumper sticker that hangs above a snoozing freshman’s head; or the melancholic euphoria of the party ending, as embodied by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s titanically lonely “Tuesday’s Gone.”

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But to isolate certain scenes in Dazed and Confused is a fool’s errand. The film is an embarrassment of riches, as every scene is a motherlode of detail, an embodiment of Linklater’s ability to look at his characters at once closely and from a distance. Every scene is a “hit” that exists for its own sake as well as drives the film forward toward the quiet reckoning that is the beer bust at the Moon Tower and its aftermath on a football field. The central poles of the film’s consciousness are Pink (Jason London) and Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), an upcoming senior and freshman, respectively, who suggest the same chill, popular dude in different stages of development. They’re both unusual mixtures of stoner and jock, and each manage to sustain a moment of abandon and contemplation into seeming eternity (read: the next morning).

Along the way, Pink and Mitch get into adventures that Linklater invests with the exaggerated satirical swagger of Up in Smoke and fellow Texan Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead. As Chuck Klosterman writes in an essay included with this disc, Dazed and Confused feels less real than imagined, both celebrating and parodying the teenage life we dream up for ourselves years later, rich in highs without consequences. Yet a fear of awakening from the dream is submerged in the film as a resigned backbeat. Try as we might to delay the inevitable, Tuesday must eventually go.

When Pink refuses to sign a pledge sheet showing his commitment to his football team and coach (Terry Mross), promising not to drink or do drugs, he comes as close as anyone in Dazed and Confused does to voicing a thesis, fighting for his right to resist conformist adult behaviors for as long as they’re feasibly resistible. He’s fighting not to belong to a traditional plot, or to awaken from this reverie to discover that he’s now, say, a middle-aged stockbroker with a gut and a mortgage. That Linklater can admire Pink’s individuality and understand him to be an entitled brat shows that he’s not only a satirist and a nostalgist, but also an artist.

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Image/Sound

The image maintains the balanced color spectrum of Criterion’s 2011 Blu-ray edition, illustrating the film’s vast range of sunny and nocturnal hues. The orange of that GTO really pops in the legendary opening, as do the painterly greens and earthy textures of the brilliant Moon Tower sequence. Yet the images often quite importantly feel worn, as Dazed and Confused refuses to indulge in the constant period-movie mistake of looking too good and too polished in the tradition of a wax museum. A lot of stuff here looks rode hard and put away wet, from the cracked bongs to the T-shirts that appear to have been worn every day for a year. The film looks like it belongs in the ’70s, and sounds like it too, as that 5.1 remastered surround soundtrack preserves the vital dimensionality of all those rock songs while allowing smaller details, such as the swoosh of a handmade paddle through the air, to really sing.

Extras

This smorgasbord of extras is entirely ported over from Criterion’s previous editions of the film. The supplements here have an appropriately overstuffed yearbook vibe, from the many deleted scenes and cast auditions to a “making of” featurette that followed up with the cast and crew 10 years after the film’s 1993 release. Richard Linklater’s 2006 audio commentary remains the ideal “one-stop shop” of this collection, merging his extraordinary sense of texture and detail with his empathy and sense of humor. Of the many essays included in the booklet, those by Kent Jones and Chuck Klosterman remain the highlights, the former for its poetry and erudition, the latter for its sense of how Dazed and Confused can shift and change with the viewer over time. New supplements would’ve been nice, but this is still a fun and intelligent package.

Overall

Richard Linklater’s unimpeachable American masterpiece receives a gloriously shaggy and vital 4K upgrade, though the supplements could use a pruning and updating.

Score: 
 Cast: Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Matthew McConaughey, Rory Cochrane, Cole Hauser, Milla Jovovich, Sasha Jenson, Joey Lauren Adams, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey, Anthony Rapp, Shawn Andrews, Ben Affleck, Michelle Burke, Marissa Ribisi, Nicky Katt, Christine Harnos, Christin Hinojosa  Director: Richard Linklater  Screenwriter: Richard Linklater  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 102 min  Rating: R  Year: 1993  Release Date: February 21, 2023  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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