PicoBlog

One of the great tropes of all time is “high school is a hellscape.” There’s a spectrum that starts with Lord of the Flies and Heathers on one end and every single high school comedy movie on the other end, but the basic takeaway is simple: High school is a Nietzschean horror show where “cool” kids torment “nerds” with cruel impunity while various other groups—the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads, freshmen, ROTC Guys, preps, JV jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, varsity jocks, unfriendly Black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don't eat anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks, the greatest people you will ever meet, and the Plastics—look on with soulless disinterest.

It’s so baked into the premise at this point no one questions it. If your story is set in high school, there will be a rigid and extremely well-defined hierarchy that every single kid—and some of the teachers—slot into. And some of those groups—athletes and richies, typically—will use their power ruthlessly to torture and abuse anyone they perceive as lower on the social scale. As with most tropes, there’s a kernel of truth buried in there. High school is usually a pretty awful experience for a wide variety of reasons. Combining hormones, acne, and the first inklings that you actually care what other people think with the dawning realization that you’re expected to make all manner of decisions about the rest of your life while simultaneously figuring out how to safely get high on a regular basis is stressful, man.

But for the overwhelming majority of folks it’s not a murderous, theatrical torture chamber. For some folks? Yes, and I’m not here to deny anyone the truth of their lived experience. But at this point in pop culture painting a high school setting as a place where children ruthlessly clan up like prison gangs is just lazy—it’s a cliche and not a very interesting one.

Which is why Dazed and Confused is genius.

Richard Linklater’s 1993 film is essentially a love letter to his own childhood in Alabama. Set on a single day in a small Texas town in 1976, it follows a cast of teenage characters as they navigate the last day of High School, when the new Senior class traditionally paddle incoming Freshmen and everyone plots major parties. And it’s probably the most accurate depiction of your standard suburban high school experience so far. It’s important to get that distinction—the high school experience typically dramatized in teen comedies and novels isn’t universal. It tends to be largely white and suburban, and there are plenty of people who live in vastly different worlds. But since the trope itself is concerned with that narrow view of high school, that’s what we’re looking at here. And what we’re looking at is the most realistic approach to this particular high school experience ever, because it allows for the possibility of joy.

High School kids aren’t robots programmed to behave in certain ways. Sure, kids are assholes—this is absolute truth. And there are sociopaths in America’s high schools, absolutely. But the way Hollywood defaults to every high school cafeteria being a microcosm of Survival of the Fittest With Clever Clique Names is just a lazy cliche, and Dazed and Confused proves it.

On the surface, it looks like a lot of other teen comedies. The incoming Senior Class at a suburban high school have a tradition of hazing the incoming freshmen—the girls are put through dumb “air raid” drills and covered in condiments while the boys get paddled. In the hands of a dumber storyteller the Seniors would all be gorgeous model types with the affect of Patrick Bateman when he thinks no one is looking, and the freshmen would all be terrified until maybe some of them banded together to overthrow the hierarchy or something. And through it all the various cliques would be observed with clinical precision, because once you’re a stoner or a jock that is all you are.

Instead, Linklater tells a more nuanced story. Yes, the freshmen aren’t exactly thrilled to get a paddlin’, and some of the Seniors are assholes. But for most of the kids it’s not that big a deal. By the time everyone’s out at the local water tower for a party, the Seniors have mostly forgotten about the hazing, and no one observes strict social lines in terms of their clique. Everyone’s just there. Pink, the star quarterback, isn’t an entitled jerk. Sure, he’s privileged, but also kind of a nice guy and deeply ambivalent about his jock identity. In Linklater’s high school there are cliques and a bit of a hierarchy, but it’s not grimly defined and immutable. People can, his universe admits, be several different things all at once.

One of the keys here is Ben Affleck’s character, Fred O’Bannion. O’Bannion is a straight-up bully, about as close to the sociopathic one-note jock-cum-monster you find in many other teen movies. He delights in torturing the freshmen and has a level of privilege and power far beyond what he actually deserves solely because of his age, aggression, and status as a Senior (or sort-of senior, as he flunked his junior year and will be repeating the grade).

But … none of the other Seniors like O’Bannion. They are, in fact, pretty openly disdainful of him, and obviously regard him as a loser. In a lesser high school narrative O’Bannion would have been the Cruel King of the school, totally in charge. In Linklater’s more realistic world everyone sees him for what he is: A jerk. His supposed friends even help to set him up for a humiliating prank when they think he’s gone too far in his hazing efforts. You get the sense that O’Bannion’s stunted emotional life and hair-trigger temper has taught his ‘friends’ to say nothing and tolerate him in order to avoid altercations—but no one respects him. Fred O’Bannion is almost a deconstruction of the typical bully character in these sorts of stories.

Of course, everyone has their own high school experience and some of those experiences are horrible. No one’s arguing that all high schools are filled with fun-loving kids who effortlessly mix between cliques at all times. But what Linklater gets right on screen is the fact that in reality those lines are pretty muddy, and teenagers are constantly morphing into new forms as they figure shit out. There are no Very Special Episode vibes, either. When Pink and a few other Seniors take freshman Mitch under their wing, it’s a great experience for the kid—but there’s no implication that they’re changing his life, or that they’ll even be close friends. It’s just a bit of an adventure on an early summer evening.

My own high school experience was okay, right up until it was time to take Senior portraits and I opted to get my hair cut. The resulting monstrosity is now known as the Somers Mop Bowl Disaster and it’s studied in sociology courses to this day. Frankly, I don’t know how I survived.

Next week: The greatest scene in the MCU.

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