The psychology of film is a fascinating and surprisingly infrequent topic of conversation. Since this discussion tends to verbalize elements of production that most people are only too happy to ignore or take for granted, it’s understandable why it doesn’t come up more. In certain cases however, a film’s core is so much better than everything else being produced that its psychology needs to be investigated. And writer/director Richard Linklater’s 1993 breakthrough film, Dazed and Confused, brought critical acclaim and a literate mentality to the high school drama. How? He created a set of realistic characters that grabbed the audience’s attention and pulled them in. I identified with this material because, for once, I had experienced a large percentage of it.

Dazed and Confused is a literal day-in-the-life-of movie about the last day of high school in 1976 in Austin, Texas. Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) is the defacto lead, a rising freshman through whose eyes the serenely meandering story is seen. Kramer’s evening takes him through one last dance at middle school and an initiation into high school at the hands of the rising seniors, to numerous parties and pool halls and finally ends at dawn when he stumbles home, tired and ready to collapse. However, while Kramer has the most screen time, hanging out with both the freshman and the seniors, subtly linking the two groups, Dazed and Confused is distinctly an ensemble project.

What makes Dazed and Confused such a triumphant success is Linklater’s keen eye for detail and his ability to craft and create three-dimensional characters who feel like real people.

The characters themselves can probably be described in the same brief terms as almost every other character in a high school movie–the stud quarterback (Jason London), the pothead (Cochrane), the older dropout (McConaughey), the bitch (Parker Posey) and the new girl (Christin Hinojosa)–but Linklater breathes life into his

creations by providing the viewer with an incredible amount of minute details heretofore unseen in the genre for each character; Linklater’s characters don’t have the answer to every question, or even pretend to. It’s part of what makes them funny and human. One of the film’s funniest scenes comes when Cochrane’s Slater asks Kramer if he’s "cool". Kramer is baffled by the question and expresses this to him. Slater responds with a caustic, "Okay..." It isn’t explained until later that Slater was asking Kramer if he smoked weed. However, by then the damage to Kramer’s ego (and my own by proxy) is done. "How couldn’t I have figured that out?" I wondered, "The man has a marijuana leaf on his T-shirt."

There are cliques in Dazed and Confused, but unlike Mean Girls, Drive Me Crazy or The Breakfast Club, everybody interacts with everybody else, whether they like it or not, just as it happens in real life.

Warm, endearing and without a hint of melodrama, Linklater has concocted a stellar movie in Dazed and Confused that forced film scholars and critics alike to acknowledge that, given the right circumstances, projects about high schoolers can be looked at as a work of art too.

chris neumer

yes, it's true: Renee Zellweger is in Dazed and Confused for roughly 2 seconds.