It’s the sort of movie you just kind of hang out with it.
And it absolutely catches that perfect moment in time. It’s the last day of school and you’ve got the whole summer stretching ahead with no plan, no curfew, just that weightless feeling of being on the edge of everything right before anyone expects you to figure out who you’re going to be.
No big epiphanies or life-changing decisions here, just one long, perfect night of cruising, loitering, and trying to stretch the moment before the real world kicks in. There’s plenty of time to come-of-age later.
I’ve always thought of it as the ‘American Graffiti’ for the Nineties Set. George Lucas’s 1973 film looked back at 1962 (which is very much where the ’50s ended) with shiny chromed-out affection, mythologising the last summer of innocence: the drag race as rite of passage, the jukebox a holy altar, and the drive-in as sacred ground.
Those were their Happy Days.
Twenty years later, we started expressing some side-eyed appreciation for the ’70s, but the rose coloured Ray-Bans were firmly down the bridge of our collective noses. Like Richard Linklater, the teens in Dazed were our older siblings, the cool kids we watched from the curb in 1976. We didn’t all live the ’70s like they did – but we absorbed it through our parents’ smoke clouds, Brady Bunch reruns, and iron-on hand-me-downs. And yet it still feels like our experience.
That was our ’70s Show.
American Graffiti was pure ’60s nostalgia – every moment was precious. But Dazed doesn’t romanticize the ’70s in exactly the same way. The era’s just there, the music, the cars, the clothes, while the film focuses on what really matters: killing time with your friends, and pretending tomorrow doesn’t exist.
So yeah, it’s our version American Graffiti, except nobody’s racing toward their future or learning big lessons. It’s just a film that gets what it’s like to cruise around, talk shit, and do absolutely nothing, because doing nothing is the last real freedom.
-Pop
Dazed and Confused arrived on Home Video this week in 1994, after a September 24, 1993 theatrical release.