dazed & confused (1993) & juvenalia, in all its messy abhorrent charisma

// link to letterboxd review //

We didn't know how good we had it, because we never did.

I was talking to some friends after a movie we watched in class the other day and I was lamenting the fact that the film didn't have any emotional core to it whatsoever and thus couldn't grab me; I wear my hopeless doomed romantic badge with pride in this cohort. To which one of my friends shot 'Love isn't real' to me. To my utter bewilderment, I was able to hit back 'And that's why we make movies.'

And I'm not cynical enough to fully write off if anyone would ever drink poison for someone else besides young fools signing over balconies, but I think we're both right. Movies give us the opportunity to exacerbate. Aggrandize. Hyperbolize. And we're all foolish enough to believe it, and that's where the magic is.

So after a night on the town with said friends & classmates, I wake up a little groggy and with an open itinerary in front of me; I can't think of a better space to be in for 'Dazed and Confused'. Well, high I guess. But it's the best I could do. 

Dazed sends us looking backward at the minutiae, a genre that is so dear to my heart. But instead of finding the huge in the small like so many of my favourites, Linklater revels in the small as they pile up on each other and just happen. That's how life is. It happens. Perpetually stuck in time while acting timeless. Its denouement is 24 hours in the life of a generation. A snapshot that's perhaps exaggerated a tad to show caricatures that represent a feeling. Do they exist exactly like this? Well, that's why we make movies. 

This was an adventure that I'm sure has affected so many people but for me, it was when I was 15 or so and watched the inimitable 'Annie Hall'. I thought this is how the witty left cultural sponges of the affluent spoke. I thought this is how I was gonna speak. Meet other people like this and interact like this.  Granted it's going on almost a decade since watching that film that I still adore, but I do find it ever so full of self-loathing and would beat myself up if I ever was like that, but would still feel that shard of coolness and dare I say bourgeois. But there's an idea in there that's real. The way you would say something if it wasn't run over four of five drafts and rewrites before being test screened and adjusted. 

So, as I sit back and look back on teenagehood escapades that I missed, I'm trying to console myself that for every drunken legend that gets passed around, I'm sure there's some kernel of truth and feeling to it, before it gets stretched and enlarges so. I mean I hope so. Otherwise, I've missed out on so much and wouldn't know how to cope with this. 'In search of lost time'. I guess that's why we watch movies. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯