The cinema, no. 2
A self-centered look at Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" and "Before Sunrise."
Overheard in the library
Him: “I haven’t had a conversation with my mom in like two years.”
Her: “Really? I guess I have the opposite problem because my mom wants to have conversations all the time.”
Showing a text conversation to their friend: “Look at this, I said ‘which one do you mean “behind?”’ and she’s like ‘you know, the one behind.’”
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Shanon and I were talking about favorite lines and characters from Dazed and Confused, so we decided to re-watch it Monday night. I wouldn’t have said that Dazed and Confused is one of my favorite movies, but it is one of the few movies I have seen multiple times, and I even read the oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright, so I guess I’m a pretty big fan. Oddly, I think Shanon and I started talking about it when we were wondering if Generation X had a Big Chill movie. Clearly Dazed and Confused isn’t that movie, but it has some weird spot in the conversation about landmark Gen X movies I think? This Rolling Stone review of the oral history kind of gets at it.
If you don’t know the movie, it portrays the last day of school at a Texas high school in 1976, starting mid-afternoon and going until dawn the next day. There is hazing of the new freshmen, and much drinking and partying by the up-and-coming seniors and the lucky freshmen they take under their wings. It is an ensemble film that launched Matthew McConaughey’s career and features Ben Affleck and Parker Posey in small roles as sadistic seniors.
There’s so much I like about the movie: the cast, the dialog, the look, the aimlessness, the way affectionate high school relationships and friendships are portrayed. It’s a movie without a plot, which is quite appropriate for a movie about high school. Director/screenwriter Richard Linklater is ten years older than Shanon and I are, so his film, set in 1976, is ten years earlier than our high school experience. But we remember the older kids in our neighborhoods, our friends’ older siblings who still closely resembled the Dazed and Confused characters in the late 1970s. And into the eighties as high school students ourselves, we were still driving around with our friends on weekend nights with a sense of endless frustrated possibilities.
On Tuesday, I was talking to a friend at the college where I work. He’s a few years younger than I am, approaching 50. It sounds like he’s having a bit of a midlife crisis, wondering if he’ll achieve anything Big and Important in his life. I told him that my advice was unlikely to be welcome: give up. I have long ago realized that if I were the kind of person who was going to do something big and important, I would have done it by now. Instead I’m trying to increasingly take pleasure in just being alive. I feel like it’s time to work on being wiser and more compassionate. Some days that’s easier than others.
He was talking about how working at a college makes it harder because we are always surrounded by young people, full of potential and energy, and he coincidentally referenced the famous Matthew McConaughey line from Dazed and Confused, “I get older, they stay the same age.” But in a wry way, not in a creepy way. You might have to take my word for that.
Before Sunrise (1995)
I have another piece of advice that I’m going to pass along to my midlife crisis friend: do not watch Before Sunrise in your present frame of mind. I watched it Tuesday night and I knew it was going to happen—I’d seen it before—but it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The film is about an American young man, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who meets a French young woman, Céline (Julie Delpy) on a train in Austria. They talk for a while and hit it off. He convinces her to get off the train with him in Vienna; she’ll take the train home to Paris the next day, as he’s leaving for the US first thing the next morning. They have one night to spend walking around Vienna, talking and falling in love with one another.
So like Dazed and Confused, it’s a movie without much of a plot, that centers on young people, that takes place over less than 24 hours where the characters stay up all night. They are both shot in a quasi-documentary style with long takes that almost always have more than one character in the shot. In Before Sunrise, Céline & Jesse are in almost every shot together so you can watch him and watch her and watch her watching him and watch him watching her to see if she’s watching him and so on.
Unlike Dazed and Confused, it has a very small cast with really only two named characters. While Dazed and Confused has a tremendous soundtrack of classic rock songs that join scenes together or play over a montage, Before Sunrise seemed to have only diegetic music playing in the cafes and from the street musicians they pass; one of the benefits of setting the film in Vienna, I suppose. When the song they listen to in the record store continues for another minute it feels natural; when some generic pop song plays over the end credits it’s really jarring.
(Y’all already know I love scenes like this one where you can watch the actors just be in the moment.)
Before Sunrise hits me hard because it’s so easy for me to identify with. This is a straight-up Gen X film about two people in their mid-20s in the mid-90s. Ethan Hawke is exactly two days younger than I am. Julie Delpy is three months older than Shanon. The film says to me, remember when you were this young and this beautiful and what it felt like to fall in love? And it’s lovely to be reminded of that very deeply and specifically. I mean, I’ve never been to Vienna, but Shanon and I will always have the IHOP. Shanon’s as beautiful as Julie Delpy, and while I may not have been as handsome as Ethan Hawke was, it was a close thing, you will have to take my word on that. And the way the film is shot, both Hawke and Delpy seem so effortlessly, artlessly beautiful. There’s a bit near the end when the composition shifts from the usual shots that frame them both to more traditional point-of-view closeups that are more professionally lit and it’s jarring. I thought, oh right, they are movie stars.
In reminding me of what it was like to be 24 years old, the film also reminds me very firmly and emphatically that it will never be like that for me again. Even the characters in the film know that with this night in Vienna they are stealing or creating time apart from the world. It’s magic time and they won’t get it again, which is what makes it so poignant to them even as they experience it.
I haven’t watched the sequels yet, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, but I plan to in the next few days (no spoilers!). I hope and imagine they will deal with this feeling directly; how can we bear a world where time goes one direction? How do we appreciate the pleasures of getting older, and getting older with someone you love? How do we become more wise and compassionate?
Footnote
It’s possible that the real reason we watched Dazed and Confused is that Wiley Wiggins in the film really resembles our son, Nick, when he was younger.
I've been wanting to do this since Before Midnight came out -- watch them all back to back, I mean -- and you have inspired me to finally do it. I don't remember much about Before Sunrise or Before Sunset except that Before Sunset had a huge effect on me when I watched it. I will report back after I've completed the trilogy (? - is there another one coming?). Since you're a Julie Delpy fan, I highly recommend The Lesson, which came out over the summer, if you haven't seen it. Also, Boyhood is a must see, but maybe not the best option in your newly empty nest. I saw it when it came out, but it will be a long time before I'm able to watch it again.
Very interested in hearing your reactions to "Before Sunset" and "Before Midnight." When the third one first came out, I did them three nights in a row and found it to be ... a lot. Maybe leave some breathing room. I don't know if you've seen Linklater's "Boyhood," but it's also a very deep experience of the passage of time, in a different way from the "Before" films. Linklater is also currently involved in a unique attempt to film the Sondheim musical "Merrily We Roll Along." Famously problematic because the show is supposed to start with the characters as bitter, cynical, middle-aged adults and then progressing backwards in time to their optimistic youth, Linklater and cast are filming it "backwards," over the course of years.