Andy Ryan
It begins with a Pontiac. In a film of under two hours, we’ll follow a group of young people at a moment of change in their lives. There will be laughter, romance, drugs and baseball. We’ll meet a large cast and, though we’ll only be with them briefly, we’ll feel like we’ve got to know them and will be sorry to leave them behind.
I’m talking about Everybody Wants Some!!!, Richard Linklater’s film about three days in the life of Texan college baseball players about to begin term. Or I could be talking about Dazed and Confused, Linklater’s film about a day in the life of Texan kids on their last day of high school. Released twenty-three years apart, the films are a duo both in their style and ideas. Linklater takes us on a nostalgic ride through drive-in restaurants, pool halls, parties and outrageous shirts. But look closely through the haze and both films show how the moment is beautiful but can’t last.
Nearing the end of Everybody Wants Some!!!, Jake (Blake Jenner) and Beverly (Zoey Deutch) are floating in inflatable rings on a lake. It’s six in the morning, the night’s party is behind them and they’re alone. The backdrop is blurred autumn leaves. Before we hear them speak, we hear the birdsong. It’s idyllic, almost too perfect to believe. The girl got the boy, the boy got the girl. Then they start talking about the Myth of Sisyphus.
Jake: “The gods intend Sisyphus to suffer, right? Well, my point was that they’d actually blessed him with something to focus on, something that he could potentially find meaning in. It’s a gift to be striving at all, even if it looks futile to others. I mean, yeah, it’s ridiculous to roll a boulder up a mountain over and over and over again, but so is everything else in life.”
Jake’s boulder is baseball. For Beverly, it’s performing. They have found the thing that they’re passionate about and which gives meaning to their lives. They are, like many college kids, confident that they’ve figured life out. There is, though, a shadow hanging over them. They already know that they’re unlikely to be able to build their lives around their calling. Jake accepts that he’s “barely good enough to be here”, while Beverly is “just hoping to get cast in anything”. In having that self-awareness, they’re ahead of many of their peers. It’s not an easy truth to face. McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) smashes Jake’s pitch and then says, “Welcome to collegeball, freshman”. Normally, Jake has a comeback quip but here, nothing, just an awkward nod of the head. Linklater himself was a college baseball player who had to stop playing due to a health condition, so he knows what it is to leave the sport you love behind. You only have to look at the sun-lit green diamond to see it’s too good to last, an Eden that is going to have to be left behind.
One or two of these players might make it, but for most of them, growing up will mean leaving baseball. What if you refuse to grow up? Perhaps the film’s most intriguing character is Willoughby (Wyatt Russell). The pot-smoking, Pink Floyd-loving pitcher is a transfer student who likes to share his wisdom. And then he disappears. He’s pitching halfway through the first practice when he gets called over by the coach. He walks past his perplexed teammates and says “Well boys, here for a good time not a long time right?”. We see him shaking hands with the coach and then leaving. A little later, we find out that Willoughby is thirty (and yes, it hurts a little to hear this said in a tone that suggests thirty is impossibly old) and has transferred in under a false identity. He’s rumoured to have done this before at other universities in an attempt to keep playing baseball and living the student lifestyle.
What’s striking is that while his teammates laugh about the stunt, they don’t mock Willoughby. Finnegan (Glen Powell) sums up the mood when he says: “He’s probably just a guy who wasn’t quite good enough to play pro ball. Just loved baseball and wanted to keep playing. . . He’s not a bad guy”. At some level, his teammates get it. Most of them wouldn’t want to leave this life behind, so they can understand why Willoughby doesn’t either. As the viewer, it poses us a dilemma. We usually see a nostalgic refusal to grow up as unhealthy, maybe even a bit pathetic. Willoughby, though, seems intelligent, happy and living his mantra to “bring who you are, never who they want”.
In Dazed and Confused, Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) doesn’t want to grow up either. He’s less of a thinker than Willoughby, and is probably remembered by most viewers for his opinions on college girls, but their philosophies are similar: “The older you do get, the more rules they try to get you to follow. You just got to keep living, man”. Both see the strictures of growing up as inhibiting who they really are. Unlike Willoughby, Wooderson isn’t pretending to be anyone he isn’t, and his younger friends are happy to accept him as he is and don’t question his choices. During the making of Dazed & Confused, McConaughey’s extraordinary performance led to Wooderson being far more central to the film than Linklater originally intended. This contrasts with Willoughby, who seems forgotten by the finale of Everybody Wants Some!!!.
Different personalities seeking the same goal and seemingly both living happy lives. Perhaps for a moment as a viewer, you wonder whether they’ve got it all figured out. Then you think again. At how many more universities can Willoughby pull off his disguise? We wonder if he’ll even try again, or whether, in his careful putting down of his pitcher’s glove, he’s making peace with an end. And for how much longer will high school kids welcome Wooderson to the parties before deciding he should be somewhere else? Whatever the philosophy, the tricks or the bravado, it eventually has to end.
In Dazed & Confused, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) does want it to end. He’s the star quarterback who is already falling out of love with the game. He stands alone in the two films as a gifted sportsman who seems impatient to leave sport behind. The film partly portrays that as a rebellion against authority, with his refusal to sign his coach’s pledge not to drink or take drugs. While he does resent that authority, his impatience goes beyond that, and sitting on the football field late at night, spliff in hand, he announces: “All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself”.
“Pink”’s strength of feeling comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, he seems to be having a good time, but this is a preemptive attack on any future nostalgia. He sounds fed up with being told that these are “the best years” of his life, and perhaps even a little scared of what it means if that turns out to be true. He knows that he wants more, but beyond Aerosmith tickets this summer and getting out of this town, he doesn’t know what that is yet.
Linklater has built much of his career on looking back. Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!! are works of nostalgia, portraying with affection worlds that Linklater knew and loved. Much of viewers’ love for them is because we see some part of our lives there and enjoy the trips back. While our memories are different, we find common threads. Stranger but still powerful is that nostalgia for the specific past that you haven’t had. I’m a Brit, and yet I watch these films and feel the pull of an American high school and university that I never knew.
While he encourages us to revel in these slices of the past, Linklater also gently nudges us and reminds us that nostalgia has its limits. These films are time travel at its safest, and when the credits roll, we’re flung back to the present day whether we like it or not. “Pink” and his friends are leaving us behind, speeding down the highway to get those Aerosmith tickets. And in Blake’s first class, he nods off while the professor tells him and us: “Frontiers are where you find them”.
