One of the few movies I like more every time I see it is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. I did not come of age in Texas in the summer of 1976; indeed, I am Canadian and was a teenager when the comedy released in 1993, 17 years later. But it is a movie that proves that late adolescence is often the same country. In one of the many drunken sociological conversations that pepper both this stage of life and the wandering film, bubbly free-thinker Cynthia Dunn lays out her “‘every other decade’ theory”: “The 50s were boring. The 60s rocked. The 70s, my God, they obviously suck. So maybe the 80s will be, like, radical.” The moment is memorable because Linklater allows himself so few superior jokes on his characters. As anybody who grew up then knows, the 80s were not radical. Even the cultural “cool kids” of the 80s, like Elvis Costello in his Buddy Holly glasses and David Byrne in his ever-growing suit, seemed to have a parodic, critical air about their work, like they knew they were producing their best stuff in an Arnoldian Epoch of Concentration.
Meanwhile, the 70s were often remembered as the era of Saturday Night Fever, a silly, narcissistic ‘Me decade’ of disco and embarrassing jumpsuits…
