Are you cool, man? “Dazed and Confused,” Gen X, and the every other decade theory

Pickford had a pretty sweet setup, what with this room and his GTO and all.

The movie “Dazed and Confused” is particularly special to me. I am one of those young people who connected with the movie, to Richard Linklater’s surprise, I’m going to offer my Gen-X perspective on why D&C meant at least as much to kids my age as it did the generation it portrayed.

D&C was released right as the 1993-94 school year was starting. That was my senior year, meaning I was basically the same age as the older students in the movie, who are just beginning the summer before their own senior year. So, here’s this movie about a bunch of kids just kind of aimlessly cruising around, drinking beers, smoking weed, listening to classic rock, shooting pool, and hanging out in whatever places they can without being chased away.

Care to guess what my friends and I had just spent our summer doing?

Then there’s the film’s geographic setting, a suburban town somewhere in Texas. I lived in a suburban town in Texas myself, and while I knew not everyone else my age did, I kinda suspected that suburban towns more or less were pretty similar everywhere. I would later have support for this suspicion in seeing Point Place, WI, in another 1970s-oriented piece of popular entertainment.

Beyond the way my friends and I found much in common with the characters in the movie, there was another obvious hook for me: This was my parents ’generation being portrayed on the screen. I agree with the writer of this New Yorker article both in that generations aren’t as neatly defined as our culture pretends, and that there’s a significant difference in attitudes and worldview between the prototypical early Boomers and the younger ones we get to know in D&C. My parents feel the same way.

I watched this movie with them, on VHS because that’s how we did it in the ‘90s. They thought it was hilarious, and fairly accurate. And watching this movie with them was probably the first time I really considered them as people who had lives before I came along. It prompted me to see them as more than just my parents.

But there’s still another reason I think this movie resonated as powerfully as it did with people my age, and it has something to do with the “every other decade theory” mentioned in both the the movie and the article. Essentially, the argument is that, at least in the 20th century, decades alternate between being awesome and terrible.

I’ll just quote the movie here: “The ‘50s were boring, the ‘60s rocked, and the ‘70s, oh my God, they obviously suck. Come on. Maybe the ‘80s will be radical.”

The thing is, for a lot of us who were that age in the early ‘90s, the ‘70s actually looked like a lot more fun than the ‘80s.

We had just been brought up in the frequently stifling conservatism of the Reagan decade. The just-say-no, AIDS-will-kill-you-if-you-have-sex, let’s-forget-the-1960s-happened ‘80s. And the ‘80s were very hostile to the memory of the ‘70s. Cultural figures of the ‘80s seemed to be trying very hard indeed to convince that the ‘70s absolutely sucked. Sideburns and flares and disco were out, short hair and the tight-roll and synthesizers were in.

Yet despite the illusion of strict control, we were still latchkey kids. We grew up with authority figures who were still often far from the ever-present helicopter parents common today. We were told what not to do, but when it came to enforcing the rules, it wasn’t unusual for nobody to be there to do that part. The culture was certainly becoming more strict on the surface, but having a lot of unsupervised free time also meant having some freedom from that.

I think in part we embraced the 1970s as an act of rebellion against that surface tension palpable in environment we’d been brought up in. The characteristic 1970s’ free-wheeling

attitudes about having a good time, along with a general sense that nothing was really as important as the adults wanted us to think it, appealed to a generation raised with increasing pressure to perform academically and behave themselves all while being told greed is good by slick-haired Wall Street types who’d already sucked most of the money out of the economy. And if the ‘70s were the least cool thing imaginable to people who actually enjoyed the ‘80s, well, that sounded like a further endorsement to us, because in a lot of ways the ‘80s didn’t turn out to be all that radical. One of the most popular movies of the decade, after all, was about traveling back to 1955.

Though there have been periods in which the ‘80s have been remembered fondly, they seem to come and go without staying around very long. I don’t think the perception of that era ever really reached the level of nostalgia seen for the ‘70s. Sure, the decade is revisited here and there. But nothing like the popularity of “That ‘70s Show” or “Dazed and Confused” has followed. The decade that was so critical of its predecessor turns out to have not aged very well.

Of course, like all decades the ‘80s are a mix of both good and bad. But the ‘80s was also a time between fairly big changes in culture and technology, and the timing works out just so that many of the things we do remember fondly from the ‘80s were better in either the decade before or after. Cars and video games were much better in the ‘90s. Music was better in both the ‘70s and the ‘90s. Movies were better in the ‘70s (but maybe not by much). Computers and home electronics vastly improved in the ‘90s. About the only thing that was really better in the ‘80s was MTV. As a transitional period, the 1980s lack both the analog charm of the 1970s and the digital sophistication of the 1990s and beyond.

And the ‘90s? The decade of my own youth is finally getting the nostalgic treatment in popular entertainment. How that goes remains to be seen, but I have reason to believe it will be remembered fondly. One reason I have for this is that I never saw any backlash to the ‘90s the way both the ‘70s and the ‘80s became uncool almost the instant they ended.

If anything, it seemed like a lot of people held a fondness for the ‘90s as we moved through the 21st century. The baggy clothes didn’t fare so well, but cultural touchstones like the first-wave grunge bands and TV shows like “The X Files” were never targeted for the kind of derision that popular things from the previous two decades had.

And that brings me back to “Dazed and Confused.” As much as it was about the ‘70s, it was of the ‘90s. It’s not a movie that could have been successful in the ‘80s. But it couldn’t have been anything but successful in the ‘90s, because by then, we were ready for it. Sometimes the every other decade theory turns out to have some truth to it.