This, I suspect, is why Dazed And Confused was a box office bomb and a slow-burning video and DVD cult: the lack of a kids-today-suck theme alienated potential adult filmgoers, and a movie that has no serial killers, gratuitous tit jokes, big dance numbers, contemporary soundtrack or anything resembling a plot wasn’t going to have the kids queuing at the cinema on pre-publicity alone. But once people saw it on video, word-of-mouth did its job. Because there are few more real teenagers in film than those in Dazed And Confused, and even fewer films that dare to show teens doing what they love doing best: nothing.
Linklater’s classic is a break with tradition in more purely cinematic terms. Gone is MTV-style relentless action, rock video montage, frames crowded with colourful detritus, jock–bitch–nerd stereotypes, Hughesian wish-fulfilment, staccato editing and characters who only speak to move the plot along, crack a gag or confess their desperate angst. Instead, we have European-style long, slow takes, serene camera movement which forces our eye to wander away from central protagonists, kids who are well-rounded and basically decent except for a few arch bad guys, enough characters to confuse the casting director of Spartacus, and conversation that leads nowhere. These kids may like their booze and drugs, but they are also masters of cultural studies, deconstructing trash TV shows and rock records, discussing sex dreams where they were doing it with a girl who has the head of Abraham Lincoln, talking the exact aimless and beautiful bollocks that teens who are cleverer than adults think but nowhere near as smart as they think they are inevitably talk. It’s the conversation that is much of the joy of Dazed And Confused, a quotable, random-generated dialogue that takes a cue from Reservoir Dogs and invents the entire oeuvre of Kevin Smith, for better or for worse. Maybe Linklater didn’t pick up the success he deserved for doing it first. But other directors copped the feel and aped Linklater’s ideas about allowing his actors to improvise around the script to make his own digressions feel more natural. The result mixed a haphazard, rambling structure with tight, taut and technically brilliant direction, as Linklater choreographs his small army of actors with the kind of unobtrusive aplomb that feels touched by genius.
But obviously I’ve got a little too into Linklater’s languid sprawl and resolutely refused to tell you what Dazed And Confused is actually about. Here’s the basics. It is the last day at a high school in Austin, Texas and kids put upcoming freshman kids from the neighbouring junior high school through sadistic ‘hazing’ rituals, talk bollocks, smoke some dope, plan a party that never happens, talk bollocks, have a drink, smoke some dope, play baseball by driving by mailboxes and smashing them, get shot at, hang out at a cool pool hall, have a drink, talk bollocks, assemble for a party in a field near one of Austin’s Moonlight Towers, fight, flirt, smoke dope, talk bollocks. The movie ends with Randy ‘Pink’ Floyd’s no to the coach, a freshman pondering his night out with The Big Kids while listening to a groovy ’70s rock band called Foghat on his headphones, and a bunch of teens taking a road trip to buy Aerosmith tickets.
The film is defined by two longish episodes. The hazing rituals are bizarre and fascinating to anyone who hasn’t gone to an American high school (or a British public school), and also play up a gender difference that feels rich with truth and subtext. For Mitch (played by Wiley Wiggins, a wide-eyed, long-faced girlie-boy with a winning smirk) and his fellow junior high kids, the ritual is perilous but spectacularly unimaginative. The high school bullies, led by Ben Affleck’s Fred O’Bannion, run after you with big wooden paddles, and, when they catch you, they hit you on the arse with them until you can barely walk. Affleck, in an early role that serves as a bit of a red herring in his career as a leading man, is the one major character in the movie who is entirely one-dimensional, a boorish meathead who gives the movie its main stand-up-and-cheer moment when a vengeful Mitch devises a cunning plan to soak him in paint.
Meanwhile, the senior girls, led by the reliably great Parker Posey as the repellent Darla, put the juniors through a complex obstacle course of vaguely sexual sado-masochistic rituals so designed as public humiliation that every senior boy not chasing kids around with paddles gets to enjoy the spectacle as entertainment. They make the juniors suck dummies. They cover them in mustard, ketchup, eggs and flour. They call them bitches and sluts. They then force them to propose to the watching senior boys, who now resemble Kings watching slave girls degrade themselves at their majesty’s pleasure. But the strangest thing is that, while the boys attempt to escape their paddling (one kid’s mom even pulls a gun on O’Bannion), the girls willingly surrender to their humiliation. There is something very disturbing here about gender roles, as well as an implication that American schools tacitly encourage the abuse.
But the scene that everyone takes from Dazed. . . is the stoned rave in a field, a long, rambling pleasure involving kids in great clothes flirting, fighting, falling over, occasionally shuffling to some prime metal or funk and talking excellent stoner nonsense about how George Washington was part of an alien-worshipping cult. The amusingly heroic moment arrives when neurotic Jewish nerd Mike (Goldberg) works himself into enough of a humiliation frenzy to punch ‘dominant male monkey motherfucker’ Clint. The fight is broken up, and we know that, if it wasn’t, tough boy Clint would kick poor Mike’s ass into accident and emergency. But one universal male rite of passage involves understanding that you don’t lose face by losing a fight . . . only by running away from one. You take your pop, hope the guy isn’t so hard that you literally lose your face . . . and then write your own myth, comparing yourself to Jackson Pollock and Ernest Hemingway. And pray you don’t bump into him when you’re alone.
Pink (the slightly-too-pretty Jason London) is forced to make his crucial ‘no’ choice when he and friends, including a never-better Matthew McConaughey as David, the older kid who just can’t quite break away from high school life, are caught having a ceremonial joint on the school playing field. The decision isn’t just throwing a piece of paper into the face of the football coach who represents authoritarianism. It isn’t even just a rejection of all-American priorities and the national obsession with college sports and their win-at-all-costs mentality. It’s a break from childhood into young adulthood, because the decision will alienate him from friends as well as the adult world. It’s a corny but neat summation of a film about choosing fun and friends and hedonism over duty and bullies and tradition, given poignancy by our knowledge of a coming decade which will do its level best to turn back the clock and pretend the 1960s never happened.
TOTALLY FUCKED UP
1993
Starring: James Duval, Gilbert Luna, Lance May, Roko Belic, Susan Beshid, Jenee Gill, Alan Boyce
Dir.: Gregg Araki
Plot: To live and die gay in LA.
Key line: ‘I wanna enjoy life while I’m still young enough to appreciate it. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. Right?’
The film begins with a shot of a small one-paragraph clip from a newspaper. It notes that, according to America’s National Institute of Mental Health, 30 per cent of teenagers who commit suicide are gay, and cites a double suicide in Milwaukee. And then, after we quickly meet star James Duval, Gregg Araki spells out his intentions in crudely fonted captions: ‘More teen angst.’ ‘Another homo movie by Gregg Araki.’ ‘In 15 random celluloid fragments.’ ‘Lifestyles of the bored and disenfranchised.’
Totally Fucked Up ( or Totally F***ed Up, for marketing purposes) is the fourth lower-than-low-budget film by Californian early ’90s ‘New Queer Cinema’ pioneer Gregg Araki, and the first in a ‘Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy’ completed by the more conventional but less engaging The Doom Generation and Nowhere. One of Araki’s production tags is Muscle + Hate, a reference to a line from a cultishly influential ’80s dance-industrial record called ‘Join In The Chant’ by British electronic band Nitzer Ebb. The more knowledge you have of alternative rock in the post-punk era, the more Totally Fucked Up will make sense.
The movie is dominated by fuzzy camcorder shots, a technique whi
ch has become familiar and mainstream following the success of movies like The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, but was still relatively new in 1993. And the movie is definitely lent an added frisson by using anti-Hollywood techniques to shoot a movie which is all about teenagers who live in Hollywood. Araki is not interested in movie industry brats, the Hollywood Hills or Sunset Strip. His milieu is the rock ’n’ roll demi-monde of West Hollywood, where young gay men and women find some refuge among artists, druggies and bohemians.
Totally Fucked Up uses a film-within-a-film structure. Steven (Luna) is filming his friends on a camcorder, mainly being interviewed by him and talking to camera. This serves as a background narrative for the plot, which is shot more conventionally. Araki also splices in short, grainy clips of other films taken from television in true guerrilla art style. Add the captions, and this should all be a mess. But it isn’t. It takes 15 minutes or so to adjust to Araki’s rejection of mainstream storytelling, and then you are drawn into the kids’ world so completely you feel like you are hanging out with them.
Early in the movie, one of the girls mentions that there is a teen suicide cult in Yugoslavia which has led the state to ban records by Joy Division, The Cure and The Smiths. It must be true, ’cos it’s in the Los Angeles Weekly. Along with its examinations of being young, gay and angst-ridden, Totally Fucked Up is also about the way the cool pose of teen misery can serve to obscure the real thing. Are all of these kids just playing at being attractively nihilistic? You can’t really work out the answer to that until the end of the movie.
Despite the declaration about fragments, Totally Fucked Up does have a linear plot. Rejected by their parents because of their sexuality, our six teen buddies have formed an alternative family. While the boys cruise, fuck, bitch and moan, the two lesbians Michelle (Beshid) and Patricia (Gill) have formed a happy, solid relationship and want a child, possibly from sperm donated by one of their four best friends.
Meanwhile, Andy (the impossibly pretty Jimmy Dean-alike Duval, an Araki regular) is sick of being promiscuous and lonely, and envies the settled coupling of Steven (Luna) and Deric (May). Student Ian (Boyce) seems to provide the solution, just as Steven and Deric begin to unravel. But the course of true love does not run smooth in this definitively excluded netherworld of self-inflicted poverty, unsafe sex and drugs, and dark aimlessness.
Much of Totally Fucked Up consists of conversation, held with an endearing mix of self-conscious over-emphasis and clumsy naturalism by the amateur cast. It’s this that makes it one of the best movies about how teens talk to each other; constantly attempting to mask their insecurity and vulnerability with cool poses, pop culture references and the kind of blasé sex talk that implies that fucking is just so passé. The witty one-liners and poetic pronouncements that screenwriters are inclined to put into the mouths of babes are eschewed in favour of a blend of angsty confessional and pretentious shite that we really say to each other when we’re kidults, especially when we’re from a big city and therefore feel that an elegantly wasted, been-there-done-that jadedness is the least vulnerable course to take in all matters interpersonal.
But obviously, this is not a film for the faint-hearted. We watch our heroes masturbate to gay porn; endure depressing one-night stands; get queer-bashed; express their lack of regret over the passing of the pre-AIDS ‘good old days’ and its fist-fucking, piss-drinking legends while also defining HIV as a government conspiracy, ‘a Nazi Republican wet dream-come-true’. They say things that you simply don’t expect gay men to say, like: ‘I guess I haven’t worked out exactly what it is I like to do yet. But I do think butt-fucking is totally gross. I mean – how can anyone put their dick where shit comes out?’ And Araki and his actors make it feel like something far more true than shock tactics.
The more in tune you get with Araki’s restless crash edits and digressions, the more elegant, accomplished and truly tragic the movie becomes, easily overcoming its own insistence that it is just ‘more teen angst’. The inevitable suicide is finally provoked by infidelity, and Totally Fucked Up could be interpreted as an argument for more monogamous practice between gay men, especially as the chaotically miserable love lives of the guys are constantly contrasted with the domestic bliss enjoyed by Patricia and Michelle. But I don’t think that is entirely Araki’s point. Totally Fucked Up is less an encouragement to copy the rules and mores of straight society, and more a warning about trampling on the emotions of the vulnerable by refusing to see their ‘angst’ as real, and putting the alternative rules of a promiscuous lifestyle before the brittle emotions of someone who you are supposed to love, and who needs your comfort and support. And I think that’s a simple sentiment about being human that you don’t have to be young or gay to get behind.
Totally Fucked Up is a key work from a brave, uncompromising no-budget film-maker at the top of his game, taking a mise en scène that would be an unwatchable mess from a less talented writer-director, and making it sing with wonderful camera-work and virtuosity in the editing suite. It leaves you feeling that you’ve spent sad but rewarding times in a place in a major city that shouldn’t exist, among people that America doesn’t want to acknowledge, let alone embrace. It finds great beauty in ugliness, and, despite all the excellently chosen goth and indie and punk and industrial on its soundtrack, leaves you playing an old Who song in your head. That big, loud one with the synths and violins that roars about a ‘Teenage wasteland’, and makes you feel the double meaning of its pay-off line: ‘They’re all wasted!’ Totally Fucked Up is the ‘Baba O’Riley’ of teen movies.
HEAVENLY CREATURES
1994
Starring: Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey, Sarah Pierse, Clive Merrison, Diana Kent
Dir.: Peter Jackson
Plot: Worried about what your daughter and her BFF get up to in her bedroom? You should be . . .
Key line: ‘All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It’s all frightfully romantic.’
I’m writing about Heavenly Creatures bang in the middle of immersing myself in most of the entries from the 1950s to the 1970s. And really, I couldn’t have chosen a film that better exemplified the radical shift in attitude by film-makers towards teen screen fiction from the 1990s onwards.
Heavenly Creatures is based upon real events: the murder of a woman called Honora Parker in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954. She was murdered by her 15-year-old daughter Pauline and Pauline’s best friend, 16-year-old Juliet Hulme.
This was a notorious crime in New Zealand, whipping up emotions in a similar fashion to the Moors murders or the Jamie Bulger case in the UK. So, rather than make up an exploitation script from media cuttings, co-writers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh researched like historians. They interviewed dozens of people who knew the teen killers, and gained access to the incriminating diaries of Pauline Parker, which went into detail about the dark fantasy world she and Juliet conjured out of the intensity of their friendship. They used Pauline’s diary entries word-for-word as the film’s voiceover narration, and even went so far as to shoot the film in the locations where the events took place. They then auditioned hundreds of girls for the two leads, and discovered one who is acknowledged as one of the great actresses of her generation, and another who should be. The resulting film was so extraordinary that it not only invented Kate Winslet, but also gave Peter Jackson the opportunity to shoot overnight from admired maker of cult comedy splatter movies to director of the three most perfectly realised fantasy spectaculars ever made . . . that would be the The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, in case you were in any doubt. And no wonder, because watching Heavenly Creatures is one of those film experiences which leaves you in a state of shock, so effectively does it cleave the power of imagination onto the horror of true events. Its only teen movie antecedent is Badlands (see here), which is also about true-life young killers, and also eschews docu-drama for an expressionist view of the fantasy world the murderers inhabited. But Badlands is all irony and iconic poses, while
Heavenly Creatures is profoundly upsetting.
In short, it ain’t I Was A Teenage Werewolf.
The film begins with scene setting. New Zealand in the early 1950s, a society that ran roughly 20–30 years behind its Brit or American equivalent. An opening contrasting a BBC voice narrating a tourism documentary of Christchurch in the 1950s with the hysterical screams and frantic running of two girls covered in blood.
Christchurch has upper-class Brit pretensions and the girls’ school where our two murderers meet is a case in point. Uniforms and bonnets and bicycles and teachers who call a girl a ‘gel’. Juliet Hulme is the new gel at Christchurch Girls High School, the English daughter of the rector of nearby Canterbury College; a pedigree so charmed that even the obnoxious teachers genuflect in her general direction. The scene establishes two crucial themes: one is the overbearingly snobbish worship of everything English and upper middle class; the other is the blackly comic contrast between the two girls. Juliet Hulme is beautiful, aristocratic, fragrant, smug, arrogant, glamorous. Pauline looks like the kind of girl who keeps spiders in her hair and eats bogies.
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