Never Waste a Summer

Linklater’s nostalgia is more harmful than you realize.

It’s hard to enjoy the summer season without reminiscing about all of the summers past that we spent in our youths. Our days were carefree, the main source of transportation was the bicycle you had gotten for Christmas, and the sun seemed to give us an endless stream of energy that lasted well after the streetlights came on. Today, most of us have to treat summer like any other time of year: get up early, head to work, and head home with the possibility of a respite that can be enjoyed outside in the low heat of the evening. It’s easy to get nostalgic for a time when responsibilities were few and summer really was a season dominated by the young and reckless. After a long day at an office job, I decided to get a taste of that magical period of life by turning on Richard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age flick Dazed and Confused. After careful examination, I felt I may have romanticized the film, and its message of a carefree summer, a bit too much.

For those not familiar, Dazed and Confused follows the intertwining stories of several students at Lee High School in Austin, Texas, on the last day of classes before they kick off the summer of 1976. The lot of characters are an equal measure of jocks, nerds, potheads, know-it-alls, bullies, and just about every other cliquish high school stereotype that comes to mind. There a few main characters to follow, but I’ll spend the time to fixate on Randall Floyd in particular.

Randall “Pink” Floyd is a rising senior at Lee High School and returning starter quarterback for the varsity football team. From the outset, school faculty, students, and locals express to him their optimism for the 1976 football season and remind him at every corner that the hope of a state championship rests on his shoulders. There’s no bigger reminder of Pink’s responsibilities than Coach Conrad, head coach of the Lee varsity team. In his first scene, Coach Conrad comes off as a tightly wound disciplinarian who demands excellence from his players, not only on the field but off it as well. To ensure that his team is focused on their championship-caliber season, he requires all of his players to sign a contract where they pledge to refrain from any recreational drug use and not to engage in any other activities that could jeopardize their performance or eligibility. Pink sneers at the attempt to regulate his behavior, prompting Conrad to belt out the now-iconic line: “Before next fall, you’re in need of a serious attitude adjustment, young man!” Conrad also comments that he notices the “crowd” Pink is running with, and he admonishes Pink about wasting time with them. Based on Pink’s demeanor, the viewer is left to question whether Pink even wants to play his senior season and whether Conrad’s insistence on the contract will make him drop all responsibility.

Later on, as the youth of Austin begin descending onto downtown, Pink begins meeting up with the crowd that coach Conrad warned about. The audience is introduced to Pink’s pot connection and pool hall buddy, the suave David Wooderson. Wooderson, played by the then-up-and-coming Matthew McConaughey, is played off as the coolest cat in Central Texas. Smooth, put together, and always looking for a good time despite being in his early twenties and still hanging out with high schoolers. After Pink and Wooderson make their way to a kegger in the woods, Pink is pulled aside by his best friend and teammate Benny O’Donnell. Benny knows that Pink hasn’t signed Conrad’s contract yet and is worried that Pink is spending too much time with his pothead friends instead of focusing on their last season of high school football. Benny relates to Pink that all of the other rising seniors have signed the pledge and are relying on him to lead them to state, and that it would be selfish for Pink to jeopardize the last time they’re all on the field together. Benny’s pleas appear to fall on deaf ears as Pink believes that Conrad’s pledge is a useless gesture only meant to restrain him and limit his individuality.

To cap off the night, Pink, a teammate, Wooderson, and a few other stoners decide to break into the football stadium and smoke pot at the 50-yard line. Wooderson tells Pink not to have any concern for his responsibilities or other people’s expectations. Wooderson himself played under Conrad a few years before and believes the old ball coach to be the same authoritarian windbag now as he was when Wooderson was in high school. The cops bust the gang of ne’er-do-wells but recognize Pink as the starting quarterback, so they decide to call his coach to counsel him instead of arresting him.

Coach Conrad drives to the football stadium in the early hours of the morning to scold Pink for hanging out with “losers” and pleads with him again to sign the pledge. Pink tells his coach that he hasn’t decided whether he even wants to play football next season, but he sure as hell won’t sign his pledge. Pink crumples up the contract and lets his coach know that he and Wooderson must drive to Houston in order to buy Aerosmith tickets. As Pink and company roll in Wooderson’s car eastward with the rising sun in pursuit of concert tickets, Foghat’s “Slow Ride” fills the air as the giggling gang drives towards the summer of 1976. When I was younger, nothing felt cooler than watching Pink and his crew roll out of town completely free, sticking it to authority and not having a care in the world.

Yet therein lies the problem with these characters watching this film again. They just don’t care.

There are no football scenes in the film, but it’s heavily implied that Pink isn’t just thrown in to play quarterback; rather, he is talented and an integral part of the team’s future success in the fall of 1976. When I was younger, I thought that it was unfair how much pressure was put on Pink and his teammates to succeed. They’re all 16- or 17-year-old kids trying to navigate their last year of high school, and yet thousands of eyes are fixated on how they perform on the field. Now that I’m a few years older and (hopefully) wiser, I can’t help but feel that Dazed and Confused doesn’t just send the wrong message, but rather an actively harmful message.

Why waste your youth taking anything so seriously? Why care about team sports? It’s just high school, anyway. Where does coach Conrad get off trying to wrangle these players like some fascist? Making them sign some pledge, and for what? For the chance of adding a trophy to some case in a school hallway? Who CARES???

Pink should’ve cared. He should have risen to the occasion, followed the pledge, and given his all for his team and his school, but not just because that’s what’s best for everyone else, but because that’s what would have been best for him. None of the other football players in the film are exactly Boy Scouts, but they know the opportunity ahead of them and they realize that it’s their last shot. Would winning a state championship change their lives or make them better people? No, they would have all grown up to be regular adults with regular jobs eventually. Ultimately — and this is true for team sports today — it’s not the title in and of itself that matters, but what you are willing to give up to get there. You have to give up your free time and certain creature comforts, and endure a plethora of aches and pains to compete, but regardless of outcome, a season competing with best friends is worth it so long as you leave everything out on the field.

Faced with the choices of continuing to get high and spend his summer with losers or locking in to get ready for a championship run, Pink doesn’t even care enough to give his coach a solid answer. He’s decided to live for himself and his pleasures while keeping everyone else on edge as to whether he’ll play or not in the fall. He doesn’t represent youthful rebellion and a free spirit. He’s the epitome of selfishness, following a doctrine of individuality peddled by his buddy Wooderson who tells pink that “the older you get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow. You just gotta keep livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.” And what does “living” look like to Wooderson? Working a dead-end job for the City of Austin while still skulking around high school haunts to hit on teenage girls and get high with the varsity quarterback. He may come off as the coolest guy in Austin, but one has to wonder why the only people who will tolerate hanging out with him are high schoolers who don’t know any better. Wooderson is a loser on a path to nowhere in life and takes a certain glee in roping Pink into a similar downward spiral.

The much-maligned Coach Conrad joins a long list of cinema villains who ended up being the good guy all along. He calls out Pink’s crowd for what they are: losers who will get him nowhere and can only make his life worse. He’s not some tyrant trying to ruin Pink’s fun. He recognized Wooderson after coming to confront Pink at the football field, and I’ll bet he’s seen a dozen young men just like Wooderson in his coaching career, the kind of young men who had potential but rejected responsibility for a good time. Conrad doesn’t want to control Pink; he wants what’s best for him and the team. It’s not just about winning a state title, but making sure Pink doesn’t waste God-given ability in the pursuit of drugs and partying. It was never about setting up rules for kids to follow, but giving them the structure they needed to focus their energy on giving of themselves instead of indulging for themselves.

The movie ends on a high, hopeful note for Pink, but it’s easy to imagine that the next few years of his youth are not so bright. He very well could drop football, thereby alienating his friends and teammates, causing him to keep hanging out with stoners and losers. Eventually, Pink could find himself as the new Wooderson, a washed-up high school athlete who never did anything meaningful with his life because he decided that “living” was perpetuating adolescence and waiting for the next crop of high schoolers to be his friends. The road to Aerosmith tickets was not the beginning of some romantic expression of teenage masculinity free from society’s rules, but rather a wasteful, selfish act that saw Pink turning his back on the people who wanted what was best for him.

I don’t mean for this article to come off as a preachy after-school special, nor am I saying that everyone’s life is determined by decisions he makes when he is 17. What I see around us today is a culture that gives young men less and less to strive for, and the last thing we need is romanticizing the notion that individuality means casting responsibility aside and seeking pleasures of the flesh at the expense of those counting on you. Pink chose pot and concert tickets over his friends, team, and community. All of the ties that bind didn’t matter in the pursuit of getting high and having a good time. He wasted one of the last summers of his youth on people who will never care about him. No one ever gets those teenage summers back, and there’s a world where Pink realizes that, but only when it’s too late and he’s too old to care about the things he should have. Don’t let that happen to your sons. Don’t let them hang out with people who turn youthful spirit into apathy and selfishness. Don’t let them quit, regardless of how trivial the responsibility may seem. Never let your boys waste their summers.