Richard Linklater: When I was in high school, our school had a ’50s day, where you could dress up 1950s and roll cigarettes up in your sleeve. My uncle had been a teenager in the ’50s, and he was like, “You guys like the ’50s, but let me tell you, the ’50s sucked.” I took that in for Dazed, like, yeah, the ’70s kind of suck, too.
Tom Junod: Many people who grew up in the ’70s felt that they had missed out on growing up in the ’60s. Linklater nails that so accurately. The second-phase baby boomers, the people who came of age in the ’70s, were almost Gen X precursors, because we felt that the real meat of the revolution had happened before we got there. In the ’60s, people had protested. They had stopped a war. They had pioneered using drugs. They had pioneered rock music.
By the time that stuff made its way to us, it was simply as lifestyle choices. You weren’t making a political statement by smoking a joint. The few times we did protest, we were already self-aware enough to look at it ironically. The movie nails that with perfection.
Chris Barton: By the time you get to 1976, when Dazed takes place, the Beatles are done. The Rolling Stones haven’t had a great album in years. The economy was not great. In a couple of years, Carter would use the word “malaise” in his televised speech from the White House. I could see how you might think the best stuff has passed you by.
Tom Junod: My generation was guilty of nostalgia way before they got old. I was class of 1976. When I think of my own experiences in the ’70s, it’s like, Happy Days was on. Sha Na Na was an act that people my age went and paid money for, even though it did not in any way memorialize their own time. American Graffiti was a really popular movie with people who graduated high school in 1976 rather than in 1962. And it was the same way with Dazed being popular with people who graduated in the ’90s.
Brian Raftery: When they were making Dazed, I don’t think they realized there was ’70s nostalgia on the horizon. By the early ’90s, the ’60s revival had reached a saturation point. We had The Wonder Years. We had Oliver Stone relitigating the entire ’60s, whether it was Vietnam or the Doors. I think the height of the ’60s nostalgia was an infomercial for a record set called Freedom Rock, with two grizzled hippies who were like, “Turn it up, man!”
There was a weird rewrite of the ’60s because the boomers had taken over the media, and these guys were like, “Hey, we were the second-greatest generation!” and it became insufferable by the end of the ’80s. So Dazed was definitely a turning point. It was like, the ’70s? That sounds cool.
Richard Linklater: I think teenagers are looking to escape the misery of their own time, whatever that time is. It’s like, “It had to have been better back then.”
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