by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

What’s the worst thing about being a senior? Realizing that you either wasted your teenage years… or the understanding that you might have just peaked in some way. Like, senioritis is real and brutal, but there’s something tragic about becoming self aware right as you leave the safety of something like high school.

In this, the penultimate column of You Can’t Sit With Us, I’m going back to basics and talking about “Coming of Age” flicks - but the later kind. The ones about exiting high school and what that looks like across time, gender, and emotional maturity. These kids might technically be adults, but they’re clinging to teenagerhood with everything they’ve got. 

Confession: I hadn’t seen Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused until I watched it earlier this year. And I watched it partially because my boyfriend loves the film and partially because I knew I was going to write about it for this very column. Sometimes the universe works out like that, you know? It wasn’t that I was avoiding this film, though, I just didn’t really have an avenue to watch it whenever it would have been of deep interest to me. But, like, I knew a bit about it because of cultural osmosis (truly who can be steeped in American culture without the Matthew McConaughey’s, “Alright, alright, alright” just running through your head). But the plot, such as it is, was never something I’d thought about. It was strictly a “stoner” teen comedy… but I wasn’t even certain it was set in high school. 

But the film is very much set in high school. The film came out the year after I was born, hitting theaters in September of 1993. It wasn’t something we had in our house, at least as far as I remember. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, that was the main way that a lot of people saw things. Your family either owned it, or you rented it. There wasn’t an easily accessible range of films that existed digitally, not like there is today. And so, Linklater’s high school masterpiece never hit me. Until now. 

Set during the last day of school in 1976, Dazed and Confused follows an ensemble cast of seniors and soon-to-be freshmen as they run through the tradition of hazing at their Texas high school. It starts during the school day, and eventually bounces between parties. It, like many films after it, is a meandering story that’s held loosely together by plot and vibes. And I think it’s a supremely good choice, that helps the film endure. Firstly, because, quite simply, it’s very cool. But, secondly, by running on vibes the way the film does, it mimics this weird liminal space that high school exists in. Especially before the popularization of the internet and social media. 

It’s the high school that Linklater grew up in, as the film is set the year he would have turned 16. Which, if you’re playing teen film bingo at home, means Dazed and Confused gets to exist in the space of teen films that adults make for their former selves. In his 30s when he made the film, it certainly looks and sounds like a love letter to his adolescence. But it also has this energy of peaking in high school, which obviously looks different in the 1960s than it would otherwise. That perhaps you might possibly be the coolest version of yourself while being trapped in the hallowed halls of state sanctioned education, simply because you’re bucking against the system. And certainly, it’s easier to do that without the presence of social media, which has made the entire condition of being a teenager quite different.

Which is certainly the world that Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart exists in. And you know what? Despite growing up on the cusp of the internet (hello MySpace and the days of needing a college email address for Facebook), I don’t think I’ve ever had my teenage experience so accurately depicted on screen, and I know many of my friends (from high school or not) felt the same after seeing the flick. Unlike Dazed and Confused, Booksmart is contemporary to when it was made, embracing all the new ideas of teenagerhood. And, where Linklater’s feature has a real teenage boy energy to it, Wilde’s has a distinctly overachieving feminine vibe. (Extremely relatable!!!)

The 2019 film follows Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), two best friends who spent their entire high school careers focusing on academics and getting into college. The day before graduation, however, Molly has her entire world shattered, when she realizes that all the classmates she thought were shallow and stupid simply aren’t. All the other students who had vibrant social lives are also getting into good schools, with excellent grades. Molly and Amy actually weren’t special because they chose to focus on academics. So, in order to try and fix their high school experiences, the girls decide to cram four years of socialization into the night before graduation. 

Like Dazed and Confused before it, Booksmart is held together with a thin plot of bouncing around from party to party and seeing what happens. Unlike the 1993 film, though, Booksmart is really driven by the characters. It’s much less of an ensemble, so we get closer readings of Molly and Amy, their relationship, and what these realizations actually have actually meant for them. Like, Booksmart has some friend breakup moments that Dazed and Confused isn’t concerned with in the slightest. Which is totally fine, and both versions of this kind of story really work in films. 

What makes Booksmart work so well, though, is the way that the young cast, almost all of whom were in their early twenties, were actively encouraged to help make their characters feel more authentic. Much like how the teenagers involved in Eighth Grade made it feel authentic, Booksmart uses its own young cast to create a kind of manic, relatable honesty. It’s less uncomfortable than Eighth Grade, but it’s only because of the type of story Bo Burnham was trying to tell, versus the one Wilde does.

In thinking about these two films, and the way they both depict a single night before the end of high school, I realized what a nice contrast they both are to each other. Not just because of how the different time periods change the way characters relate to each other (with or without technology, social advances, economic downturn, etc), but how the time periods really dictate the ways that the characters view high school at all. 

In Dazed and Confused, it’s a much more apathetic look at high school as an institution. It’s liminal and most characters are just kinda there because they have to be. In fact, it seems to only exist as a way to stave off the hazing for a little while. I think it’s fascinating because a fair amount of the characters are incoming freshmen. Their lives will soon be defined by school, but the seniors are showing them (without really meaning to) what place high school can, and should, have in their lives. Which is to say, it’s something they have to do, but you might as well have the best time while doing it. A mentality, I think, that was largely impacted by this entire generation of teenagers having just lived through the US’s involvement in the Vietnam War. 

But in Booksmart, high school is life. Especially for Molly, who has defined herself by her ability to achieve within the very strict American school system. A system that’s much more competitive and brutal, on an educational level, than that of the 1970s. And it’s been made this brutal because of many things, but in particular the collapse of the housing market in 2008. Everything is more competitive out in the “real world,” and so teenagers must face this reality. It’s something that must have seemed like a dystopian future even in 1993, but it’s the world we’re living in. It’s the culture that modern teenagers inherit, and I think Booksmart does a really good job of showing how teenagers have adapted over time. Maybe not Molly, but her peers for certain. 

What is it like to leave high school, to no longer be a ward of the state for eight hours a day, and have to carve your own path as a pseudo adult? I think teen films about graduation, regardless of if they take place over a single day or over a full school year, all aim to explore those questions. Even if they aren’t trying to. They’re the questions that underpin the entirety of your senior year of high school in America, no matter what decade you’re living through. 

So, to successfully tell the story of eighteen-year-olds on the precipice of adulthood, you must come face-to-face with the future in a very specific way. I think, maybe more than most teen genres, stories about senior year often only really work when those ideas are present, even subconsciously. And, to that end, I think the films that are great within that very specific niche, give you the context to understand what the character’s future looks like.

And perhaps we’re more interested in the stories about leaving high school because it’s hell. All the time. For most people. Making films about the people who got out, even if they weren’t unscathed, is something to celebrate. That we all had futures, even if they were uncertain, or messy, or even stalled. High school is hell, and we’re all just trying to get through it, no matter what decade you’re in.