In 1995, my highschool graduating class picked as its senior song the Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad “Tuesday’s Gone.” Frankly, there have been few obvious alternatives. The ’93 and ’94 classes had already taken Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” and Garth Brooks’s “The Dance,” respectively, using up all of the clichéd favorites. There weren’t many more recent songs that seemed appropriate, either. (We could hardly have the college choir singing Coolio’s “Implausible Voyage.”) “Tuesday’s Gone,” no less than, had an elegiac beauty to it, filled because it is with lines about wind and trains and “rolling on” that were just vague enough to use to our own uncertain futures. Still, you’d have been justified in asking why a bunch of 1995 kids selected an old classic rock tune, written by singer Ronnie Van Zant about his apprehensions over the band’s latest record deal, as the aural time capsule of our teenage years. 

If you happen to’ve seen Dazed and Confused, nonetheless, as a lot of the student body had, you’d know the reply. “Tuesday’s Gone” plays through the film’s climactic blowout, drifting near-subliminally within the background because the kegs are floated and the party is dying. Richard Linklater has said he wanted his 1993 movie, a couple of bunch of rural Texas teens celebrating the last day of faculty in 1976, to be a piece of antinostalgia. He wanted to indicate that our oft-romanticized youths were crammed with more anxiety, trauma, and tedium than we care to recall. “I desired to do a practical teen movie,” Linklater told the Guardian in 2019. “Most of them had an excessive amount of drama and plot, but teenage life is more such as you’re searching for the party, searching for something cool, the infinite pursuit of something you never find, and even if you happen to do, you never quite appreciate it.”

Linklater does his best to deflate those mythologized glory days, revealing them as a lot driving around aimlessly, leaning against partitions and drinking low cost beer, and fretting about things that won’t matter in a yr. Still, he can’t help but allow himself a moment to mourn their passing anyway—to linger within the dawn and the bittersweet realization that things won’t ever be exactly like this, with these people, ever again. Without that grace note, it’s doubtful that Dazed and Confused would have struck such a chord with my very own highschool class, or turn into such rite-of-passage viewing for each generation since.  

Go figure, then, that the character who became most related to Dazed and Confused is the one who most puts the misinform the notion that the party ever has to finish. Wooderson, played by Matthew McConaughey, is described in Linklater’s original script because the “older guy still hanging on to the highschool scene, mainly cool and looked as much as but is getting more pathetic because the years go on.” He’s a twentysomething adult who spends all his time with teenagers; he’s not only “pathetic” but an unabashed sexual predator. Wooderson is what most right-thinking people would call a dirtbag. As written, we were meant to laugh at him, to search out him repulsive, to view him as a cautionary tale about what happens whenever you refuse to grow up or aim higher than working some joe job so you may throw keggers with kids. 

As an alternative, we love Wooderson. And despite Linklater’s intentions, ultimately the film loves him as well. It simply can’t help it. There are moments that, on the page, ought to be undercut by irony, like Wooderson’s slow-motion strut through the pool hall to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane.” It’s a play on Robert De Niro’s similarly swaggering introduction in Mean Streets, only rendered comedic here by how pitifully small and low-stakes Wooderson’s world really is. Nevertheless, the scene attains a mythic sweep that negates the winking lyrical asides concerning the man who “could’ve been champion of the world.” Even Wooderson’s closest buddies call him “Woulda-been,” however the nickname never really lands. He’s Teflon in a Ted Nugent shirt. Someway, this pathetic old man stays the best, cockiest guy within the room.

Why are we—like Marissa Ribisi’s budding mental, Cynthia—so drawn to Wooderson, though we must always know higher? Obviously, quite a lot of that has to do with McConaughey himself. As Linklater once told Texas Monthly, he initially thought McConaughey was “too good-looking” to play the loser creep he’d written, and he was right. In McConaughey’s audition tape, he’s an Apollonian beauty, blonde ringlets and all. Even after roughing himself up with tattoos and a wispy mustache, he retains that very same golden aura and simple McConaughey smile. But quite than clashing with the character, it in some way made him real. McConaughey’s innate charm (and that face) transforms Wooderson from someone so disgusting, you’d be left wondering why anyone even tolerates him, right into a guy you may actually consider these kids would admire.

There may be also the heft of McConaughey’s own titanic self-confidence, which became an inextricable a part of Wooderson’s allure. McConaughey likes to speak about Wooderson as his “origin story,” telling and retelling the story of his likelihood run-in with Dazed casting director Don Phillips on the Austin Hyatt. McConaughey often plays it off as serendipity—the “right bar at the fitting time,” where two guys just happened to get tipsy and trade golf stories, until one among them happens to say that he’s working on a movie. But as Linklater would tell Melissa Maerz in Alright Alright Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, that is pure, self-mythologizing bunkum. It elides just how calculated McConaughey was about tracking Phillips down and making things occur, in a really un-chill, very calculated way. 

Yet even this speaks to McConaughey’s peculiar trick of constructing his ambition and unwavering self-regard seem ingratiating and type of charming—even downright inspiring. He brings this same quality to Wooderson, whose bluster would have come off as clearly ridiculous or insufferable had McConaughey not imbued him together with his own endlessly marketable type of breezy conviction. It’s little wonder that Wooderson became not only the origin story of McConaughey’s acting profession, but of his entire persona, which was concurrently born and in full bloom the second that first “alright” left his mouth. 

But while Dazed introduced us to Matthew McConaughey’s whole deal, Wooderson also worked because you most likely already knew guys like that. Perhaps they weren’t as charismatic, and surely not as attractive, nevertheless it’s easy to consider Linklater when he says people have come as much as him for years swearing that that they had a Wooderson of their town. That number includes McConaughey himself: “I ain’t this guy, but I know this guy,” the actor told Linklater at their very first meeting. McConaughey himself was more of a preppy college kid, favoring crisp polos and khaki shorts. But he’d grown up worshiping guys like his older brother Pat, who tooled around their hometown of Uvalde in his Camaro, blasting Judas Priest and AC/DC. In Maerz’s book, McConaughey talks concerning the life-changing moment when he saw Pat smoking a cigarette behind the highschool, his knee cocked up against the wall, and decided right then that there was nobody cooler on the planet. It was Pat who inspired Wooderson’s strut, McConaughey said, of “shoulders back, kinda leaned back a little bit bit, the pelvis pushed forward, preceding the chest and the pinnacle.” 

If you happen to grew up in East Texas, as McConaughey and Linklater did—or anywhere with a self-mythologized hero leaning against a wall somewhere, bragging about his automotive and his conquests—then you definately probably knew guys like that, too. For higher or worse, Wooderson seems like one among our own. 

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Although Dazed and Confused was filmed throughout Austin, and it was clearly inspired by his highschool years in Huntsville, Linklater intentionally didn’t got down to make a “Texas” movie. Still, bits of the state clearly seeped in: Austin’s moontowers; those long stretches of farm road broken up by liquor stores; the football coaches that I swear also worked at my school, with their double-knit polyester shorts and demands for a “serious attitude adjustment”; the way in which adults don’t think twice about pulling a gun on a child. 

But mostly, Dazed seems like a Texas movie since it’s about making the most effective out of nothing. It’s a part of an extended lineage of flicks about bored Texas kids: Hud, The Last Picture Show, Fandango, Linklater’s own Slacker and Suburbia. Spiritually it also seems like a prelude to Austin director Eagle Pennell’s movies—of which Linklater is an avowed fan—The Whole Shootin’ Match and Last Night on the Alamo. There you’ll find even older, much more pathetic former football stars drinking an excessive amount of and clinging to their glory days—still trying to find the party, still incapable of appreciating what they’ve already got.

Several of the characters in Dazed and Confused spend the night talking and stumbling their way through this quintessentially Texan struggle. Starting quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) is so preemptively jaded about where his future’s headed, he can’t even enjoy what ought to be his glory days: “If I ever start referring to those as the most effective years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” Pink mutters. Cynthia takes a less jaundiced view, but she’s grappling with a similarly existential problem. “If we’re all gonna die anyway, shouldn’t we be having fun with ourselves now?“ she asks. “I’d wish to quit considering of the current, like without delay, as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else.” 

After which there may be Wooderson, Buddha of the beer bust, who could also be type of a creep, or a loser, but you may’t deny he seems to like every minute of it. Together with his “just keep livin’ ” monologue—which McConaughey, still reeling from his father’s death a number of weeks into shooting, reportedly improvised on the spot—Wooderson whips up a complete philosophy in only a number of artfully drawled sentences about not letting the bastards grind you down. 

So far as ideologies go, “just keep livin’ ” isn’t much. A little bit of Zen and a touch of Stoicism, with a floater of go-to-hell nihilism. Arguably, the monologue that Sasha Jenson’s Don delivers immediately afterward—his resolve to someday “look back and say that I did the most effective I could while I used to be stuck on this place”—has more poetry. It resonates much more deeply with the movie’s themes. But “just keep livin’ ” is agreeably easy. It’s clean. You possibly can see why McConaughey turned it not only right into a mantra but a mission. 

“Just keep livin’ ” and “alright, alright, alright” got all the celebrity, but I even have a passion for Wooderson’s much less quotable line from much earlier within the film. A few of the guys outside the pool hall are about to take a joyride, they usually ask Wooderson if he wants to come back along. Wooderson’s reply is firm: “I’m here, man,” he says, a line that McConaughey emphasizes by holding his palm flat in a way that seems strangely benevolent and reassuring in its certitude. 

Here’s a person who may seem to be stuck prior to now, but he stands out as the just one who knows exactly where he’s and who he’s. Wooderson is fully and deeply within the now. It’s icky, yes, but additionally type of intriguing that Wooderson ends the film by finally organising a date with Cynthia, who’s been craving to cultivate that exact type of mindfulness. And it’s little wonder why we keep coming back to Dazed and Confused to see him—to hang around with these people again, to feel the nostalgic sting of their Tuesdays gone and parties past, and to have Wooderson awaken us all yet again to the straightforward joys of the current, and provides us our third wind to get back on the road.