The Class of `77 in the summer of `76 - "Dazed & Confused"? I don't think so. Not that we weren't dazed and confused - yes of course we were. But we were not ever the brainwashed simps with the cruel streak, who parade around in the film, and do all these strange involved rituals with each other. The only ritual we had was THE PARTY. Though it was talked about, and you even got to look at it from a distance - at what was suggested as, and what might have been a party - in the entire movie, even when you were actually on the premises, you were never really THERE at THE PARTY.We had all seen the uprisings of the `60's and the early `70's, all the people in Vietnam dead before our eyes on the tv screen. These things were enmeshed into the fabric of our childhood and adolescence. We had seen the world come closer and closer to the brink of what felt like complete, continuous, damning warfare with no end. We had seen the lying-est president chased out of office for his lies, bribery, and burglary, go home to his palace and get immediately pardoned. We had seen glimpses of our future in our older siblings' attempts to get jobs, which, even for the affluent and aspiring among us, were fewer and fewer and more and more meaningless.
Mostly we didn't care about the future because it seemed so far-fetched to believe that it would ever really arrive. We believed in RIGHT NOW. Believing so wholeheartedly in RIGHT NOW married us to the event, the ritual, the reality, the celebration of THE PARTY. What else was there? At THE PARTY everything went on. We were dazed and confused about the beat-up world and its beat-up future. At THE PARTY we were kings and queens of destiny. We knew all we needed to know, and connected with each other on the highest possible plane. Our kisses were full of joy and we were courageous, unafraid of the doom the poor, deprived, destroyed world had in store for us. There was nothing else to look for. It was all there. All knowledge, all effort, all love led us there, and there we were free. We granted each other freedom.
But in this movie there are only middle-class caricatures of what could be some teenagers somewhere who beat up on each other indiscriminately, where the poor and working-class boys and girls don't even exist.
Lisa Manning