If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.
Time for something a bit different. A look at a remarkably truthful movie that lets us do a few things that we've been meaning to do for a while.
Like consider what value - if any - can be extracted from the inverted culture we grew up in. Then there's the issue of the boomers - an inexplicably stunted generation with an outsized portion of the responsibility for that inverted culture. Why are they so mired in illusions and incapable of growth? There's the opportunity to look at socialization patterns and hierarchy. And a chance to write about what the Band considers a brilliant movie - one of the most underrated ever.
Where this is coming from.
Over the last decade, the Band has come to realize that we're in a very different world from the one we thought we were in. Many readers can relate. We've been reacting to this in broad strokes - going back to the roots of our civilization to figure out what we can know and tearing the webs of lies off massive deceptions.
It's been quite a journey.
It's been quite a journey.
But the problems of fake reality strike on more personal scales too. Coming of age in the beast system means most of your most powerful cultural experiences were the products of luciferian perverts. Movies and pop music are the worst - emotionally charged media that provide touchstones and texture for our lives while delivering the most dyscivic mass message ever.
One approach is to ditch it all.
This is ethically sound but psychologically not realistic. People will consume media, will remember fondly media from their past, and will want to share something with their children.
Old paintings and texts aren't for everyone, so where does someone go for anything more recent?
The Boomer approach of closing eyes tightly while shouting that the myths are True! is immoral and retarded. Picturing life as a flaccid t.v. plot while remaining in a perpetual mental status quo is how we got here. Even their own icons could see it...
John Lennon's line from Strawberry Fields Forever is right on the money. Right until it isn't.
The problem isn't with the statement but the application. That is, discernment. The insight trails off into apathetic blather...
Leaving only one question other than "this is quote worthy?"
Did Bieber wear it better?
One approach is to ditch it all.
This is ethically sound but psychologically not realistic. People will consume media, will remember fondly media from their past, and will want to share something with their children.
Old paintings and texts aren't for everyone, so where does someone go for anything more recent?
The Boomer approach of closing eyes tightly while shouting that the myths are True! is immoral and retarded. Picturing life as a flaccid t.v. plot while remaining in a perpetual mental status quo is how we got here. Even their own icons could see it...
John Lennon's line from Strawberry Fields Forever is right on the money. Right until it isn't.
The problem isn't with the statement but the application. That is, discernment. The insight trails off into apathetic blather...
Leaving only one question other than "this is quote worthy?"
Did Bieber wear it better?
The question then - other than the Bieber one - is there any logos at all in the materialist brownfield we came of age in that is worth watching? Our answer is not much - which isn't none. But you need to know how to discern where truth can be found. It's unlikely to be in the main messaging. The dyscivic content has been part of mass media almost from the inception. Even idle amusement - especially idle amusement - is filled with corrosive subtexts.
The Band still enjoys music, though with less abandon than we once did for obvious reasons. Which is a positive thing. Click for a lovely version the song that probably inspired this picture - Jerry Garcia and David Grisman's Loser, performed live by the Grateful Dead in 1971.
The Band still enjoys music, though with less abandon than we once did for obvious reasons. Which is a positive thing. Click for a lovely version the song that probably inspired this picture - Jerry Garcia and David Grisman's Loser, performed live by the Grateful Dead in 1971.
But it's easier to tune lyrics out and get an emotional charge from the sounds. Movies and television shows are a different matter - there, the "lyrics" tell the story. You can appreciate cinematography, set design, and other technical skills in a degenerate production, but not in a way that tunes out the words. And if we have to deal with messaging, we've raised the subject of logos.
Where we can find logos in the beast system is in the representation of reality - on some level or another. Real life is filled with idiot messaging and we navigate that, so we can navigate it in a convincing representation of reality too - if there insight to be had. The unwatchable dreck is where inverted message - ie. most of it. But that still leaves plenty of works that assume a luciferian globalist perspective but represent at least some aspect of reality truthfully. Verisimilitude, to use a technical term in film and literature.
There are two general types of verisimilitude - internal and external consistency with reality. Don't fall into the binary trap of thinking of them as either-or. They're related - we are dividing them to discuss them more clearly.
Where we can find logos in the beast system is in the representation of reality - on some level or another. Real life is filled with idiot messaging and we navigate that, so we can navigate it in a convincing representation of reality too - if there insight to be had. The unwatchable dreck is where inverted message - ie. most of it. But that still leaves plenty of works that assume a luciferian globalist perspective but represent at least some aspect of reality truthfully. Verisimilitude, to use a technical term in film and literature.
There are two general types of verisimilitude - internal and external consistency with reality. Don't fall into the binary trap of thinking of them as either-or. They're related - we are dividing them to discuss them more clearly.
The internal kind of verisimilitude has to do with whether the narrative is realistic on its terms. It's related to suspension of disbelief - how an audience will accept events in a fantastical story so long as they "work" within its parameters. We accept alternative laws of nature easily, but we need them to then be laws of nature for the rest of the story. When people judge sci-fi or fantasy, internal consistency is a huge part. Even the phrase "internal consistency of reality" came from one of our earlier Tolkien posts. He used it in his piece "On Fairy-Stories" to describe how consistency in sub-creation - artistic creation - mirrors Logos in Creation and lets the author use fantasy to reveal something about reality. Like the smooth relationship between ontology and epistemology in The Silmarillion...
...or the consequences of abandoning logos.
CosmicHawk, Numenor under the waves, 2011, digital art
External verisimilitude is like artistic realism - it looks and sounds like the real world it represents. It's what you generally think of as realism in a painting - looking realistic. If sufficiently well done, it will reflect insights into that world without even intending to - simply by presenting patterns and interactions that exist or existed.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Shipping on the Clyde, 1881, oil on cardboard, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Grimshaw's goal was to catch the light effects on a coal-smoky evening. It doesn't have to be exactly one moment to tell us a lot about 19th-century life. Because it has external verisimilitude
Which brings us to a beloved relic from the brownfield that has a tremendous amount of truth about the formation of the modern inverted beast system in the later 20th century. That is Richard Linkletter's criminally underrated Dazed and Confused.
James Flames, Dazed and Confused, Mondo print
Note - we're leaving out boomer mewlings because Team Cathode seems generationally incapable of fathoming such profound mysteries as 'the difference between population and individual', 'honor', and 'they lied to you' among others. There's no place for irrelevant anecdotes set in a reality that never existed and reimagined into universal parables. Or Walter Mitty-esque vignettes of imaginary triumph. Or both.
This may seem an odd choice to readers accustomed to more erudite topics, but forest, trees. The Band is interested in reality, and when we're looking at historical topics, that means the most credible record we can see. Most of the time, that means more "bookish" sources - highbrow writers, old master paintings, grand buildings, medieval and ancient artifacts - since they tend to be most transparently vetted. And vettable. But modern history is different. We have more thorough source material and better picture of overall life. Our occult posts have shown deep patterns in ordinary things when they're close enough in time to really fit them in their contexts. What matters isn't the loftiness of the tests. It's the relationship to logos. And relationships to logos cover a lot of ground.
It's not that different from the Heidegger post. We're looking for insight not authority - utility not role models.
It's not that different from the Heidegger post. We're looking for insight not authority - utility not role models.
The Band has found that popular culture is valuable when it comes to unraveling the inverted glamour that modern materialism entangles us in. Even the word glamour - chosen for its mix of magic and physical allure - is most commonly used in relation to pop culture. Realizing that what ensorcelled society was taking the mass media-marketing system for reality has been one of our most useful insights, and it mostly came from looking at old t.v. shows, music, and ads. Same with Pied Piper/ Grateful Dead analogy - fairy tales and jam bands aren't exactly Dante and Kant either. But in both, the observations are cut through deception in ways that are relevant to us now.
Dazed and Confused is different from the psychedelic occult posts because it's only one movie. But it's one movie that manages to distill truths about the crumbling modern culture by letting us take up where those posts left off in some ways. We identified the process where fake media world de-moralized society - set up a fake soulless materialist "norm", create a fake counterculture around cultural inversion, then mainstream the inversion in a new fake norm.
Dazed and Confused is set among 11th and 8th graders on the last day of school in 1976. The main characters would be born in 1959 and the junior high schoolers in '63. This makes them late boomers, given the standard birth range of 1946-1964. The cohort too young for Tavistock Presents the '60s ® The group who grew up with the de-moralization process we identified as the their norm. The movie has been called a love letter to that moment in American culture, suggesting it puts an un-critical spin on it. But in a way, this makes it more effective because the insights that come through are inadvertent socio-cultural observations - like the depiction of Victorian life in the Grimshaw painting.
This matters because the delusional resistance to empirical reality in the boomer generation is one of the largest macro causes of the current crisis of the West. Certainly on the immediate - political, social, and familial - fronts. There are larger forces beyond even a generation at work - they're why the de-moralization was so destructive. Greed and narcicism replaced the moral bulwark that held the forces of wickedness and collapse at bay. It's current history and a powerful cautionary tale about the illusion of prosperity and the necessity of Christian morality to the success of Western culture.
The Band's been thinking about a boomer post for a while, but it's more significant as cities burn and the cathode generation continues mumbling decades civnat aphorisms that never were real. Where does the mix of self-absorbed greed and delusion come from? And why is it so resistant to change? From the outside is is inexplicable.
On-line consensus on the boomers seems to fall into two categories.
1. They were the objectively worst generation in post-classical history for the obscene solipsistic destruction of their cultural patrimony on every level from familial to civilizational.
2. It's not entirely their fault.
Note - we're leaving out boomer mewlings because Team Cathode seems generationally incapable of fathoming such profound mysteries as 'the difference between population and individual', 'honor', and 'they lied to you' among others. There's no place for irrelevant anecdotes set in a reality that never existed and reimagined into universal parables. Or Walter Mitty-esque vignettes of imaginary triumph. Or both.
No generation got more materially for less effort and no generation so systematically shafted the ones to follow. All the while lying about the efforts required for their generational theft. Venal hollow cretins from one end of endless childhood to the other. Even now, decades later, they remain mired in half-century old illusion while warming their hands over the flickering embers of the seed corn. Ironic how generation don't trust anyone over 30 devolved into the first group of elders with no wisdom to offer.
It goes without saying that those in the 1945-63 birthday cohort that this doesn't apply to don't g-g-generationally identify in the same way. They don't make stuff their holy grail either. They have valuable experience.
They're just near unicorn-level rarity.
The Band's answer is both. Like we noted in the posts on glamour and fake reality, they didn't bring the the televisions into the houses and replace morality with stuff and lies. They didn't choose to be raised in a de-moralized, consumerized Flatland where manhood was defined by prancing martinets in swivel chairs or the size of the fins on the caddy.
But the prancing martinets didn't burn down their civilization. They hollowed it out, but maintained the social order that delivered the worlds highest standard of living. The boomers took sociopathic self-absorbed materialism to a fever pitch and replaced the necessity of maintaining some sort of conventional order in a functioning society with do what thou wilt. And increasingly grotesque mummery intended to pass as "cool" to increasingly bewildered younger people. It could work for a while...
It is interesting how the material peak hits after the moral decline starts.
Randy, Slater, Pickford, and Michelle getting high in the Pickford's affluent suburban house.
The level of affluence enjoyed for the effort put in is striking.
Fake media world tells us that "the 70s" were when things fell apart. But the pre-Carter 70s were closer to a superficial mouse utopia in a darkening world. The long process of globalist de-moralization sharpened in the first half of the 20th century and climaxed in the insane social policies of the 60s. This took time to bear fruit, and society was so affluent that it had huge room to coast. It's like the dog days of summer - it's hottest, but the days are shortening.
The pattern - abandoning logos leads to a short-term burst because moral constraints are abandoned but the unconscious morality and social patterns are Christian. Anything goes, but appearances are kept up. This falls apart because implicit norms aren't passed on on the same way as real beliefs, and the next generations have no cultural Christianity to hold evil at bay.
Randy and Slater arrive at the Pickfords to buy weed and hang out. This scene nails the difference between logos and the fake appearances of de-moralized materialism. Logos is transferable.
Pickford and his father. Senior has no moral authority because he's a materialist shell. His appearances are hypocrisy. So why bother?
Pickford's dad looks pretty smug at wrecking the plans for the party. The world would have been a better place if his empty generation of materialist husks had shown similar interest in the state of their society or their families. Nice shirt though.
The recurring problem is crystal clear - what happens with the kids? Other than farming them out to corrupt state institutions to be "taught" by psychopaths and pedophiles. Modernity is based on chasing the now without consideration for the consequences on future generations. And by extension civilization as a whole. Think of the move to suburbia starting after the war. It was all based on how awesome it if for you now, without thought about how this sort of community makes atomized families inevitable in the future. Likewise the idiot forebearers of the boomers raising a generation with Mammon in place of Logos.
For those of us looking back and trying to fathom something that seems inexplicable, the internal and external verisimilitude of Dazed and Confused is remarkably insightful. It's a brief slice of life, but it brilliantly shows us social patterns, general opinions and conventional wisdom, and general cultural flavors that gave us postmodern America. And it does it in a way that distills the brownfield down to a root cause of disconnect between people, culture, and society. This is a message that is useful for planning the future as well as understanding the past.
Mel, Benny, Randy, and Don relaxing after a round of hazing the rising freshmen. The verisimilitude in the casual interactions is astounding.
Some context. The sin of the boomers - other than venal materialism and self-centeredness bordering on egomania - is the inability to learn or grow. To recognize when things they thought aren't so and change accordingly, or leave the diversions of childhood behind. It was the idiot generation ahead of them that invented sociopathic nonsense like "the teenager" and "the mid-life crisis". But it was the boomers who internalized these things as inexorable parts of the biological life-cycle and not symptoms of the fundamental inhumanity of atomized modern life. And because they couldn't grow, they were unable to step into the adult roles needed to preserve family, community, and nation.
Modernity is based on absurdity and de-moralization, but there are levels.
Melba Toast, Wooderson’s 1970 Chevelle 454
It's not being obsessed with wanting a sports car as a teenager...
It's not even that shuffling papers around awards the resources to buy a sports car...
It's still being obsessed with the car you wanted as a teen when you're 50.
Imagine a life so devoid of meaning that childhood priorities freeze in amber because nothing happened to cause priorities to grow or change. The retarded '70 is the new whatever' idiocy for the empty.
We could go on, but readers who live in reality will understand what we mean. The important question is how did it happen? Later generations faced more sophisticated brainwashing and dyscivic institutions. We could see through the lies. Part of it is that the bloom was off the rose before the following generations hit adulthood. The option to breeze from orderly school into a lifetime employment with cheap housing wasn't extended to us. So we became aware of the disconnect between a group born on third and their embarrassing tales of legging a single into a double then stealing third. Reality made it obvious for us.
The problem with self-fluffing reality-denying extends past the denier. If are wrong about yourself, you won't understand how and why the interactions around you are taking place. Because you can't see what your part in them actually is. Like not realizing you're stealing then not understanding why you've been apprehended.
The epic morning after the party scene from The Simpsons captures how misrecognizing yourself and your surroundings are connected.
But it's more than that. There are unique conditions that made that generation what it is and why it is unlikely to ever find the truth. Conditions that offer lessons about the danger of de-moralized dopamine collecting as a societal ethos. Understanding how human nature is manipulated and inverted is always valuable. And it's directly relevant. The crumbling world of illusion we find ourselves in is a direct result of that generation's ongoing collective delusion. And seeing that shows why disconnecting from beast system myths begins the path through logos to freedom.
Thomas Worthington Whittredge, Old Homestead by the Sea, 1883, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
So why a movie? And why this movie? The answer to that brings us back to the finding truth in culture question that we opened with. The Band defines art as in terms derived from the ancient roots of Western civilization - technical skill + logos from the Greek techne and episteme. The idea that the specifics of art are culturally-determined but all the Western forms share technical skill and some element of truth.
The technical skill part is easy - Dazed and Confused is a very well made movie. This is not just the Band's opinion. Critics and viewers agree - the Rotten Tomatoes score is the most impressive considering the number of ratings. Infogalactic gives a more fleshed-out sample of reactions.
The studio was down on the movie's prospects - it opened on limited screens and was poorly promoted. Universal had green-lighted it on the basis of Linkletter's indy hit Slackers but clashed with director from the start and treated the finished picture like a throw-away. But it became a slow-burning smash on home video - to the point where it's called a cult classic. Home video sales have probably topped $100 million and it's been viewed online countless times. And Linkletter moved smoothly into the beast.
Dazed and Confused is an unusual movie - detailing one day in the life of a group of rising 12th and 9th graders in a small Texas town (or suburb) in 1976. The exact location is less important that the feel of the setting. It was shot in Austin, but according to Linkletter it wasn't set there - or anywhere else in particular. He described it in an interview as
"just a depiction of small town America, Texas in particular... I intentionally didn’t put where it was. I didn’t say blank, Texas, or blank anywhere. I was purposely going for an Any Town, USA feel. But personally, I couldn’t help but slant southern and small town Texas. I was just working off the template of my own high school experience".
The setting is left deliberately vague.
It works - there's a generic feel that makes the movie so accessible and an authenticity that comes from being partly autobiographical. It's where the verisimilitude comes from - if he is honest in recalling his impressions, he may be wrong, but he isn't lying. The could-be-anywhere realism is why it works for this post.
There isn't much of a plot - not in terms of any significant climax and resolution in any case. There's a large ensemble cast, and banal events will have life-altering consequences for some of them, but nothing conventionally "big" happens. No trip, score, or grand prank. Not even a graduation or prom - it's the last day of 11th grade so they're not even out of high school. You can see where the studio would have difficulty with an odd genre picture that aggressively refused any teen movie conventions and blew a sixth of its budget on the rights to old rock songs. It's fortunate that he was able to realize his vision - a typical Pedowood teen movie would have nothing to offer besides how degenerate the beast system is.
This is central to the question of logos in Pedowood. It isn't that Linkletter wasn't a ticket-taker - he was totally open for business. It's that he was fresh out of indy film-making and able to push for a personal vision with a small budget.
Linkletter directing Slater, Randy, and Don.
The lack of push for the movie supports the idea that on a sliding scale, the narrative was more his and less straight beast programming.
Dazed and Confused does Pied Piper with a glorified hedonism - which probably got it made. Those are Linkletter's values. But it tries to do justice to how it 'really was' rather than rewrite it to current year norms. This is why it has aged so well and seems so nostalgic to those who remember the time.
Raising the 800 pound gorilla in any discussion of logos in movies - the evil that puts the pedo in Pedowood. Especially in a movie filled with young actors. Including Anthony Rapp. There are more red flags too. The number of those young actors that went on to have careers being a big one. It's hard not to see them through the pedophilic eyes of dream factory casting.
The junior high-schoolers in particular.
We've already mentioned that the cleanest answer is to disengage from fake media world altogether. But if we are going to post on a movie, the Pedowood issue must be addressed. It isn't "justifying" anything. It's a necessary requirement to even have this discussion. The movie has never had a Me Too air, and many of the actors didn't go on to do much. Linkletter's own status at the time, and the minimal interest from big players help. Ultimately it's unknowable if and to whom abuse happened. This one seems better than most, but that's a choice each viewer has to make.
It's worth comparing it to more conventional Pedowood distortion of youth culture.
Scene from John Hughes' The Breakfast Club, 1985
Dazed and Confused is dramatized in ways, but the settings and personality types are almost aggressively realistic next to the mannered grotesqueries in "teen commedies" or "coming of age movies". The contrast with the freakish manikins and After School Special verisimilitude of this is eye-popping. Like a 26-year old Judd Nelson dressed as... what exactly?
Linkletter's rejection of the Pedowood freak model was deliberate, if not for those reasons.
"I remember being a little frustrated with the genre of teen movies. It’s not about the big dramas, it’s about the little things. It was more of a vibe about my impulses riding around, trying to be cool, find the party, go where the action is. It’s this big mix of characters. And the older I got, I started thinking, “What the hell was that?” What were those dynamics? A lot of those would come out of a small town."
What he comes up with are characters who are recognizable archteypes but not stereotypes. Randy - and to a lesser extent Don - move across social boundaries. Like popular kids did. Randy's story arc revolves around being pulled in different directions. This lets personality play out through subtly changing social dynamics as groups mix and mingle - like they really did in some suburbs and smaller towns. And that brings the verisimilitude.
If there are two main characters, they're rising freshman Mitch Kramer and rising senior Randy "Pink" Floyd - seen here in Randy's sweet El Camino.
They are also the two that most closely reflect Linkletter's own perspective and experiences. It's set in one night, but there's personal verisimilitude from both ends of the age spectrum. Note how the actors also look the part. They were within a couple of years of the characters they were playing.
So on the one hand - characters and setting drawn from personal experience and real memories. On the other - posturing manikins mumming old pedos' visions of youth that never resembled anyone's actual school. We don't mean the "personality archetype" of "jock" or "brain" that make people imagine relevance - we mean the overall absurd fake depiction of "school" that children of the 80s were subjected to.
Is it "real"? No. But it's not typical Pedowood trash either. There's honesty in it - the honesty of personal recollection, but an honesty all the same. Like sigma Pickford's perfect arrival at the opening. The right look, girlfriend, car, and song - all things that define him as "cool" but are familiarly plausible. .
You don't have to be in a Pedowood production to imagine this happening. It's relatable in spirit to anyone who's ever thought about making an entrance anywhere.
So the logos in Pedowood isn't Logos - or only indirectly. In the Band's ontological hierarchy - our three-level structure for relating different types of knowledge - capital-L Logos is metaphysical. The extension of God in Creation and that's not a big seller in the Hellmouth. It's logos in the material human world - the level of truth we have spent the least time on because it is the least systematic and hardest to deal with summarily. Linkletter's fidelity to his memories gives Dazed and Confused empirical truth value. Like a genre piece where the "moral lesson" is inadvertent but a moral lesson all the same.
Pickford, Randy, Slater, and Mitch on the Moontower.
Like how a de-moralized existence offers nothing but material things. Once those are covered there's no purpose. Materialist Flatlanders can't even see what it is they're lacking, so it manifests as boredom. With hedonism the default cure. This picture nails it.
The Band can't say exactly how realistic it is because we're too young to have a meaningful perspective on 1976 youth culture. But childhood memories of the afterimage in a place described as years "behind the times" rings true. And much of the organic youth socialization for Gen X outside urban settings had similar patterns of exhilarating boredom, drugs and alchohol, and complex dynamics - the difference being that the bottom fell out of the future. For what it's worth, reactions from late boomers who were around at the time praise how effective it is at recapturing the spirit of the time. That is, verisimilitude.
It's crazy how strongly a movie about very little so powerfully evokes a sense of place. The realism is so layered that we can inhabit the worlds of the characters.
Don and Wooderson outside the Emporium.
They have their own identifying mannerisms and ways of interacting with each other like real guys do in a group. It's one day, but it plays like people with long-running relationships. Right down to who hangs out with who.
Kaye, Shavonne, and Jodi in a convertible Beetle
Linkletter has said he regrets not doing as good a job with the girls - an understandable shortcoming since he didn't have the same kind of experience to draw on. It's not that his girls ring false - they don't. They just don't get the screen time to show the subtle nuances that make the guys so real.
There are cliques, but they're much more fluid than the freakish caricatures in most teen movies. They interact like real-life young people who grew up together - some hang with different groups and some keep to their clique. The football guys are most zealous about the hazing, but there's none of the psychotic beatings that gets dealt out by the "bullies" in movies like The Karate Kid or Back to the Future. Those play like weirdos projecting fear and inadequacy - making it look as bad as they felt because the real cause of their fear was pathetically trivial.
The tics, rituals, and social gradients are insanely well done. And the very real power of music to define community and make the banal seem epic runs through. Dazed and Confused uses music as well as any movie the Band has seen.
Dazed and Confused soundtrack album, 1993, Giant Records
The soundtrack in a topic in itself. It fits the movie so well that it's like another character. Or a spell. Some of the songs were new to us, but they all work.
It's ironic how the morons who introduced the "everyone gets a trophy" school of child rearing enjoyed the quality of culture that happens when everyone doesn't. The throw-away pop music of the era is Mozart next to the discordant degeneracy that replaces music today.
One lesson of Dazed and Confused is that hooky rock - and that extrapolates to music that moves you in general - transforms the banal into the epic. Like we noted in an earlier post, the music adds the emotional content that the visual representation lacks. This is true in personal experience - the movie lets you see it play out. It's one of the best uses of soundtrack we've ever seen so it's really clear, but the observation is applicable anywhere. And if music adds emotional meaning to banal life the same way it does banal representation... that means life is at least partly a representation.
Not that this is new, but epic posing in existentially meaningless contexts replaces substance in a de-moralized materialist youth culture. High fidelity music was an unprecedented soundtrack. The boomers were formed in a context where life had never been less real and more representation. But it could seem beyond epic.
The three ages of alpha. Wooderson, Randy, and Mitch's iconic entrance into the Emporium. Hard to find a better clip to show how music, carriage, and sense of the dramatic turn something banal into a legitimately awesome feeling. From a description, it seems silly. But in the moment it's everything.
As far as insights go, we can see why boomers are so hypocritical and fake. They were formed to believe life is a performance. This comes back to the internal vs. external morality posts from a bit ago, but it's different to be able to see it. It's understandable as an adaptation to complete immersion in an inverted fake beast world. When everything else is fake, the winning play is to construct the identity that gives the best chance for social success. Only this is complicated when the youth culture is disconnected from reality. It's where the endless childhood comes from - the fake identity that brought "cool" is at odds with the fake identity that does "adult" busywork. So the busyworker wastes their life dreaming of past cool and it's all fake.
Benjamin Williams Leader, Evening, the Ploughman Homeward Plods his Weary Way, 1860, oil on canvas
When you step out of the beast system, it gets so easy to see that it can make you feel crazy that it ever worked. The question is why the boomers can't step out after decades of dyscivic consequences as evidence.
Why can't they? Part of it had to do with external and personal realities so strongly rooted in illusion and lies that actual reality becomes effectively invisible. We bought in, but social cohesion was already breaking down and the opportunity to hide out for life in a world of profligate lies was no longer a gimmie. Hence the nihilism, which was also useless, but a more honest reaction to the world of illusion.
This complete immersion in fakeness from infancy is a reason why boomers seem so gamma as a group. Everything is lies, fronting, and feminized peacocking and popularity. The socialization and socio-sexual hierarchy post is next. But for now, consider - even in the early stages of mouse utopia, human nature remains real. Social status is innate. and very few got to experience this:
Socio-sexual status is fractal, meaning there aren't many king bee spots in a large group. Everyone's fronting, but the alpha guys are still the alpha guys. What's new is that when life is a representation, there are no hard standards. Lying and posing - the gamma path - become endemic.
When representation and life blur, the line between the internal self-image movie in our heads get mixed up with the external reality of what's happening. It's why now, as the old order is wheezing to an end, they seem so dishonest. All their reactions and instincts - professional and personal - are cued to a reality that's fake. As the fakeness becomes more obvious, the believers go down in the wake.
This clip also captures the depth of the verisimilitude of this movie. The three ages comment wasn't flip. They're all alphas with traits in common - we'll go deep into the socio-sexual hierarchy (SSH) next post. It's an astonishingly predictive system of classifying socio-sexual status and characteristics among males developed by polymathic thinker Vox Day. We've considered his work before because he's a fountain of thought-provoking ideas.
Three posts on definitely not meth user Jordan Peterson and the occult were review/reactions to Day's Jordanetics. An excellent book by the way - a clinical napalming of a luciferian fraud.
The SSH is one of Day's most insightful ideas. It maps so well onto the large patterns that we can see that we use it productively in our own interactions. In our opinion it's more useful than Game in the broad social sense, and Game is something every man should at least understand. Click for a video on the SSH - we can't find a good written summary to link to. If anyone cares, the Band responds to things with a mix of logic and intuition rather than with a conscious system. But if we were to turn the pattern into a system book, it would start with internalizing a grasp of SSH and Game.
Look at the clips for nuanced verisimilitude.
All three are plus athletes - status based on physical accomplishment - and lead their circles. Mitch is a boy, but the other two are very good looking with flattering and planned wardrobes, and move with self-conscious cool. But differently. It's the differences where the verisimilitude sings.
Wooderson is a fantastic character - funny with hints of distaste and poignancy. The older guy on the border of leveraging experience and a working income to "win" at youth culture and being the old weirdo. He's still on the winning side here, and age and swagger make him the alpha of alphas. You suspect he was to Randy as Randy is/will be to Mitch. Verisimilitude in the clip comes through in the intensity and swagger of a master of his domain. The status as eldest is obvious.
Linkletter originally wrote him creepier until he was blown away by an unknown Matthew McC's audition - the famous "all right, all right, all right", was an ad lib. The result was much better - letting us appreciate how cool Wooderson was drives home the gulf between status in youth and adult worlds. This is important
Randy is the current alpha - the rising senior and most popular guy in school who flows effortlessly between social circles. He moves with an easy grace and with great hair - momentarily playing situational bravo out of the limelight. Mitch is the leader of the middle school pack and his status is obvious with how easily he insinuates himself with the older guys and navigates the new social landscape. Here he nails the initial awe at coming into the place where the cool older kids hang out for the first time. It's the details that make it ring so honest.
There is one thing we do have to deal with. There is a feeling of exaggeration - not the usual Pedowood grotesques, but it is an action-packed day by do-nothing youth standards. And then there is the hazing. In the era before the internet, initiation rituals and rites of passage were pretty much local things. But whether it was exactly like this is less important by what it represents in organic late boomer youth culture. There's also a darker allegory in the price paid to enter Pedowood, but more on that in a moment.
Culture critic Chuck Klosterman had an excellent insight on the exaggerations in a review of the film - tying the distortion to how memory works. Here's a quote...
Like so many of Richard Linklater’s movies, Dazed and Confused is about how memory operates (and what memories mean). When I recall my most insane high school experiences, it’s difficult to untangle what truly happened, what seems retrospectively plausible, and what I pretend to remember in my mind. No film has ever combined those three realities as adroitly as Dazed and Confused.
Klosterman is an interesting guy. An artifact of a long-gone world of the oughts - his mix of twee insouciance, ironic detachment and gushing pop-culture idolatry is a virtual date stamp.
Chuck in 2016. The look, political acumen, and narrative huffing are as you would expect. Full disclosure - in long-ago times, when the Band also thought cleverly deconstructing pop culture was a worthwhile focus, Klosterman was a regular read.
Underneath is an clever mind. It's what distinguished him from peers like Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons. And the distorting effect of memory is a good observation - it just doesn't go wide enough. The rhetoric of the movie recreates the feeling at the time. The fear and humiliation of hazing is usually worse than the reality. The elation of blasting tunes and getting wrecked with buddies is immeasurably more epic than the reality merits. And not just how it's remembered - though that's part of it - but how it felt at the time.
Mythmaking in real time - Pickford recounting the guy shooting at them. This is the sort of story to be told and retold - the armature of personal memory and collective lore.
Tolkien would call this modified reality a sub-creation - where the basic nature of reality is the same as our world, but certain things are modified or enhanced to call attention to larger truths. The larger truths that we see highlighted probably aren't Linkletter's. The brilliance of Dazed and Confused's verisimilitude is that they're still true.
We're thinking of this post as a sort of sequel to the psychedelic occult posts. Not the occultic part, but the relationship between that boomer generation and the endless glamour that they're under.
The Summer of Love was 1967 - it was the earlier boomers that we were looking at then. The transition from the sanitized fakery of 50s and early 60s fake media world into the "edgier" fake counterculture of the later 60s and the mainstream by the earlier 70s.
They're good posts if you're interested in how the media glamour got started, but Dazed and Confused looks at teenagers in 1976. These are late boomers - born in 1959 or 1962 - and grown up in a world where the de-moralization was internalized in the mainstream. It continues the story in a general way by looking at what happened when the Aquarian Age didn't raise everyone into Krishna Consciousness or whatever it was supposed to do. After the Keseys and Learys had cashed out.
Teacher and older boomer Ms. Stroud reminiscing about the wonders of the Democratic National Convention.
The oldest of this crew were 8 during the Summer of Love.
It's also not t.v. centric - the glamour posts looked at t.v. as the vector for dyscivic enculturation, but no one's watching in Dazed and Confused. Music is the beast entertainment medium here - and we already noted it nails how the rhetorical power of rock provided the emotional charge that actual life was lacking. So sequel works.
There isn't going to be a long recap - there's lots of that available online. Ditto links to the movie. We suggest watching it if you haven't already. The Band does not advocate illegal activity and won't link an illegal stream. Nor will we promote Pedowood sales by linking to a pay site. The path should be clear for those who don't need us to think for them.
Bob Montana, cover for Archie Annual #4, Archie Publications, 1953
We're uninterested in most commentary - the Klosterman memory idea being an exception. It's mainly descriptive social insight - some of it's good, but reviewers are uncool and don't understand SSH. So they don't really get the purpose of the rituals they see.
And we're completely disinterested in blather about "being a teen-ager" - that's a fake social category created in the mid-20th century by abundance and marketing.
The big reveal isn't the banality of modern life, the uncertainties facing young adults, the joys of youth - those are all there, but they're surface-level observations that accept the beast system's terms.
Look deeper and the defining motif is disconnect.
The disconnect between the youth culture and the adult world that we barely glimpse is obvious.
Randy and his coach is one example. Pickford's dad another one.
But there's more to it. This disconnect unfolds against a deeper one - one the Band has come tho think of as the main problem with modern life - the disconnect between the standards of living we enjoy in the modern West and what we have to do individually to enjoy them.
We don't mean the difference between the the wealthy and the rest - we mean the assumption that single family homes, heating, plentiful food, cars, lots of clothing choices, etc. can be yours in exchange for filling out forms or performing some repetitive busywork. It's obvious in the youth - everyone driving around with time to burn for doing nothing. Nothing to the point that they complain about the empty hours and abundant material comfort as boring.
Slater's Martha Washington bit is hilarious, as those sorts of burn-out ramblings can be. But note the standard of living vs. the effort required to have it.
This is historically unprecedented hedonistic mass leisure. Mouse Utopia. Progress!
Remember that formative experiences imprint lifelong patterns. Patterns that are stronger if everyone around you shares them. In this case, the socio-cultural patterns come from a de-moralized society with no spiritual or religious pathways to logos. A mouse utopia of unearned leisure means there's no material connection to it either. It's a suspended state of unreality - like the Matrix, but self-inflicted. But humans remain thinking social creatures and something will fill the empty hours whether real or not. Socialization will happen with or without logos. So truth becomes replaced with fake principles and ultimately meaningless rituals and organizations...
Mel, O'Bannion, Benny, and Don waiting to paddle Mitch after his baseball game.
...like youth sports and hazing in a modern context. Initiation rituals historically welcomed someone into a stage of life. The de-moralized form is pure youth culture - there's no bearing on the fake world of adult busywork, and you don't have to take part.
Consider two of Randy's football conversations - one with an older man while the guys above were waiting for Mitch, and one with Don.
"This arm ready to throw about 2,000 yards next fall?"
Contrast the old man's enthusiasm for high school football with the players'. He rattles off their returning roster and their lofty season prospects. How different thing would have been had older generations not replaced things that matter with a bizarre fascination with children's play.
Then there's this...
Randy: Don, have you ever thought about why we play football? How many times have you gotten laid strictly because you're a football player?
Don: I don't know. A few, probably...
Randy: A few? Well, all I'm saying is that I think we'd do just as good if we were, like, in a band or something...
Football, a band - the activities are fundamentally meaningless in themselves. There's no glory. It's about social popularity, and if football is at odds with rocking out and getting high...
Harvey Dunn, The Homesteader's Wife, 1916, oil on canvas
The problem is that necessity motivates by necessity and social dynamics don't. If everyone stops caring about getting food, they all die. In Mouse Utopia, where there is no external pressure, everyone can stop caring about football or bands and nothing meaningful happens. Significance comes down to who cares most intensely. So the two levels of disconnect are... connected.
Put it this way - the clash isn't between wooden stereotypes like "macho jock culture" and "slackers" - it's between investing in fake rituals. And when you realize that, you see that that "no rituals" isn't an option, because people socialize, logos or not. So the value of the fake ritual is based in fake value systems. Sports are important for young men, but there is nothing inherent in the game to make idolizing football a civic virtue.
So two levels of disconnect:
Start at the widest level. We've mentioned rewards of modern life are completely disconnected from the things you do - to the point where ordinary high schoolers can tool around in nice cars whining about boredom. And the demoralization is complete - no one mentions religion and civic causes are transparently empty. School doesn't teach...
Ms. Stroud's iconic moment. It is funny, but it also reminds us that the globalist-SJW takeover of the institutions is a long-running thing. It's just sort of assumed that "public institutions" are provinces of the loony left. And the students filing out as she delivers it?
Does it get more boomertastic than disinterested hedonists placidly ignoring dyscivic institutional leftism?
The coaches are self-parodies, the star quarterback would rather party, and the derided drug-free pledge a 4G epic failure. Parents don't really care. Bust the party, pay no mind to the guy dealing dope out of his bedroom.
Adult world actively opposes youth culture with the pledge to abstain from drugs and alcohol. Don says sign it and lie - Randy stands on principle. See the moral mess fake reality makes?
Randy, Mike, Tony, and Cynthia react poorly to the team pledge not to party.
Then there's the historically weird issue of "youth" in general - we already alluded to it with the invention of the teenager. That's the idea that the early years are front-loaded with hedonistic fun that is suddenly set aside for a new system of "adult" values. In modern times, this period can extend into middle age, but in the 70s it was pretty new.
Consider - as the 20th century "progressed" school dragged on for more years while becoming more pointless. Consider your own background - how much did you learn that was either useful or true?
Some stuff for sure, but as a fraction of the 12+ years given to formal education? So extend school and make it pointless. Then wonder why it's disconnected from anything real. Like all the rest.
Somewhere the idea appeared that the best way to prepare young people for the future was to set up their post-adolescence with adult resources and infant responsibility. It's even more bizarre in hindsight, when it was new and not yet normalized by decades of repetition. It's like the positive aspect of how boomers were raised - the freedom of childhood development without constant adult supervision - but extended past it's shelf life. 'Go play' can be excellent advice when the children are small. It's less helpful when they're a 17-year old young adult with wheels, cash, and a bag of weed.
It reverses natural growth. As we age, physical diminution is supposed to be offset by gains in wisdom and spirit.
Eastman Johnson, Sunday Morning, 1863, oil on canvas
But that requires intergenerational bonds and a logos extending beyond the planned obsolescence of pop culture and floods of dopamine.
Frontloading the responsibility-free dopamine tsunami in an undeveloped psyche is the best way we can imagine to ingrain materialism. It's the ultimate addict pattern blown up to life. The huge initial surge that can never be recaptured, then the rest of life to chase the dragon in memory. Until the time comes to finally unleash that inner Wooderson, blow up the family and...
With nothing but de-moralized materialism for values and the empty hedonism front-loaded, those boomer trappings make more sense. They were the badges of status in the only time in their life they felt alive. And since they're incapable of growth, the values are those of a teenager.
Go further. Frontloaded dopamine doesn't explain the extent of the arrested development. The Band and many readers enjoyed frontloaded dopamine by the trainload when younger and managed to evolve spiritually and psychologically. Not being able to sashay into a world of lucrative employment and cheap stuff was definitely a wake-up call, but successful younger people can see the terminal emptiness of solipsistic boomer materialism as well.Why is that? It's not hard to see that the path from Generation Cathode Reality to Generation Napalming the Seed Corn fits a de-moralized broken culture - what's not clear is why the spell is so blasted strong strong.
Dazed and Confused shows us why.
Everyone is living in Mouse Utopia. Set aside preconceptions about what's more "responsible" - it's all de-moralized smoke tracing the path of degeneration. Coach, Pickford's dad, and Ms. Stroud are as far from logos as Slater. Adult world is the beast system is "society". We laid it out above - it's fake, doesn't work, and no one cares. We're looking for something - anything - honest or real.
All the roles are fake on the broad level. That's the Mouse Utopia-disconnect from reality. But within the fakeness there are different grades of socialization.
The disconnect between youth and adult culture overlaps a deeper one. That's the disconnect between actual natural organic human socialization and the atomized fake media world materialism of the modern protoplasm. Youth culture has it and adult world doesn't. That means that the youth culture resonates on a primal human level that all the cathode rays and empty busywork can't replace. Which is why they never change. It's not just imprinting and it's more complicated than t.v. replacing reality. It's what's real vs. everything else being fake.
Looking back, the inability of boomers to evolve does seem like a global spell cast by the magic cyclops.
But the t.v. is the indirect cause. It's the backbone of and proxy for the larger fake media world that replaced reality. That is, it's the pervasive fakeness of fake media world that makes any viscerally real thing so powerful.
That needs to be repeated for emphasis:
We've seen official world is a pointless wreck, but it's also lucrative. Hence the soulless, de-moralized emptiness. It offers nothing beyond money, but without money there's no Mouse Utopia. And without Mouse Utopia, tough metaphysical questions have to be addressed and gratification managed. So watch and consume - it's horrifying to the youth who are immersed in a bubble of organic socialization within the larger utopia. It's clearly the organic socialization - the rituals, groups, images, etc. - that matter to them. That's human nature. It's not their fault that the context was so bizarre or that there was no other sounder organic socialization in their lives. Even families are fragmented.
Jodi, Julie, and Mitch at the final party.
We've mentioned the Pickfords. Then there's big sister Jodi "meeting" little brother Mitch now that he'll be part of her real life. Their family relationship was a front - now that he's in the youth culture they really see each other.
This makes boomer attachment to their youths understandable on an emotional level - especially when you think about what comes next. Set aside for a moment the fact that emotional lives also should mature. Theirs obviously didn't. But consider Wooderson's iconic L-I-V-I-N' speech through the lens of real vs. fake socialization and natural human psycho-social needs. Material level logos.
His alternative life choices are equally fake constructs, but the critique of the beast system is honest. Far more honest than the adult figures - unlike them, he is what he appears to be. Within the system that condemns him to marginal status. But if you take that attitude outside into logos... well, that's the hope for the world to come.
The problem is the de-moralization. As blossoming nerd Cynthia puts it "I'd like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to somethin' else" and if we are all gonna die anyway shouldn't we be enjoying ourselves now?" This is reality without anything beyond the material. Dopamine and stuff.
Tony, Mike, and Cynthia
Or Mike's "it's seems what everybody in this car needs is some good ol' worthwhile visceral experience." Ending up with him losing a fight, Tony meeting a girl, and Cynthia making plans for Aerosmith in Houston with Wooderson.
Contrast the adult beast system world with the youth culture - they may be pampered posturing babies on the threshold a life of parasitic bloat, but the socialization is real. There's nothing to do and drugs numb the ennui - but that's just the pathology of modern culture. Without constant lurking pervs adult supervision, the social patterns in that fake bubble are also natural and authentic. There is an element of logos that is absent from every other part of the culture that reflects actual individual and group natures under the circumstances.
We see this in the anthropological elements - the ritual gestures and dialect, the initiation, the sorting, the oral histories, the shared expectations.
The little details in the interactions are a big part of the verisimilitude. Characters don't just have a catchphrase - different characters have different patterns of behavior that vary depending on who they're with. Like Don and Slater's rock out gesture, Pickford and Slater's greeting, Don and Wooderson's handshake, Randy and Pickford's handshake - it goes on and on. The little natural mannerisms that develop organically among a group of characters.
Silly? Maybe, but more natural and meaningful than what the hollow beast world is offering.
Or the depth of lore that spontaneously generates. We've mentioned characters myth-making in real time. Urban legends and tall tales also appear.
Then there's the actual socialization - from hazing initiations to Randy and Don giving Mitch tips on girls that he uses...
...to Slater telling his stoner buddy how to improve the bong he made in shop class. And in an example of the small-detail verisimilitude that runs through the movie, it's the same bong Don's hitting in the car with Pickford and Slater and another guy.
The contrast here is perfect - youth using the pointless beast system facility to make something that is actually meaningful in their world. Likewise Benny making his paddle - the only meaningful experiences they probably has there. Even the knowledge transfer and interaction is more honest.
The boomer youth culture may be de-moralized hedonism, but it's also the only thing that isn't a grudging accommodation of a pointless sham. Of course it defines them. But it also replaces vertical links with horizontal ones. Instead of being enculturated into community, or manhood or something cross-generational, it all happens within one narrow age range. And it's not political. It's not the "don't trust anyone over 30" garbage the mindless older boomers parroted in an ironic foreshadowing of their own future value. It's a consequence of a system that replaced organic culture with fake media world and de-moralized busywork for lollies while letting the kids go play.
Freed from responsibility, the kids make their own world. But it's time limited, and the beast system awaits.
"Are you in?"
Jodi notices freshman Sabrina and invites her to join the hazing. It's clear that there's a selection process - the girls with Sabrina aren't potentially cool enough to be asked. Likewise, the cooler boys get paddled hardest. It's an initiation into the youth social world.
This is an important insight when you consider the boomers led the charge against the fake "bullying" crisis and subjected kids to suffocating oversight from the kinds of weirdos drawn to that line of work. There is no place for sadism. But organic right of passage cultures - not ones created by fiat and populated with freakish maladjusted SJWs - aren't "bullying". Good lord, that's an inane term. They establish social fitness and prevent Mouse Utopia. If the rite of passage is bad, it's because it doesn't test for anything meaningful, not because it's hard. The problem is with meaningless society, not with trying to have social standards. Instead, internet monoculture brings the beast into the bedroom and destroys the possibility of localized youth cultures.
Mitch is tested repeatedly, including a savage hazing in an intense scene. But by repeatedly rising to the challenge, he's one of the guys by the end of the night. He showed toughness and resourcefulness because he got the chance to.
The sort of weird controlling shitbag who made "bullying" their adult cause was never popular or socially fit. And they probably were never initiated as a result. Oh, they would have lived in fear that someone cool was coming for them, even though someone cool never was. If the Band were king, wanting to work in the child related sector would disqualify you from doing so. The problem isn't youth rites of passage. The problem is an adult world with nothing meaningful to initiate into.
And this brings us to a massive factor in the collapse of the old order that comes through between the lines - the impact of girls on what it means to be cool.
Simone, Darla, and Kaye arrive. Randy's day revolves around chasing Jodi despite girlfriend Simone. Feminist Kaye is happy to chat with Wooderson.
The boomers were the first to have to deal with gender integration on this level, and afte the "sexual revolution" of the 60s.
What it meant structurally to add the hope or expectation of sexual activity into youth culture seems utterly fundamental. And almost totally uncommented on. Note - by sexual activity we mean any variation on physical coupling - the spectrum from making out to intercourse - because it's all expressing the same behavior driver-motivator.
The youth traditions that adult world acknowledges - official ones like sports or unofficial but tolerated ones like hazing - are gender segregated. Older concepts of manly activity - like commitment to football as life's highest goal - came from a time when getting laid wasn't really much of an option. Male SSH is inevitable, but how it expresses depends on the context. Without girls or access to girls, physical competition becomes intense. Status comes from winning.
László Moholy-Nagy, Dusk at the playing fields of Eton, shot 1936, printed 1973, gelatin silver photograph, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Manly competition can't hold the same all-consuming allure if girls and weed are an alternative. Or the motivation.
Sexual "liberation" added the direct pick-up as a real option. Good lord progressive a-holes twist language - all they have are lies. There were always operators and seducers, but never before had seduction skills been so important to so many. Throw girls in, and status comes from getting girls. And while female hypergamy means that the celebrated winners will be attractive, there has to be a cultural difference when things go from ends in themselves ways to pull chicks. Not to mention the social consequences of one high value male like Randy occupying multiple high value females that the West seemed to have solved in medieval times.
Edward Lamson Henry, A Country Schoolhouse, 1890, oil on canvas
Boys and girls had been together in schools since the 19th century - according to Britannica, that's when coeducation really took hold in America. Like magic dirt, Unitarian nonsense, and secular transcendences, 19th-century America was a hive of "progressive" inversion. But the difference was interaction was strongly regulated - officially and unofficially.
The "prudish" morality attacked by satanic socialists and their pleasure-seeking dupes was what allowed Western society to work so well. Monogamy means relatively stable family bonds which is a macro good, and it links the irresistable power of sex drive to pro-social outcomes. When sexual market value is assessed from a relative distance, men compete by distinguishing themselves among men.
When the rules are minimal, men still do that. Randy's speculations aside, being quarterback of a good Texas high school team certainly boosted his status among people who didn't know him personally. But men also behave differently when their priorities are rearranged.
The assistant football coaches.
In fact when male activity is a choice, it's easily cast as homoerotic. It's much clearer in the stills, but there in the film.
This is extra true for male activities that don't earn female desire. Note how the most zealous paddlers don't appear that popular with the ladies, while Randy abstains from paddling and lets others do the dirty work.
There's a chicken or the egg symbiosis here. An alpha personality is more likely to make a winning quarterback. While being a winning quarterback sharpens an alpha personality. It's not a coincidence that Mitch doesn't just play baseball, he pitches. There's a great moment at the game when the older guys are waiting to haze Mitch and he still focuses and strikes out the last batter. The older guys stop taunting in a moment of quiet respect.
You'd miss it if you haven't seen the movie 100 times and very conscious of the importance of emotion in sport - but it's a real flicker of verisimilitude of the kind the gamma weasel that tends to comment on "film" misses.
Oh, Mitch still gets a walloping. The fact is that the respect probably makes him get it worse - something else gamma film boys definitely can't understand. It's not a coincidence that Randy got it badly too. Organic initiation - not institutional sadism - is a sorting mechanism as well as a test.
But the padding is homoerotic also at the same time. "Soul Pole" and "Fah Q" are painted right on the paddles. To say nothing of the cinematography. The girls are also sexually humiliated also, just without the dimension of physical pain.
The violent sexuality is more obvious in stills - it hadn't struck us so strongly until collecting pictures for this post. So the idea is still rough, but it's hard not to see a metaphor for making it in Pedowood. If you want to be in, bend over and do whatever we want. Especially considering that when Linkletter made Dazed and Confused the ticket offers for him and his young stars were freshly printed.
It fits perfectly, though we can't determine that's intentional, more unintended consequences of verisimilitude, or just hindsight. What is intentional is the homoeroticism - the question is what it means in the movie. The most likely take is that Linkletter was trying to be "subversive" by contrasting the "repressed" jock culture with the sexually healthy libertines. The assistant coaches come off as guys with iffy search histories. But Linkletter's messaging is inverted and de-moralized - it's the verisimilitude that makes Dazed and Confused so useful. The Pedowood metaphor stands regardless. The real social statement was that if you add sex to an independent organic youth culture in Mouse Utopia, priorities are going to change. And once they change, fake sexless adult Mouse Utopians might as well as well be the Charlie Brown teacher.
Sabrina goes with Jodi to be hazed so she'll be "in". Once she's with Tony, she refuses to go along. They seem like a healthier take on youth sexuality - broadly defined - but it's still coed relations breaking down the old hazing structure.
So the adult order sucks and is totally fake - there's a poignancy in the little speeches on the football field near the end of the movie. Don's in the moment - have the most fun he can while he's stuck in this place. His character embodies that throughout the movie. Wooderson defiantly advises to keep living against a world that becomes ever more suffocating. And Randy rains on the "best years of your life" cliche. Ironic, considering that pining for lost youth is a boomer leitmotif.
But now we see why that obsession is so strong. It's not the best years of their lives because it was so intrinsically rewarding...
... it's because it's the only time there was any human social reality in their lives at all.
This is where Dazed and Confused excels - the meaningless backdrop, the granular realism, and the banal epicness let us see what made boomer youth such flypaper. They formed their identities by being oganically socialized into an empty dopamine-driven world, but were then plugged into an even emptier beast system without even that. All of it was fake, so none of it's any use today as the real party is winding down and illusions failing.
But inside the bubble of fakeness, the fun part was organic. It's no surprise that the one real thing stands out in a de-moralized wasteland of fake media world and the dance of stuff. You see with Mitch. Actor Wiley Wiggins generally avoided Pedowood but captured his growing swagger brilliantly as he gains confidence and emulates the older guys.
The scene where Mel tests him by sending him out to buy beer is a great example - contrast the anxiety of the underaged kid trying something like this for the first time and the self-satisfied strut after he pulls it off. You see him starting to emulate the manner of the cooler older guys as his confidence grows. Initiation and organic socialization. Even if it's meaningless.
Mel's a good example of the fractal nature of the SSH. He's an alpha to the group of black guys in the opening, a bravo when he's with Benny, and an assertive delta in the larger group. His status shows itself in how his relationship with Mitch grows - from hazing, to the beer run, to acceptance - as Mitch proves himself.
What experience in adult fake media world will make him feel as alive as when he swaggers back into the Emporium like a mini-Wooderson? Or gets to drink with the cool older guys?
Mel offering him a beer is very symbolic.
Or when Wooderson taunts the cop for wishing he'd enjoyed this life when he was in school. It's a small town - they know each other. The difference in joy, vitality, and honesty between the "responsible" authority and the "loser" illustrates the different between organic socialization and complete de-moralized consumerism within a common fake media world bubble. And note where the pretty girls are...
Obviously the cop is more "successful". But Dazed and Confused lets you feel why mindless boomer youth culture had such a stronger hold than what followed.
And this may help explain why boomers are such hypocritical turds. Even their one real thing was a series of facades made possible by Mouse Utopia. The organic socialization would have been very different in a reality-facing context. And then they turned around and made all the choices that ensured that no one else would ever enjoy the historically unique mix of complete freedom from any real concern beyond 'what career to pick' and 'am I popular'. Good times make weak men indeed.
This has been a long post with a lot to think about. De-moralization, Mouse Utopia, boomers, girls... The sequel will use the verisimilitude as a way to talk about the socialization and the SSH in detail. That's something we've wanted to write on for a while.
