Fast Times and Mean Girls

What the great teen movies tell us about American adolescence

- Hillary Kelly

In the early spring, I caught a preview at my local Alamo Drafthouse Cinema for its forthcoming stoner-classics retrospective: snippets of Monty Python’ Life of Brian; Tommy Boy; a few Dada-esque cartoons perfect for zonking out on, postedible. The audience watched quietly until Matthew McConaughey, sporting a parted blond bowl cut and ferrying students to some end-of-year fun, delivered a signature bit of dialogue. “Say, man, you got a joint?” he asked the kid in the back seat. “Uhhh, no, not on me, man.” “It'd be a lot cooler if you did,” he drawled. The crowd, including me, went wild.

Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, in which a fresh-faced McConaughey appears as Wooderson, the guy who graduated years back but still hangs with the high-school kids, is that kind of teen movie: eternally jubilance-inspiring. Set in 1976 and released in 1993, it's a paean to the let-loose ethos of a certain decade of American high school. And boy do these kids let loose.

On the final day of the school year, a group of ris-ing seniors in small-town Texas set out with custommade paddles to whack the bottoms of soon-to-be freshmen, and then take a couple of them to a “beer bust” out by a soaring light tower. Along the way, they shoot some pool, cruise the town, smoke joint after joint. If the film has a point, it’s that the teens want to party all night and still wake up in time to buy Aerosmith tickets in the morning. (The last frame shows them driving into the sunrise.)

What makes