Is Dazed and Confused a Comedy? Is it a Sports Movie?

If you read the blog regularly, you know I'm compiling a list of press links around the wonderful Dazed book by Melissa Maerz: Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused.  You can order it here or just search on Amazon if you prefer.  You can find my compilation of press around it here.

There was a piece written around the release of the book, but it didn't have any interview with the author or Linklater, and didn't have any excerpts, or any audio or video, unlike all the other press links I've compiled.  However, this piece was really excellent with a very unique take, so I wanted to make a separate post about it.  Here it is: https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/itd-be-a-lot-cooler-if-you-did-july

The author is Michael Weinreb and the subtitle is: Dazed and Confused isn't just the best comedy of the 1990s. It also might be the best sports movie.  That is an intriguing thought in a variety of ways.  The very first thing is the idea that Dazed is a comedy.   The second is that it's the best comedy of the 90s.  The last is that it's also a sports movie that might be the best sports movie of the 90s.  I was very intrigued to read the defense of such statements and the author does a pretty good job defending them.

I've never thought of Dazed as comedy.  Dazed is about life, and life certainly includes plenty of comedy but I still can't think of it as a comedy.  I can see how someone might think that, but I just can't get on board the "comedy" train.  The author doesn't really focus on defending it as a comedy though, it's more about it being a sports movie.

Is Dazed a sports movie?  Most people would say no, and most certainly not in a traditional sense.  Traditional sports movies involve a lot of on-field play, and a rather traditional plot, often revolving around an underdog theme.  I can't say it is a sport movie, I just can't.  But I most definitely agree that sports is an important aspect of Dazed, and there are several reasons for that.

Dazed is based on Richard Linklater's high school memories.  He was deeply involved in sports through his college years and remains a fan of sports to this day.  Heck, in 2008 Linklater directed Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, a profile of former University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido, the winningest coach in NCAA history.  Amazingly, one of the people featured in the film with comments about Mr. Garrido is the former University of Texas head football coach Darrell Royal, who is mentioned early on in the article that inspired this blog entry. 

Linklater played football and baseball but was better at baseball and so has experience with both sports featured in Dazed.  He covers both Randall "Pink" Floyd and Mitch Kramer, which makes sense since he based those characters on what he himself experienced in high school.  One could argue that the strongest adult authorities in the film are the football coaches.  The biggest plot point you will find in the movie is whether Pink will sign the letter distributed by the coaches.  Mitch is a big-time Little League pitcher, and the baseball game after night falls is such a great scene in the movie.  Pink says he got paddled as a freshman after baseball practice.  More sports than you'd think, right?

Does that make it is sports movie though?  I'll say that for me, things fall quite a bit in the middle.  Dazed is not a sports movie, but sports are a much bigger part of the movie than most people realize.  Let me know what you think in the comments.