Recently, I (Katie) watched Dazed and Confused, the 1993 cult classic directed by Richard Linklater, for the first time. I know, I know, I can practically hear you screaming at me from across the ether, “How are you just now watching this movie?!”, to which I’d reply, as I do when my friends ask me incredulously about having not seen this or that “it” movie or tv show, that I sometimes think I must live under a really big, soundproof, pop culture-less rock, or, at the very least, a large pile of unread books. So, as a preface, I realize that the ideas I’m offering now in 2025 are a decades-late contribution to a near 32-year discourse on a well-known film, in which all possible things to say about it have likely been said. But then again, that’s the beauty and richness of pop culture, that it is continually at our disposal as a tool to rethink, recontextualize, and remix our understanding of our lives and the world around us at any given moment. So without further ado, in the spirit of pop culture literacies, which we detail in Chapter 7 of our book, I’d like to look at how Dazed and Confused is more than just a “day in the life” movie of American teenagers or nostalgia bait. Rather, in my view as an educator (and future parent to teenagers), it is also a critique of how we collectively think of adolescence/ts and is thus a call to educate them differently. At its core, it’s a call for more joy.
If, like me until recently, you are unfamiliar with Dazed and Confused, it follows a diverse group of high school students in 1976 Austin, Texas, on the last day of school. Mitch Kramer and his friends, all recent graduates of the 8th grade, bolt out of their junior high, quaking in fear as a ragtag group of macho upcoming seniors, led by likely prom king and star quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd, attempt to induct the rising freshmen into the social system of high school through hazing. What follows is the serpentine unfolding of a summer night set to a soundtrack of classic 1970s vinyl as the wide cast of characters from different social cliques come together to drink, smoke, fight, kiss, drive, talk, and waste time until sunset. If you’ve watched the Before Sunrise (1995) trilogy, you can see Linklater’s fingerprints all over this movie with its nearly plotless narrative aimed at capturing the experiences of characters in a particular time and space, especially in their negotiation of growing up. For instance, Randall is coerced into signing an anti-drinking statement by his teammates and coaches at the beginning of the film, and as the night wears on, the paper, folded in his shirt pocket, remains unsigned, the symbolic weight of real-life expectations juxtaposing the carefree party atmosphere he floats through. Will he or won’t he sign the pledge? But then an even bigger concern overtakes Randall and co.: Will they make it in time to snag front row seat tickets to Aerosmith? What follows is a night of transformation, like in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the characters emerge from the party at the moon tower into the morning light as new. Well, at least, in the sense that they are young and relentless and keep driving forward into the sunrise despite it all.
While at first glance the movie seems basically conflict-free (hence its nostalgia bait reputation), the invisible powers that undergird the teenagers’ lives —the ones that they are (sub)consciously rebelling against —tinge the rosy-colored lens through which Linklater views the past with shadows of darkness. I had fun watching the movie to be sure, but there was some feeling I couldn’t quite shake after the credits rolled: I was, well, kind of disturbed. I was bothered by all the underage inebriation, of course, but what really shook me was the microcosm of American life that the film depicts, one that, as the hippie English teacher character yells out over the final bell, is rooted in “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.” How this historical elitism and white supremacy shows up in the teens’ lives, in just one example, is in how the upperclassmen repeat the tradition of hazing, intentionally humiliating and beating up the freshmen, just as they were tortured when they were that age. Even the adults seem to be in on this scheme. When Mitch begs his teacher to let them go early so they can evade the bullies, he wistfully smiles, says no, and offers an anecdote something along the lines of, “Back in my day…” The other adult responses we get to the violence are met, well, with more violence. One boy’s mother points a loaded rifle at an assailant, and another man threatens to beat them up.
On one hand, the pessimistic take on all this is that the teenagers are trapped in systems of oppression and abuse from which they cannot and may never escape. (Matthew McConnahey’s character David Wooderson, a 20-something who still hangs around the high schoolers to find solace in the 9-5, perfectly embodies this notion.) For instance, the teen characters attempt to dismantle the status quo in the only ways that they know how: with loud music, fast driving, binge drinking/smoking, and refusing to sign pledges that their coaches assign them, the models of adolescence that have been bestowed by the radio, tv, and magazines of the time as well as previous generations. But it’s arguable that these methods actually keep them in their place, despite their countercultural flair, a sort of facade of rebellion that doesn’t lead to any real change. The characters don’t have the ideological toolkit to actually remake the systemic ways of being that are keeping them dazed and confused, so, ironically, they’re left to unknowingly perpetuate ‘the way things are’ that they despise.
Then again, you could argue that the teens’ symbolic middle finger to the man by way of partying and rejecting the adults’ pleas is a gleaming example of exercising agency, making meaning, and enacting joy despite the systemic boundaries rectified by tradition and institutions. In other words, the characters find ways to explore who they are and what it means to live authentically within systems designed to enforce rigid conformity. In this view, the movie is a celebration of the audacity of youth to be themselves, to follow their own desires, cultivate community, and have fun as an act of resistance.
So you may be wondering what all this has to do with our book about joyful literacies in secondary ELA. I’ll admit, this was not where my mind went either when I first watched the movie. But as I followed the rabbit trail of my post-credit roll feelings, this is where I ultimately ended up: I wondered how can we as ELA educators use, not quell, our adolescent students’ great and urgent capacity for risk-taking, for doing things differently, for self-expression and authenticity, for feeling deeply, and for belonging to empower them–and ourselves!–to break the mold of the status quo? After all, as psychologist Abigail Baird reminds us, the teenage brain, like the toddler brain, is in a stage of incredible plasticity and is quite literally wired to take risks for the sake of initiation into the adult world. But, as the movie illustrates, schools seem designed to do just the opposite–they are anathema to the wonder that is the teenage brain. As adults how often do we tolerate this because that’s how we did things “back in our day?” In what ways are we simply initiating adolescents into the status quo of an adult world that’s built on subjugation, violence, isolation, and dread? Conversely, in what ways are we giving them the tools to (re)read and (re)write the word and world as a more liberating, peaceful, unified, and joyful place?
These are really big questions to tackle, the types of questions that led me to pursue a PhD in adolescent literacy education, and that likely should be considered through an interdisciplinary lens. But for now, a few ideas come to mind from a literacy educator’s perspective. At a school structure level, I think of Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine’s (2019) work on engagement in high school classrooms. They found that, across the board, the high school experience in the 2010s, even in so-called innovative schools, mirrored the experiences of the characters in Dazed and Confused. Many students were troublingly disengaged from education, learning instead how to comply with the unspoken norms of schooling (i.e., taking standardized tests, completing worksheets, figuring out how to read novels without actually reading them, etc.) instead of delving into the messiness and challenges of authentic learning. However, Mehta and Fine found pockets of what they called “deep learning” in most extracurricular spaces like theater and shop class. Here, students experienced a workshop model in which they were immersed in apprentice-style teaching and learning, creating authentic products for audiences beyond the teacher while still reflecting the work of the discipline. For instance, in a theater class, students transformed from simply high school teenagers into actors, directors, PR agents, and costume designers, all doing the necessary work required of folks who work in professional theaters. They learned the appropriate content and developed important skills, but their education went beyond the standards as they learned from each other to collectively create something real–a production for a large audience. These students, unlike the ones in the movie, had opportunities to channel their teenage energy into making meaning, making spaces of belonging, and making their identities as agents in the world, instead of funneling pent-up energy into destructive tendencies, or at the very least, directionlessness or apathy. Students were invited to participate alongside experts in the fields that interested them. They were having fun as resistance, but also having fun to learn. After all, the characters’ boredom in the film, in my view, stems not from their carelessness but a feeling of insignificance, as their biggest internal desire is to feel like their lives matter. (To clarify, the workshop model as presented at the beginning of the film, where characters in shop class are designing paddle-boards for their hazing ritual while the teacher sits to the side with his feet propped on his desk snoozing, is the opposite of how Mehta and Fine are conceptualizing it.)
What could all this look like in a high school ELA classroom? This is one of the questions that motivated us to write Joyful Literacies in Secondary ELA. I imagine, for instance, the students in the movie having a completely different experience in English class, one filled with invitations to critically and creatively consider all that they read and compose both inside and outside of school, to bridge the texts of school with the texts of their lives, and to then actually make their own texts for real purposes and audiences. Using the Soundtrack of Your Life or A Curated Collection of Current Pop Culture Obsessions (CCCPCO) projects in Chapter 7, for instance, I imagine the students in Dazed and Confused, a movie where the soundtrack is everything, analyzing their favorite songs of the moment, digging deep to explore not only what brings them joy about these songs, but also to understand how these songs are reflections of contemporary culture or conceptions of adolescence/ts. I could see the students interviewing and composing multimodal portraits of each other as presented in Chapter 2 to overcome the deeply entrenched divides between social cliques. I could envision students taking up the work in Chapter 9 to explore the problem of their school’s hazing tradition, imagine solutions, and compose texts to write for change. Considerations of the literacy practices of the ELA discipline, as outlined in Chapter 5, could also initiate students into the real work of literary scholars and professional writers, laying the foundation for a workshop environment in which students engage in authentic and personally/professionally relevant work alongside experts, as Mehta and Fine describe.
While the students’ experiences in ELA class realistically wouldn’t address or solve all the issues the movie points to, it could be a starting place for transforming our collective understanding of adolescence/ts from a time in which adults must control and coerce teenagers into compliance and conformity, and to instead recast it as a unique and particularly fruitful moment in our lives in which significant learning and growth occur. It could be a starting place for us to revise the inane tasks we assign our teenagers that can feel like a waste of time to them (which explains the appeal of generative AI like ChaptGPT), and to instead foreground opportunities for connecting to authentic purposes and audiences, and something larger than themselves. It could be a starting place for curtailing the type of destructive, hedonistic fun as embodied by the characters’ night which devolves into fighting each other for no reason and taking baseball bats to random people’s mailboxes, and to redirect them toward a “deep fun” that challenges students to think differently, create purposefully, take responsibility, and find joy in problem-solving. It could be a starting place for tearing down the artificial walls we’ve constructed to exclude teens from being in the adult world, and to instead embrace radical inclusion and belonging in our curriculum by inviting them to learn and do alongside us. Above all, it could be a starting place for dismantling teens’ long-held feelings of entrapment and helplessness, and to instead empower them to expand their sense of self and the world, and exercise agency to act in and on that world.
So what’s the TLDR? We’ve cast teenagers as dazed and confused for too long, but ultimately, I think that’s because we’ve passed down a limited perspective of what they are capable of from generation to generation. But we don’t have to do things this way. We need new models for thinking about and cultivating healthy and meaningful adolescence/ts, and I believe one place this can start is in a joyful English class.
Joyful Literacies 
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