I read the other day that Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s rambling cinematic ode to his own teenage life in the mid 1970s, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Twenty years… holy crap. There are some pop-cultural landmarks that feel like 20 years (or more) really have passed, and then there are others that make me think I must’ve been frozen during a routine deep-space probe and blown into an orbit much more vast than originally planned, because surely that event just happened a couple weeks ago. Guess which one Dazed and Confused feels like to me? Maybe it’s some kind of psychosomatic effect from all the pot smoked in that film.
For the record, I wouldn’t call Dazed one of my favorite movies. I don’t have any particular memories, fond or otherwise, associated with it, and I don’t think it made any extraordinary impact on me. But I did enjoy it when I first saw it, and I’ve actually found it even funnier and more endearing on subsequent viewings, a genuine rarity when it comes to comic films. Like George Lucas’ American Graffiti (which Dazed and Confused resembles in many ways), the movie is essentially plotless, a series of vignettes that follow several groups of young people around during a very long summer night as they party, get into (relatively minor) trouble, and struggle to figure out what it’s all about as they near the inevitable transition into adulthood. Also like Lucas’ film, Dazed‘s real strength is less rooted in what happens than in the way it seems to authentically capture the textures and mood of a very specific and forever-gone moment in time — 1962 in Graffiti, 1976 in Dazed. (Personally, I think it’s kind of fun to imagine that the kids in Dazed are the children of the kids in Graffiti… the timing almost works.) And it’s one of the very few movies in which I’ve actually enjoyed Matthew McConnaughey’s performance. His delivery of that infamous line about liking high-school girls because they stay the same age while he gets older is pitch-perfect, just the right combination of eyebrow-waggling sleaze and good-natured cluelessness. It never fails to crack me up. (My appreciation of this joke is probably helped, in part, because I went through a similar phase in my own life. Yes, it’s true: I was one of those losers who continued hanging around my old alma mater for a time after I graduated. Most of my significant girlfriends — including The Girlfriend — were a couple grades behind me in school…)
There is one element of Dazed and Confused that’s always mystified me, though, and that’s the setting for the big kegger that fills the back half of the movie, a place the characters refer to as “the moon tower.” As seen in the film, the moon tower is a big metal structure in the middle of nowhere, with incredibly bright lights mounted on top of it. I’ve always assumed it was a radio or TV transmitter tower like we have around here, even though it looks nothing like the slender red-and-white columns with red aircraft warning lights blinking away to the west of my house, and the term “moon tower” was just a nickname bestowed by the local kids.
Totally wrong.
It turns out the moon tower seen in Dazed and Confused is a historical relic from the early days of electric lighting. Before the modern paradigm of incandescent (or, increasingly, LED) lamps at street level was worked out, many American cities experimented with placing large carbon-arc lamps on high towers that resembled oil derricks, so a relative handful of lights could illuminate entire neighborhoods from above. The effect was something like the light of a full moon, hence the structures became known as “moonlight towers” or “moon towers.” An elegant idea, but sadly, one that came with unforeseen problems, including animals being completely discombobulated — to the point of death, in some cases! — by the sudden and near-total banishment of nighttime. (The details are recounted in an interesting Atlantic article I ran across the other day.)
The age of artificial moonlight passed quickly and is hardly remembered today. But curiously enough, 17 moon towers still stand in and around Austin, Texas, where Richard Linklater went to college and where Dazed and Confused was filmed. Their light sources were long ago updated to common mercury-vapor lamps, but it makes me happy that such unique and oddball treasures survive somewhere. If nothing else, they’re useful reminders that we shouldn’t take for granted the way things are done, especially mundane things nobody thinks about anymore, like street lighting. It seems like our current system should’ve been the obvious solution to illuminating a city, but it wasn’t; it fascinates me to think what other ideas were tried out and abandoned…
(Hat tip: As with so many of the interesting links I’m finding these days, I spotted that Atlantic at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.)
