Richard Linklater’s graduating class for his breakout 1993 hit – now rereleased for its 30th anniversary – featured baby-faced high-schoolers Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich, Rory Cochrane, Cole Hauser and Adam Goldberg. Then there is Matthew McConaughey, who does not look all that much different from the way he does now, playing the older guy with a dodgy pudding bowl hairstyle and a pack of cigarettes stuffed into one of his T-shirt sleeves, creepily hanging out with kids from the school he is supposed to have left some years ago.
This is a film which drew on Altman’s Nashville – like that movie, this is set during the bicentennial of 1976, and is now nearer in time to that year than to 2023 – and Lucas’s American Graffiti. It features kids in Austin, Texas whoopingly celebrating their freedom at the beginning of summer to Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. The junior high graduates are allowed to be “hazed” – or brutally bullied – by the grotesquely unpleasant older kids, led by O’Bannion (Affleck); these horrible jerks “paddle” the younger kids by hitting their behinds with what look like specially designed cricket bats. This dysfunctional abuse is deeply ingrained, more unpleasant than anything in Lindsay Anderson’s If…, and every time I see this film I am baffled at how normalised it all is. O’Bannion is to get his Carrie-style comeuppance, but I can’t help thinking he deserves something more.
