by Brendan Foley
Memory is not a straight line.
It is not a passive, tranquil collection of dead things to be filed and sorted away, impassively visited and remarked upon at leisure.
Sifting through memory is like trying to sift through the wreckage after an explosion; everything is jumbled up in random order, familiar outlines overlapping with one another to create strange dissonances.
I don’t have whole memories, not really. What I have are collections of sensations, sharp notes of ecstasy, scatterings of sorrow, refrains of melancholy and love, all swirling around in a constant buzz. At the strangest of instants (a note from a long-forgotten song, an old sight seen from a new angle, a familiar face curving in just the right smile) a memory comes bursting to the forefront.
When my niece was very young she would wear my younger sister’s clothes, and seeing my sister cradle the newborn that wore the same outfit that my sister had worn when I cradled her…it was all I could do to keep my feet, that’s how hard that punch hit.
Richard Linklater is an American poet laureate of memory, crafting films that act as exquisite, gentle time machines to laconic moments from yesteryear. With Everybody Wants Some!!, his new film now in limited release, he has crafted perhaps his most nebulous, tricky film; an intimate epic that appears to be about nothing yet broaches everything, driven by Linklater’s unerring ear for human moments and his eye for the tangible moments that set off memories like bombshells.
The year is 1980 and the guy we’re following is Jake (Blake Jenner), a young baseball player starting his first year at college. Everybody Wants Some!! is almost entirely plotless, following Jake through the last weekend before classes start (there is an actual timer that appears throughout the film, a countdown to the moment when reality will interrupt the idyll) as he moves into the baseball house that comes stacked with a treasure trove of Linklater’s typical slackers, weirdos, motor-mouth philosophers, and loveable dimwits that slouch their way towards enlightenment.
The easy description is that Everybody Wants Some!! is a continuation of Linklater’s early-90s masterpiece, Dazed and Confused, if that film were to narrow its focus down from the eclectic rotation of kids and onto one group (Jenner is in, I believe, every single scene. Jake is a blank in the way that many of Linklater’s leads are empathetic blanks, but Jenner has charm to spare).
Despite the open similarities (right down to both movies using Gilligan’s Island as a shared cultural touchstone) there are key differences in how Linklater broaches the kids in each film. The core difference is that the kids in Dazed were defined by what they rejected, by the sense that they were running away from something, while the boys at the center of Everybody are open to everything.
The kids in Dazed rejected just about everything. Classes, rules, laws, social structures, class ranks, traditions, the identities imposed on them by authority figures, the decade in which the film is set, and even, in perhaps the most meta-moment of the film, going so far as to reject the sense of nostalgia that drove the creation of the film, with Randall “Pink” Floyd’s late-film declaration, “All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life — remind me to kill myself.”
The boys in Everybody Wants Some!! would have no hesitation with identifying the days we are witnessing as the best they are ever going to know. The actual, physical embodiments of white male privilege, the entire world is at their disposal and the boys revel and delight in the opportunities this affords them, at the ease with which they can slip into and out of identities and away from consequences (this being a Richard Linklater film, the characters stop to have involved dialogue exchanges about the sociological and philosophical underpinnings of this state of affairs).
Really, you can just look at how each film uses Gilligan’s Island. In Dazed, the kids call out episodes from memory, followed by one of the girls launching into an angry screed about how the show was a “male pornographic fantasy”. But in Everybody, a punk band repurposes that show’s theme song as an exuberant punk number, and hearing the words causes a cry of rapturous mass recognition from the audience as they share in a moment of cultural connection and release that excitement in a mosh pit.
The college days depicted here aren’t anything like my own, and yet the film feels like the sort of memory I carry from those times. I wasn’t born until a decade after this film was set, and yet watching strangers bond over odd pop cultural totems, watching guys go from best-buddies to mortal enemies to back to friends again, it all feels perfectly exact to my own experiences.
And that’s always been Linklater’s greatest trick. He understands the universality of specificity. He understands that the more intimate and personal a story, the more people will read themselves into it. In taking his memories of those hazy, lost summer days and recreating them with his exceptional young cast, he is inviting audiences across the world to wander through the sensations he treasures and stores, and to see themselves and their own journeys reflected there.
It’s a heckuva place to get lost.
