Chapter 11 - Keeping Time in Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Boyhood

Summary

For those of us who had followed the stories about its production across a twelve-year period, Boyhood (2014) was one of Richard Linklater’s most anticipated film releases. It screened at a range of festivals, as was common with Linklater’s work, and arrived at the Sydney Film Festival in June, 2014, where it sold out at the State Theatre. I was at that screening. Knowing Linklater’s earlier films (and having a special fondness for Slackers [1990] and Dazed and Confused [1993], shared by almost every one of my social circle), I found Boyhood deeply moving, calling to mind my own memories of boyhood in a striking filmic experiment about the way in which time is, in a sense, always part of our lives, and always present to us. It is a classic Bergsonian idea that has been brought to several analyses of Linklater’s work: that our pasts remain steadfastly present to us, always enmeshed in present experience. We can then also say that when reflecting on the past, rather than departing for a distant mental place constituted by vague images in the mind, we actively call the past to the present, to our present attention and awareness, not as it was, but as a reinvigorated image of that (once present) moment in time. This condition of pastness allows Bergson to suggest that, for example, “states of consciousness, even when successive, permeate one another, and in the simplest of them, the whole soul can be reflected.” We see this interlacing of pasts and presents in many beautiful moments in Boyhood; I remember being awed by the cut from a sequence in which Mason’s (Ellar Coltrane) sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), performs Britney Spears’s “Oops! … I Did It Again” (2000) to an unspecified, unmarked future, with the little Samantha now visibly aged, a fully embodied older being, having leapt (but fully lived) through the intervening time. A hard cut from one image to the next in which Mason’s mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), has aged in wrinkles surrounding her eyes was profoundly affecting; that materiality of changed flesh—across a single cut—constitutes, in formal and phenomenological terms, such an affront to our traditional experience of film time.