Everybody Wants Some!!

　

　
1.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) is a frat-boy genre film. There’s no use in pretending that the core of the movie is anything else.

Movies of this kind are raunchy comedies pitched to teenagers and young adults. Generally, these movies are set in the recent past and are suffused with nostalgia – we had so much fun before marriage, jobs, and children tied us down.

Harold Lloyd’s silent comedies often exploit a college setting and involve frat-boy exploits. The form was transferred to the talkies with the Marx Brothers 1932 pre-code Horse Feathers. In 1947, college students in love engaged in wacky antics and crooned Mel Torme songs in Good News (194 7). The genre’s exemplar is National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) starring, among others a preternaturally young and girlish-looking, John Belushi. The Revenge of the Nerds (1984) is another campus comedy featuring underdog science and math majors. Rodney Dangerfield returned to school to acquire a degree in Back to School (1986) shot in part on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Linklater’s own Dazed and Confused (1991) recounts the last of High School for a group of young people in a small Texas town.

There’s also no point in denying that Everybody Wants Some!! complete with its double exclamation-point title is also related to teenage sex comedies, most notably the leering patriarch of the genre, 1981's Porky’s and it’s "Bro-mance" progeny, for instance, The Hangover (2009).

The question raised by Linklater’s film is whether it is more than a genre exercise in funny sex and heavy-duty drinking. Is Everybody Wants Some!! a genre film that conceals, as it were, other deeper currents?

　

2.

Linklater has made successful genre pictures. His comedy School of Rock (2003) starring Jack Black was an enormous box-office success (and praised by critics as well.) The film spawned a TV show produced by Linklater that ran for two seasons The 2011 dark comedy Bernie, also starring Black was highly regarded by critics and, also, made money. And he both produced and directed a remake of the Bad News Bears (2005), a commercial and critical failure, but a film that shows Linklater’s willingness to work within conventional Hollywood parameters. In this context, it is worth noting that Linklater’s "Before" trilogy, although somewhat experimental in form and modestly produced, has been very successful with art-house audiences and have achieved a wide audience in DVD release (recently through Criterion.) In fact, on the basis of published budget and receipts with respect to Linklater’s major films, it is clear that the director is generally "bankable" – his movies earn back what they cost and, even, often show a significant profit. (The notable exceptions have been Linklater’s The Newton Boys (1998), a baffling Western that no one seems to have liked and that lost an enormous amount of money. Linklater’s 2008 success d’estime Me and Orson Welles, although acclaimed as the best film ever made about live theater, also was a serious disappointment at the box office.)

Like Steven Soderburgh, Linklater’s interests and films are protean. At the height of his career, he has turned away from conventional moviemaking to direct highly challenging and experimental pictures. These works include the controversial adaptation of the Eric Bogosian play, SuBurbia, as well as the rotoscoped and hallucinatory A Scanner Darkly (2006, based on a Philip K. Dick novel) and Waking Life, (2001) a rotoscoped philosophical dream diary. (A measure of the risk taken by these films is that Linklater engaged major Hollywood stars, for instance, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in a Scanner Darkly, shot them live and, then, animated – rotoscoped – over these images.) Only a few filmmakers have successfully straddled the worlds of Hollywood, Independent film making, and experimental film – Linklater is a rare example of a director and producer who has worked successfully in all these forms. 　

A theme to which Linklater returns again and again is the effect of time’s passage on characters. (It is not an exaggeration to say that Linklater is the Proust of the cinema – time is central to all of his films and his work is philosophical: even crowd-pleasing comedies like Dazed and Confused are refracted through a prism of nostalgia.) The "Before" trilogy famously measures the effects of time on the intermittent romance of its principal characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – the two characters meet on a train in Europe in 1995 in Before Sunrise. Time is a presence in these films. Although the young man and woman (both of them students) are attracted to one another, they spend only a few hours together in Vienna before parting at sunrise. We meet this couple again in Before Sunset (2004) – nine years have passed and they are both married to other people; they spend an afternoon together in Paris. Then, in Before Midnight (2013), after another nine years, the couple spend an evening on a Greek island, mostly bickering before they reconcile. The films show Delpy and Hawke as they have actually aged of course and are intensely romantic and bittersweet. (The effect is similar to the 7 Up series of documentary films that follow the adventures of 14 British school children, seven years old in the first episode made in 1964. Directed by Michael Apted, these documentaries are produced at seven year intervals and, as remarked by Roger Ebert, represent a "noble experiment" in exploring "the central mystery of life, the passage of time." As I write 63 Up is under production with release scheduled for later this year.) Most notably, Linklater’s majestic Boyhood (2002 -2013) was shot over 12 years and chronicles a child’s life up to his leaving home to attend college – the film uses the same actors and we watch them as they actually age on-screen. I am ambivalent about this film – it seems almost entirely improvised and doesn’t have much of a narration. Viewed uncharitably, nothing much at all happens in the film – people get into quarrels, there is a divorce, step-parents, first love, and, then, the protagonist’s first few days in college. Of course, life is improvised also and, if we are lucky, nothing too dramatic happens to us.

　

3.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a sequel to the picture that first brought Linklater’s talents to the public at large, Dazed and Confused (1993). The protagonist in Dazed and Confused is a high school pitcher, renowned for his blazing fast ball, Mitch Kramer (played by Wiley Wiggins). Dazed and Confused is set in 1976 in a small Texas town. The hero of Everybody Wants Some!!, Jake Bradford is similarly a baseball-player, also a pitcher, who has full-ride scholarship to the fictional East Texas University. Linklater has said that Everybody Wants Some!! is Dazed and Confused "four years later" – the movie takes place in 1980. Many points of resemblance connect the two films, most prominently the sound-tracks of classic rock and roll that date the action in both movies: Dazed and Confused begins with Kramer in bed, listening to Fog Hat’s "Slow Ride"; Everybody Wants Some!! starts Jake’s arrival in the college town, the Knack’s "My Sharona" blasting out of his car-speakers.

Much of Linklater’s work is autobiographical and there are strong currents of memoir in Everybody Wants Some!! Linklater was raised in Huntsville, Texas. His parents divorced when he was seven. Like Eagle Pennell, Linklater was a star High School athlete – he played football in Junior High and, then, switched to baseball in High School. (Linklater played shortstop in High School and was a power-hitter.)

Recognizing his athletic talents, Linklater transferred to Bellaire High School in Houston where he was coached by Ray Knoblauch (Chuck Knoblauch’s father). Bellaire High School was a force in Texas baseball and won the State Championship the year that Linklater played for the team. Linklater holds the Bellaire High School record for the most stolen bases. The future film maker’s father lived in Houston and Linklater resided with him during his senior year. In Houston, Linklater’s grandmother took him to the symphony orchestra (she had season tickets), the opera, and art museums. So while he was honing his skills on the diamond, Linklater also became interested in the fine arts.

Sam Houston State (in Huntsville) recruited Linklater to play baseball on the college team. As shown in the movie, Linklater lived with the team and practiced incessantly. When he was 20, he had dual aspirations – to play professional baseball and, further, to be a novelist. Linklater didn’t play much during his freshman year, but was put on the starting roster as a sophomore. He was assigned left field and batted third in the line-up. Health concerns intervened. Linklater felt weak and dizzy on the field. A doctor diagnosed him as suffering from atrial fibrillation, a heart condition, and he was side-lined. By that time, however, Linklater was taking courses in philosophy – he later dedicated two movies to his college philosophy teacher – and playwriting.

After college, Linklater worked on off-shore oil rigs for a couple of years and lived in Houston when he wasn’t at sea. On the oil-rig, Linklater read voraciously. In Houston, he attended a repertory cinema almost nightly and acquainted himself with film history. With his wages from working on oil rigs, Linklater bought some film equipment and began experimenting with making movies. A little later, he was taking a course in film production from the Austin Community College. In 1990, he independently produced Slacker, a film featuring eccentrics hanging around the University of Texas – the movie cost $23,000 and was a big success in Austin as SXSW. He made Dazed and Confused in 1993, the film that introduced Matthew McConaughy to the world. In 1995, he directed the first of the "Before" films, Before Sunrise. Since that time, Linklater has directed 16 pictures. He is 58 and lives in Houston. His production company is called Detour Films, a homage to Edgar Ulmer’s ultra low-budget 1945 suspense film of that name. Linklater has said that Scorsese’s film Raging Bull (1980) was the movie that changed his life and drove him to make films.

　

4.

Most comedies are directed in Hollywood’s most "invisible" style. Camera set ups are intuitive and designed for maximum clarity. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the gags. Several of Hollywood’s most prestigious directors of the classic period "cut their teeth" on directing Hal Roach Studios two-reelers. Movie comedies are unostentatious but if presentation of space and time is botched audiences won’t get the jokes. (In slapstick comedy, space and time are the essential ingredients in setting up gags – some Laurel and Hardy routines are breathtaking in the amount of time that they use; similarly, telling jokes involves exquisite timing – the dimension of time is what makes the joke work.) The purpose of movie comedies is to instill in the spectator a sense that they are looking through a window to observe the antics of the film’s characters – editing is minimal, camera movement generally not necessary and, so, not used, montage, by and large, non-existent, and close-ups limited to reaction shots and slow burns.

Linklater’s comedies are generally shot using "invisible style." The director doesn’t interfere with the clear presentation of the filmed "facts." Cliches abound – the opening sequence in Everyone Wants Some!! is a museum of trite conventions: the hero arrives in town with the camera surveying his car as it travels through the streets around the campus. This is the one of the oldest techniques in film: showing the hero driving to the place where the action will occur while a sound-cue establishes the era in which the movie will be set. Later, as the young men cruise the campus, the camera centers on the swaying rear-ends of female students, another time-honored cliche. The entire film is constructed of sequences that are shot from the most obvious, clear, and unobstructed vantage.

These observations are not to deny Linklater’s tremendous talent as a film-maker. Shooting a film in the style of Howard Hawks is not simply accomplished and requires tremendous discipline. Furthermore, if the camera style is restrained, the focus on acting is pitiless. And there’s no doubt that Linklater is tremendously successful in directing his young actors, all of whom were, in effect, unknown when the picture was made. (It’s clear that Linklater excels in directing young men – his proficiency directing women is less evident in this movie: the girls are mostly just props.) Furthermore, Linklater takes pain to differentiate his large cast of young men – each character has his own quirks and distinct personality. Achieving clear delineation of character in a setting in which there would be a natural tendency to treat all the boys alike – they are generic "Texas jocks" – is an achievement of a high order. Similarly, Linklater’s clearly lit compositions are, often, fantastically complex – he fills the screen with his actors in long fresco-like takes that involve a half-dozen or more participants. Marshaling characters into complex group shots also requires enormous skill. Therefore, although the movie is clinically lit and simply shot and edited, nonetheless, the intricacy of the group dynamics shown on screen is remarkable.



5.

We have seen that a documentary-like "invisible style" was used by the neo-realists (as in Bicycle Thieves) as a warrant of fidelity to the truth. Of course, the "invisible style" employed by Linklater in Everybody Wants Some!! is also the paradigm mise en scene for pictures made in Hollywood during the classic studio era – as I have noted Linklater’s unobtrusive style is similar to the way Howard Hawks directed films like Rio Bravo and Only Angels Have Wings. (And like Hawks’ films, Linklater’s movie is densely, even aromatically, masculine – Hawks focuses on groups of men trying to accomplish something as a team; this description is literally accurate for Everybody Wants Some!!) No one would claim that Hollywood studio films are fundamentally realistic. In fact, the "invisible style" praised by Andre Bazin can be deployed in ways that are markedly non-realistic – for instance, Bunuel used an "invisible style" in all of his films, many of which are avowedly surrealistic.

In Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater presents a wholly sanitized and ideal picture of campus life. This is emblematic in an early party scene in which one of the boys pulls a girl’s blouse over her head to reveal two of the most spectacularly beautiful breasts in film history – the shot is typical of an exploitation movie, that is, characteristic of the genre of a raunchy frat-boy campus comedy. But the shot also signifies that we are embarking into a realm of pure male fantasy. Everything in the picture is cheery, upbeat, positive and optimistic. (Even comments about the ubiquity of idiotic competition among the boys are presented without cynicism. When one character hurls a pingpong paddle at the hero, we are explicitly told that no harm was intended – "he would have hit you, if he was trying," a character says about the uber-athlete who throws the paddle.)

At Southeastern Texas State no one has acne. The girls are all, without any exception, as beautiful as fashion models and they are all, also, sexually voracious. No one is sad, lonely, or homesick with the possible exception of Beuter who spends the last weekend before college with his farmer girlfriend – and things work out for Beuter as well. Everyone is successful, self-confident – the boys all regard themselves as conquering heroes. Bar fights occur without anyone getting hurt or arrested. Indeed, there are no authority figures anywhere in sight – in an early scene, the coach announces that he can’t be involved in coaching the team since the season hasn’t started. So he and his rules are side-lined. There are no adults, no anxious parents, no police, no professors until the film’s last thirty seconds. During the three day weekend that the film documents, the weather is always perfect – people can sleep or pass-out drunk outside without fear of being frozen or sun-burnt or bitten by bugs. No one gets paranoid when smoking dope. No one gets sick despite the vast amounts of beer and hard liquor (for instance the punch) consumed. The characters swim in a huge, beautiful spring that they have all to themselves – it’s at Blue Hole Regional Park at Wimberely, Texas in the Texas hill country. (Today the park is so crowded, you have to secure advance reservations to swim in the Blue Hole.) Most films present the world as more dangerous or ugly that it really is. Everybody Wants Some!! shows us a world that is impossibly clean, bright, and safe. The artistic kids living in the house on the outskirts of town welcome the jocks to their party. Their home is exquisitely decorated and far more beautiful than such a place could be in real life. In this film, there is no racism and no one suffers from the identity crises that typically affect college students – on the three nights that the film shows, the characters cross frontiers: they spend one evening at a disco, one night at a country-western bar, and, after a sojourn with punk rockers, one night partying with students majoring in the fine-arts. Everyone can dance with well-nigh professional skill. There is no angst about fitting in to these disparate milieu. Kids cross boundaries effortlessly. Identity is protean – you can be a punk rock, country shit-kicker, disco-baseball jock BMOC. All possibilities are open.

(One surprising thing about the film is that Linklater is blissfully unaware of the "rape culture" controversies that now characterize campus discourse on parties and dating. Of course, this discourse didn’t exist in 1980. But Linklater’s film is almost gleefully politically incorrect on this point. Nonetheless, anxiety clearly exists about the portrayal of relations between the sexes as shown in the film. The title embodies this anxiety Everybody want some!! – emphasis on "everybody", that is, both sexes. The girls in the picture are unrealistically shown as being sexually promiscuous and enthusiastically available – although, perhaps, this was the case in 1980 with regard to good-lucking college jocks. But recent history, at the University of Minnesota among other places, has shown that college jocks often overestimate their charm and take advantage of their elite status in ways that can lead to rape charges. For this reason, Linklater shows all of his characters consuming vast amounts of alcohol but never getting drunk – this is a way to avoid consent issues that might be problematic involving semi-comatose girls and sloppy drunk, but still sexually capable, jocks. The film is so persuasive that I don’t know any critic that has raised this issue – but we should note that the fantasy shown on screen doesn’t comport with anyone’s actual memories of what campus sex and dating was like in 1980. Note that the relationship between the hero and the performing artist major is sweet and the degree of sexual contact between the two is left tactfully ambiguous.)

It is curious that the film somehow evokes a sense of melancholy – this arises from Linklater’s concern with the passage of time. The world shown in Everybody Wants Some!! is imaginary. It’s a utopia that never existed, a place where a generous memory has smoothed away all the rough and painful edges. The movie ends with a strange slogan written on a chalkboard: "Frontiers are where you find them." What does this mean? The past is always a different country, particularly the past as evoked by pop songs now almost forty years old. The frontier that we discover in this film is the boundary between real and imaginary, the present and an idealized past – we know that life couldn’t have been so welcoming and sheerly, and unashamedly, hedonistic when we were twenty years old. In fact, real twenty year olds are plagued by all sorts of neurotic doubts. We have outgrown all those simple pleasures (most of which are fantasies anyway). Films about simple happiness are rare. Everybody Wants Some!! has happiness as its theme – and, yet, the movie ultimately inspires this question: if happiness is so simple and abundant, then, why are we unhappy? What has gone wrong with our lives?