How Everybody Wants Some!! Connects to Dazed and Confused

What is a “spiritual sequel”? Basically, it’s any work that seems connected enough to another but isn’t directly linked by characters or any sort of narrative acknowledgment. However, the rules are pretty loose depending on where you look. TV Tropes claims Richard Linklater‘s Dazed and Confused is a “spiritual successor” to George Lucas’s American Graffiti, but that’s just because they’re a similar kind of movie. Now Linklater has made Everybody Wants Some!!, which he has long referred to as a spiritual sequel to Dazed. And again, it would seem it’s pretty much just the same kind of movie, the soundtrack-heavy, people hanging out and talking kind.

Earlier this month, Linklater told Variety that he wasn’t sure what the term really meant. “I started calling it a ‘spiritual’ sequel, but I don’t even know if spiritual is the right word,” he admitted. “I used it as an orientation to the material, because Dazed was high school and this is college.” The idea reminded me of the difference between Teen Wolf Too and Teen Wolf, the former technically a sequel but following new characters, set at college instead of in high school and with a change in sport central to the story. Yet the Teen Wolf movies do share a couple characters, and its different protagonists are related, specifically as first cousins.

Perhaps the Everybody relationship to Dazed is more akin to that of 10 Cloverfield Lane to Cloverfield. Linklater can instead refer to it as an episode of an anthology film series and make more movies like those two set in other time periods and times of life. There could be one that’s set in an office where a bunch of co-workers play basketball or go bowling after work, and it’s the 1990s. Another could take place in the early 2000s in a retirement home and the characters are heavily involved in shuffleboard. If he does just one more, Linklater can call it a trilogy in the same manner as Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavours Cornetto” movies and Lars von Trier’s “Golden Heart” films.

Actually, there already are three. Back in 2014, Linklater stated that Everybody (then titled That’s What I’m Talking About) is also a sequel to Boyhood. “I don’t know if one film can be a sequel to two different movies,” he says in an interview with Creative Screenwriting magazine, “but it begins right where Boyhood ends with a guy showing up at college and meeting his new roommates and a girl. It overlaps with the end of Boyhood.” Well, of course that makes sense because Boyhood is a very autobiographical movie, and so is Everybody. And so is Dazed. In fact, a lot of Linklater’s movies have some level of autobiographical element to them.

“When you’re a director, a little bit of you is in everything,” Linklater told Moviemaker magazine in 1995. “Dazed probably more so. I don’t know.” The more so is compared to his breakout film Slacker, which he says was more personal than autobiographical. It was more that he knew that world, but also he admits that a little of him is in a lot of the characters. The same is true of Dazed, and some have theorized he identified with the character of Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) because he would take on that role during auditions for other parts. But he’s claimed he’s also Mike and Tony (Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp). And he acknowledged as early 21 years ago, “Probably the closest would be Mitch, the young guy. In ’76,  I was going into high school, too.”

And Mitch is a baseball player, a pitcher. Now in Everybody there is a character named Jake who is going into college and he’s also a pitcher. The movie is set four years after Dazed, in 1980, the same year Linklater went to college on a baseball scholarship. “If you want to get technical,” Linklater says in the Variety interview, “if you think of the young guy Mitch in Dazed (Wiley Wiggins), it’s four years later if he had kept playing ball in that movie. Had I [made the movie] four years later, maybe it would have made sense to have Wiley in there.” And retained the name and had it be an actual sequel, it would seem.

Linklater stated at this month’s SXSW premiere of Everybody, “Almost everything in the movie happened in one way or another.” That’s close to what he said 20 years ago about Dazed being his “most autobiographical moment to moment.” So why not just name the Jake character Mitch? Linklater even cast an actor, Blake Jenner, who looks like someone you could believe is Wiggins’s character four years older (with a touch of young Matt Dillon mixed in). Maybe it’s for the same reason he didn’t name Ethan Hawke’s character in Before Sunrise Mitch, even though he is also somewhat based on Linklater — or, at least his experience is based on one had by Linklater, albeit in Philadelphia rather than Vienna.

We could almost connect all of his movies as a sort of Linklater Cinematic Universe based on the fact that so much is at least semi-autobiographical, starting with his first feature, 1988’s It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, where Linklater himself stars as a guy trying to find himself, inspired by his own soul searching in the mid-’80s. He put some of his baseball background into his remake of The Bad News Bears. He also told Sight & Sound the character Amber (Ashley Johnson) in his fictionalizing adaptation of the nonfiction book “Fast Food Nation” is autobiographical. And his documentary Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach is at least a very personal project, one that Linklater has said is about himself as much as about subject Augie Garrido.

In Before Sunset, Hawke’s character is a writer, and he says something to a reporter that is very similar to what Linklater told Moviemaker in 1995.  He paraphrases Thomas Wolfe: “He says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.” The character’s book is based on the experience he has in Before Sunrise, which is based on an experience Linklater had in real life (sadly the basis for Julie Delpy’s character never showed up to a screening of Before Sunrise because she died in a motorcycle accident before it came out).  So all of Linklater’s movies, if they’re written by him, are connected in a way through the clay of his life.

But if he once recognized Dazed as his most autobiographical, then did so with Boyhood (which has a scene that really seems to overlap with Dazed) and now implies Everybody has that honor — Linklater even dated a girl from his college’s drama department, though it was much later than happens for Jake in the movie — they are the most unified. Mitch, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and Jake are pretty much the same person, aligned in spirit. Other characters in Everybody will remind fans of characters in Dazed, but not in any substantial way. It’s not a spiritual remake. It’s not even a spiritual remakequel. But Everybody is as close to being a true sequel as many official follow-ups are.