How did everybody find out about the party at the Moon Tower?

Movies preserve more than stories. They preserve worlds. The Time Machine looks at the ordinary life hiding in the background.

Pickford is supposed to have the party.

His parents are going out of town. The keg is coming. Everybody knows the plan. Then the keg shows up early, Pickford’s parents figure out exactly what their son had planned for their empty house, and the party is dead before the last day of school is even over.

Which raises a question the movie never seems particularly concerned about.

How does everybody find out?

There’s no group chat to announce that Pickford’s is off. Nobody can text 15 people looking for a backup. Once a new plan emerges, nobody drops a pin or checks to see where everybody else went.

And yet, a few hours later, everybody seems to know there’s a party at the Moon Tower.

Richard Linklater made Dazed and Confused in 1993 about teenagers in 1976. He wasn’t making a movie about teenagers living without smartphones. They were just teenagers. More than three decades later, though, the mechanics of their Friday night can look almost foreign.

Watch closely and the system is right there.

Or just watch Slater.

The people around them were the network

Slater spends a remarkable amount of Dazed and Confused getting into other people’s cars.

He never seems especially concerned about where he’s going. He gets into one car, gets out somewhere else, finds another group and eventually winds up in somebody else’s back seat. At some point, somebody will know where something is happening.

Everyone else is doing some version of the same thing. When school gets out, the kids scatter across town. Groups form and separate. People who left school in completely different directions meet again somewhere else. Plans change while everybody is already out.

Information can’t move on its own, so people carry it.

Eventually Wooderson has the update everybody needs: “Party at the Moon Tower.”

Then he explains the distribution strategy: “Spread the word, man.”

And they do. The people he tells leave and encounter other people. Those people carry the news somewhere else. Nobody needs a way to reach everyone because, sooner or later, the right people are going to cross paths.

In less than a decade during the 2000s, that communications network moved into teenagers’ pockets. In 2004, only 45 percent of American teens ages 12 to 17 owned a cell phone. Three years later, 71 percent did. By 2010, 54 percent of American teens were texting friends daily, making texting the most frequently used form of daily communication with friends measured by Pew.

In Dazed and Confused, the network is still driving around town.

They went where people might be

Without knowing where their friends are, the kids have one reliable way to find out.

Go look for them.

That makes the Emporium more than a place to shoot pool and drink beer. It’s somewhere people can reasonably expect to find somebody they know, somebody who has seen the person they’re looking for or somebody who knows where people are headed next.

Nobody has to know exactly who will be there. That’s why they go.

Parking lots, houses and the football field work the same way. They’re places to hang out, but they’re also places to get information.

The kids don’t have to know the whole night before they leave the house. They only need to know the first place and let the rest sort itself out.

There’s risk built into that. They might show up and find nobody. They might spend an hour looking for people who already left. They might miss something completely.

But they might also end up somewhere they never would have chosen beforehand.

We’re so used to coordinating first and going second that it’s easy to miss how much of Dazed and Confused works in the opposite order.

The kids go out first. Then they figure out what they’re doing.

They really did just drive around

There is an enormous amount of driving in this movie.

Not driving to something. Just driving around.

Cars are where conversations happen, where people meet up and where plans get made. They pull alongside each other so people can talk. Someone hears where another group is going and follows.

The car isn’t merely transportation in Dazed and Confused. For teenagers with access to one, it’s something close to a movable room. It gets them away from parents without requiring them to have anywhere in particular to go.

And this is one of those cases where the research sounds as if somebody watched the movie and started taking notes.

Monitoring the Future, which began surveying American high school seniors in 1975, has tracked teenage social behavior for decades. One of the activities researchers have measured is riding around in a car for fun.

Access to that kind of mobility has changed considerably. University of Michigan researchers found that 46.2 percent of American 16-year-olds had driver’s licenses in 1983. By 2014, that figure had fallen to 24.5 percent.

Those numbers don’t measure the exact 1976 world Linklater is recreating, but they show what happened to one of its basic ingredients. A car doesn’t just get these kids somewhere. It gives them the freedom to keep moving until something happens.

Finding the night was part of the night

This is where the background of Dazed and Confused starts to become more interesting than the absence of smartphones.

Researchers looking across decades of Monitoring the Future data have documented a substantial decline in unstructured, face-to-face socializing among American teenagers. One study found that unstructured in-person socializing among 12th graders fell by roughly 30 percent between 1999 and 2017. Another found that by 2016, college-bound high school seniors were spending about an hour less each day socializing face-to-face than their counterparts had in the late 1980s.

“Unstructured socializing” is a clinical-sounding term for something Dazed and Confused spends nearly its entire running time depicting.

Hanging out.

Nobody designed the group that eventually gathers at the Moon Tower. It forms over the course of the night.

By the time they arrive, they’ve already had a night.

Give everybody in the movie a smartphone and Pickford’s busted party becomes a much easier logistical problem. Somebody starts a new group chat, sends the location and tells everybody where to go.

That is unquestionably more convenient. Nobody has to burn half a tank of gas trying to locate 20 people who are doing the same thing.

But the inconvenience produced things too. People run into friends they weren’t looking for. Someone they barely know becomes part of the night. People encounter whoever happens to be there, not only the people they would have chosen in advance.

In Dazed and Confused, finding the night is part of the night.

All that hanging around was doing something

Mitch Kramer is probably the clearest example.

At the beginning of the movie, his social world is mostly kids his own age. He’s finishing eighth grade, playing baseball and worrying about the seniors waiting to paddle him. Randall “Pink” Floyd is one of the older kids who crosses into Mitch’s night.

Then Pink takes him along.

Within hours, Mitch is riding around with seniors, drinking beer, going to the Emporium, trying to talk to girls and spending the night with people who would have been outside his normal social orbit that morning.

And he has to talk to them.

Not all of those interactions are pleasant. That matters too.

The world Dazed and Confused preserves isn’t some lost paradise where teenagers became socially well-adjusted because nobody owned an iPhone. O’Bannion is an asshole. Mitch gets beaten with a paddle. Mike picks a fight he has no business picking. People say stupid things, misread one another and make each other uncomfortable.

But they have to deal with one another.

If Slater is sitting in the back seat of somebody’s car and the conversation stalls, he is still sitting in the back seat of somebody’s car.

Developmental researchers have long treated peer interaction as an important part of adolescence. It gives teenagers opportunities to learn how to cooperate, handle conflict, read other people and build relationships. Face-to-face conversation also comes with all the little signals that are harder to reproduce digitally: facial expressions, pauses, tone, body language.

More recent research on young adults has found an association between social anxiety and feeling more comfortable or confident communicating online than in person.

That doesn’t mean smartphones caused social anxiety, or that teenagers who grew up with them don’t know how to talk to people. The research doesn’t justify that leap.

But put that research beside the decline in unstructured face-to-face socializing and Mitch Kramer’s Friday night becomes interesting in a different way.

He is getting hours of social practice without anyone arranging it for him. Nobody signs him up or calls it enrichment. Nobody’s mother drives him there and comes back at 8:30.

Pink just tells him to get in.

Spread the word, man

Pickford’s party never happens.

The night does.

The word starts moving. One group tells another. Cars leave one place and turn up somewhere else.

The plan moves through town because the teenagers do.

Eventually, everybody finds the Moon Tower.

It takes half the night.

But that’s the point.

Sources

Universal Pictures, Dazed and Confused. Official film synopsis and release details. https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/dazed-and-confused

Dazed and Confused transcript. Used to verify the Moon Tower sequence and the lines “Party at the moon tower” and “Spread the word, man.” https://transcripts.simpleremix.com/script.php/dazed-and-confused-1993-Rkb

Pew Research Center, “Device Ownership by Teens Over Time.” Teen cell-phone ownership: 45% in 2004, 63% in 2006 and 71% in 2007. https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/device-ownership-by-teens-over-time/

Pew Research Center, “Teens and Mobile Phones,” 2010. By 2009, 75% of U.S. teens ages 12–17 owned a cell phone; Pew’s 2010 report found 54% of teens texted friends daily, more than the other daily communication methods it measured. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2010/04/20/teens-and-mobile-phones/

Monitoring the Future, University of Michigan, “About MTF.” The study began with nationally representative samples of high-school seniors in 1975. https://monitoringthefuture.org/about/

Sivak, Michael, and Brandon Schoettle. “Recent Decreases in the Proportion of Persons with a Driver’s License across All Age Groups.” University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Report UMTRI-2016-4, January 2016. Table 1 reports 46.2% of U.S. 16-year-olds licensed in 1983 and 24.5% in 2014; underlying data came from the Federal Highway Administration. https://public.websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2016-4.pdf

Borodovsky, Jacob T., et al. “U.S. Trends in Adolescent Substance Use and Conduct Problems and Their Relation to Trends in Unstructured In-Person Socializing With Peers.” Journal of Adolescent Health 69, no. 3 (2021): 432–439. Sample: 44,842 U.S. 12th graders from Monitoring the Future, 1999–2017. Unstructured in-person socializing declined by approximately 30%. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.12.144

Twenge, Jean M., Brian H. Spitzberg, and W. Keith Campbell. “Less in-person social interaction with peers among U.S. adolescents in the 21st century and links to loneliness.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 36, no. 6 (2019): 1892–1913. Nationally representative samples spanning 1976–2017; college-bound high-school seniors in 2016 spent about one hour less per day in face-to-face peer interaction than their counterparts in the late 1980s. The measured activities included riding in cars for fun. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519836170

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Population Affairs, “Social Development.” Supports the discussion of adolescent peer interaction, relationship skills and the role of nonverbal cues in face-to-face communication. https://opa.hhs.gov/adolescent-health/adolescent-development-explained/social-development

Scott, Riley A., Jaimee Stuart, and Bonnie L. Barber. “Young adults’ perceptions of their online versus offline interactions with close friends: An exploration of individual differences.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports 14 (2024): 100399. In a sample of 687 Australian young adults, participants high in social anxiety more often described feeling more confident, comfortable and open online than offline; the study does not establish that digital communication causes social anxiety. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100399