It would be easy to mistake SubUrbia (1996) for another Dazed And Confused (1993). Superficially, the plot of SubUrbia is about a group of recent high school graduates who begin to reevaluate their life choices when a friend who made good as a rock star returns to their small town. SubUrbia may reprise some of the themes of Dazed And Confused but it’s a much darker film with more political concerns.
Richard Linklater adapts Eric Bogosian’s stage play as a claustrophobic portrait of a group of friends. Linklater keeps the camera close to his subjects and blocks them so their backs are almost always against the wall. Their world feels so small and the pressure to “be something” is so great. This strategy mirrors Spike Lee’s strategy for escalating tensions in Do The Right Thing (1989) which Linklater takes advantage of during the climactic confrontation.
Beneath all of the teenaged angst and Gen X nihilism is a scathing portrait of systemic racism and misogyny in America. SubUrbia even opens with the theme song to the Kirk Douglas courtroom drama about war-rape, Town Without Pity (1961), suggesting what will come to pass when ultimately none of the characters in SubUrbia proves capable of challenging the social and political systems that have made them. SubUrbia reflects an unwillingness to willfully accept or challenge the status quo.
SubUrbia adopts the very chic attitude that the nineties were going to be the darkness before the dawn of the new millennium. Everything about the film, from its ensemble cast to the Sonic Youth song-track, encapsulates the zeitgeist of its moment perfectly. SubUrbia is at once a totally disposable and pretentious political statement while also being an indispensable document of a precise moment in time.
