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Description
A minute-by-minute analysis of Richard Linklater's 1993 film, Dazed and Confused.
Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.
This book uses a close study of Dazed and Confused to tell three interrelated stories of adolescent development: the filmmaker's, the film's characters, and the author's own. The film's unconventional approach to character and plot mirrors the author's own structureless and energetic childhood, while also having a profound impact on his artistic development, as the film revealed that bending traditional narrative rules could make a story feel more honest and precise. The film also marked a kind of artistic coming-of-age for Linklater himself, as he transitioned from his self-financed indie infancy into his first studio film.
The structure of Dazed and Confused mirrors the roving momentum of a youthful night, moving fluidly between characters, incidents, conversations, and what can only loosely be called “set pieces”, while never feeling aimless. Each moment moves the night forward, revealing more of our characters as we slowly form a sense of what the rest of their summer might look like, and how the rest of their lives might go (though we're also reminded there'll be surprises along the way). As these moments accumulate, viewers are invited to reflect on their own lives, their own friends, their own easy nights of highs and lows, boredom and elation, danger and congress. Adopting the formal conceit of the Timecodes series, this book accepts the film's invitation to live moment by moment, taking each discrete minute as an opportunity to reorient and explore new vantages on both the movie and the author's own life.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- PDF/UA-2, 1.4
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
Has alternative text descriptions for images
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
Table of Contents
Endnotes
Index
Product details
| Published | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 184 |
| ISBN | 9798765134702 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 13 bw illus |
| Series | Timecodes |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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A love letter to movies, memory, and the fleeting magic of youth, Winnette's writing drifts effortlessly between personal reflection and sharp-eyed film criticism. He's deeply attuned to the nature of time, how it stretches and slips away, how even the smallest moments can hold the weight of an entire life.
Melissa Maerz, Author of Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (2020), USA
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A tender and obsessive minute-by-minute analysis of Dazed and Confused that takes Linklater's film about not-entirely-feckless teenagers as seriously as it deserves. But, Colin Winnette does more than study the film. By folding in an anthropology of his own adolescence in small-town Texas, he shows how one beloved movie colors in the borders of growing up somewhere small-kids finding and making their own fun, slowly growing into who they'll be next.
Esmé Weijun Wang, NY Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), USA
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Like its subject, this astute, earnest analysis is continually in motion: oscillating among the perceptive synthesis of the (amateur) film scholar, the narrative acuity of the (seasoned) novelist, and the complex, often disarming nostalgia of the (lapsed) small-town Texan. A perfectly fruitful pairing of movie and mind.
Daniel Levin Becker, Critic, Editor, and Translator, USA, and author of What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language (2022)

























