#62 ‘American Graffiti’
Cruisin’, Confusin’, and the Endless Adolescence of the American Male
American Graffiti (1973) is George Lucas’s nostalgia-soaked mixtape of a film, a love letter to the early ’60s—before Vietnam, before counterculture, before any self-awareness about how boring white teenage boys can be when given a full tank of gas and no emotional vocabulary. It’s all tailfins and Top 40, drive-ins and drag races, a time when men were boys and women were barely people. And we’re supposed to miss it.
Set over the course of one long night in Modesto, California, the film follows a gaggle of post-high school guys loitering on the edge of adulthood, unsure if they should go to college, stay home, or just keep circling the same damn diner until their egos expire from lack of attention. There’s Steve (Ron Howard), the golden boy with commitment issues. Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), the neurotic proto-Luke Skywalker looking for meaning in billboards and blonde phantoms. John (Paul Le Mat), the too-old-for-this drag racer with a jailbait passenger. And Toad (Charles Martin Smith), the designated nerd, comic relief, and avatar of every man who thinks a girl owes him a smile for existing.
Let’s be clear: the film looks great. It glows. The cars gleam, the soundtrack is wall-to-wall hits, and the pacing hums with late-night indecision. It captures a mood. But that mood is deeply male—mopey, self-important, and terminally unaware of how tiresome these dudes are when they’re not being propelled by teenage hormones and borrowed masculinity.
The women? Oh, honey. Laurie (Cindy Williams) exists to absorb Steve’s emotional flailing. Debbie (Candy Clark) is thrown at Toad like a consolation prize for surviving puberty. Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) is a literal child riding shotgun with a grown man—and the film treats their odd-couple energy as quirky, not queasy. And the mysterious blonde in the T-Bird? She’s not a woman. She’s a metaphor. Of course she is.
And what’s the film’s big message? That growing up is scary, that change is inevitable, that maybe the best nights are the ones where nothing really happens except a lot of insecure men projecting their crises onto everyone around them. At the end, we get a grim little epilogue telling us what happened to each character: one dies in Vietnam, one goes missing, one becomes an insurance agent—because nothing says “meaningful narrative arc” like reducing your characters to future tragedies in Helvetica.
Yes, American Graffiti is technically impressive. It helped launch the careers of several future stars. It invented the jukebox movie. It made cruising cinematic. But let’s not pretend it's deep. It’s a reverie for arrested development, a slow dance with male entitlement, and a reminder that the good old days were only good if you had a dick and a driver’s license.
3 out of 5 cheeseburgers in paradise
(One for the cinematography. One for the soundtrack. One for the way it captures the emptiness of small-town nights with eerie accuracy. The missing stars? Stuck in the backseat, wondering if anyone’s going to ask the girls what they want before the engine cuts out.)
