PODCAST – Everybody Wants Some: Structure Without Structure – Part 1

This week we’re going to be looking at Richard Linklater's new film Everybody Wants Some. Richard Linklater has called this film a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. He has also referred to it as a sequel to Boyhood, his brilliantly structured (although very unusually structured) film, which basically ends right before this film begins: at the end of boyhood and the beginning of college.

Everybody Wants Some picks up the baton where Boyhood left off, and centers around a college baseball player who is just starting college, and the other guys on the team, in the days leading up to the first day of his freshman year. And though the main character may be different from the character in Boyhood, and while the structure may be entirely different than the structure of Boyhood, confined to a few days, rather than evolving over many years, Linklater is once again building a sprawling, multicharacter journey around young kid in a different kind of family, at defining point of discovering his identity and what gives meaning in his life.

But the question remains: is Everybody Wants Some actually a good movie?

Because Everybody Wants Some basically does nothing that a movie is supposed to do. It has virtually no plot; In fact most of the film is simply spent watching a bunch of bros hang out. It’s built mostly around dialogue, much like a play, rather than the action and images we’re used to seeing as the primary building blocks in movies. It kind-of has a discernible main character (it certainly seems to center around Jake( but the truth of the matter is, Jake doesn't really drive most of the action.

In fact, most of the structure isn't really driven at all in the way we traditionally expect, with one character chasing a particularly challenging goal against increasingly difficult obstacles. Instead, it's driven by random events like, “Let's go dancing,” “Let's go to baseball practice,” “Let's pick up some chicks.” Which feels a hell of a lot like the free-flowing structure of any respectable drunken freshman’s introduction to college, but not much like the version of that story we’re used to seeing in a movie.

The overall effect is that we’re watching (and for many people, enjoying) a film that seems to have very little structure at all. And this is not because Richard Linklater can't do structure. Because if you've seen Boyhood, you've seen a film that survives upon its rock solid structure as it jumps from year to year to year in a young boy’s life.

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