Filmmakers have long been drawn to “the Texan” as a character type. Our series Playing Texan revisits some of the most notable of these portrayals, from the legendary to the ludicrous, to determine what they say about how the world sees Texas—and how we see ourselves.

Another Texas summer has sprung and—to butcher Alfred, Lord Tennyson—a young person’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of getting the hell out of here. Or maybe it’s not just the young. Come next May, I will have been out of high school for thirty years, yet every June I feel the same stirring to light out for the hills and start truly living, something I doubt would go over too well with my wife and kids. 

There are several explanations for this impulse, not least of them the weather. But in my case, I suspect it’s also that I grew up watching too many Texas movies that were set in and around the last day of school. The Last Picture Show, Fandango, Reality Bites, Varsity Blues, and Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Suburbia, and Dazed and Confused: the history of Texas film is disproportionately rich with stories of young Texans who suddenly find themselves at the crossroads of adulthood, left to ponder their uncertain futures against our state’s impassive and abiding terrain. Some of these films take place in backward small towns, others in the urban sprawls of Austin and Houston. But for the most part, the characters within them all tend to conclude that to truly come of age in Texas means ultimately deciding whether to leave it.

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 isn’t as well-known as films such as Dazed and Confused or The Last Picture Show. It’s not nearly as good either—and more on that in a minute. But it is arguably the film that deals most directly with this commonly Texan rite of passage. The 1998 comedy, shot entirely in Fort Davis, takes place in a fictional West Texas town that’s just outside of Alpine, inside the real Brewster County—that “big, blank area east of El Paso,” as Breckin Meyer’s Keller puts it in the opening monologue. Keller and his friends Terrell Lee (Peter Facinelli), John (Eddie Mills), and Squirrel (Ethan Embry) have all grown up together here, a quaint little void where you have to drive a hundred miles just to buy a six-pack of beer. 

On the weekend of their high school graduation—where their group makes up four fifths of the senior class—it’s finally time for Keller and friends to put up or shut up on the pact they all made years ago to hop on the Monday morning bus to Los Angeles. As Keller tries to dissuade his buddies from chickening out, some of the older townsfolk start placing bets on whether they’ll go through with it. (“Talking about leaving is one thing,” one of the elders tells them sagely. “But actually picking up and taking off, well, that’s something else.”) These men fill the kids’ heads with horror stories about all the earthquakes, riots, and lingering Manson Family members awaiting them in the big city. But it’s not so much the fear of where they’re headed that causes Keller’s friends to have second thoughts. It’s their worries over what they’d be leaving behind. 

All of them have some pressing reason to stay in Dancer. Terrell Lee stands to inherit the family oil business. John and his father tend to their struggling ranch. Squirrel frets about abandoning his own dad, a drunk who spends his days sleeping off hangovers in their still-unleveled trailer. Likewise, Keller is the only one left to look after his ailing grandfather—although there are plenty of widows, swarming with their tuna casseroles and Jell-O molds, eager to take his place. 

Like all good Texas coming-of-age stories, Dancer, Texas touches on the eternal clash between tradition and modernity, between the gravitational pull of family and the chance for self-determination and adventure. But mostly, the film’s main characters aren’t sure they’d be any better off in L.A.— especially considering that all of Keller’s grand plans seem to end with them getting jobs as waiters or bartenders, then just sort of figuring out the rest. Even Keller doesn’t know what he really wants. “All I know is it’s not here,” he shrugs.

Dramatically it’s unsatisfying, although it rings true: in films like this, the characters are often defined by the lives they don’t want, rather than some particular ambition that can’t be realized here. But Dancer, Texas suffers a bit from its own indeterminateness. Its characters feel sketchily realized; despite some nods to the declines of oil and cattle that loom in the margins, its stakes feel sitcom-light. In one key scene, all four boys admit that they probably wouldn’t even be friends had they grown up anywhere else, and it remains equally unclear to the audience what these guys even share besides a zip code, or what they might lose if they were to go their separate ways. (It probably doesn’t help that they all look like they just finished a photo shoot for Abercrombie and Fitch, rather than having spent eighteen years baking under the West Texas sun.) 

Although Dancer, Texas benefits greatly from its Fort Davis setting, drawing heavily on those rust-red mountains and scrubby desert plains to create a sharp sense of place, the people within it rarely come into focus. With the exception of Patricia Wettig, radiating crisp, white-linen Southerness as Terrell Lee’s pushy mom, the film’s women are all ciphers who exist solely to dote on the menfolk—sunny church ladies and saintly Waffle House servers who pop in as needed to stuff the boys with catfish and pep talks. All of the elder men are interchangeable rancher types, there to offer terse, folksy platitudes about the values of hard work, simple living, and a good, comfy chair. “Could any American town, no matter how tiny and tucked away in the heartland, be as wholesomely Waltonesque?” the New York Times asked of Dancer in its review. 

This lack of any real conflict or complexity is ultimately what holds Dancer, Texas back from being included in that canon of great Texas films, even if it is among the few that’s explicitly about the Texas experience. It was written and directed by Tim McCanlies, a Texas native who based the script on his own high school years in Bryan, as well as the conversations he’d had with his own friends about leaving the state. But you could also say it was inspired by spite: In Alison Macor’s Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas, McCanlies explains how he wrote the script out of frustration with his stagnating career at Disney, where he had been forced to choose his next job from a handful of dead-end projects that included another Ernest sequel. McCanlies rebelled by filling the screenplay with all of the things that were strictly forbidden by Disney’s regime at the time, i.e., “Nothing rural. No dust. No saddles.” 

The result is a movie that veers between moments of closely observed naturalism, much of it drawn from the Fort Davis locals who fill out the cast, and overwrought beer-commercial montages of Texana, like when the boys pause to watch a herd of wild Mustangs cavorting through a stream. McCanlies clearly knows the state; surely only a local would get such a kick out of dropping so many references to Alpine’s Sul Ross State University and its “real good meat program.” But the Texas that the film inhabits still feels a touch too romanticized to be real, reduced to a dreamy, idealized version of rural life that’s just as hazily formed as the “anywhere else” that Los Angeles represents for its characters.

Watching Dancer, Texas again recently, I found myself thinking of another work of West Texas art, the desk on Hancock Hill, which overlooks that same big, blank space just outside of Alpine. I’ve never seen the desk myself (I’m what you might call “hiking averse”), although I did read Sterry Butcher’s evocative portrait of it for Texas Monthly some years back, and I will count that as close enough. Besides, I don’t have to slog across a mile of rock and cacti to appreciate why the desk continues to draw visitors more adventurous than me year after year, or why those pilgrims feel compelled by the majesty of their surroundings to fill the notebooks that are stuffed inside the desk’s drawers with their personal musings. Butcher explains it all quite well in her piece, asking (more or less rhetorically) why the desk seems to invite such a profound experience: “Is it because when faced with that outrageous sky, the sotol and prickly pear and grassland far below, people inherently turn to thinking about the vast questions in their own lives?” 

It’s the same impulse that drives filmmakers to keep setting movies like Dancer, Texas here. We certainly don’t hold the patent on stories about the young and the restless, a subject that is as universal as the very existence of small towns, and one endlessly renewed with each successive generation of bored-to-tears teenagers. Still, these coming-of-age stories gain a certain mythic sweep whenever they are juxtaposed against that grand Texas firmament, enough that they nearly constitute their own genre. Maybe this is just the natural evolution of all our beloved cowboy odysseys, from The Searchers to Lonesome Dove, about Texans who choose to wander endlessly between the winds rather than ever get too comfortable.

Whatever the reason, the preponderance of these kinds of movies suggests that there is something about growing up in Texas, surrounded by these great expanses of everything and nothing, that nurtures some special yearning inside. Get to the right vantage point in Texas and it feels like the whole wide world has been laid out before you; inevitably you start to think about where you fit into it. That story’s not exactly unique, nor is it always compelling. But for so many of us, it’s one we never stop telling ourselves.