That’s essentially the bullhorn of an introduction to Parker Posey’s character, Darla, in Richard Linklater’s 1993 hangout-movie masterpiece, Dazed And Confused—and likely the intro for most viewers at the time to the actor herself. (She made her film debut that year, also appearing in Coneheads two months earlier.) Wearing a rolled-up sweatshirt with “seniors” emblazoned on it and candy-stripe shorts, she completely takes over the scene, stomping across the parking lot like a sergeant and shouting at the incoming high schoolers insults like “little lazy bitches” and “you little slut girls, you little freshman sluts” as stoner Slater (Rory Cochrane), reluctant quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), and horny jock Don (Sasha Jenson) laugh in the background, watching this very dumb hazing ritual unfold.
Darla is basically the female version of O’Bannion (Ben Affleck) in the film, the bully who takes this Texas rites-of-passage stuff way too seriously and gets way too much pleasure from it. And like O’Bannion, who is doused with white paint outside the Emporium, she also has her pathetic fall from grace, drunkenly confronting incoming freshman Sabrina (Christin Hinojosa) during the kegger at the Moon Tower and making her peers roll their eyes. If this movie has villains, it’s those two seniors—and yeah, that guy Clint (Nicky Katt) who beats up Mike (Adam Goldberg) in Dazed’s biggest moment of humiliation. And if there are on-screen arrivals that made you do a double take on first viewing and go “who is that?”—the kind who, to this day, garner applause and hoots at midnight screenings—it’s those of Posey and Matthew McConaughey. To quote Ned Nederlander in The Three Amigos, they…“have got it.”
Now—that is, some thirty-plus years after Dazed—Posey’s character, Victoria, in season three of The White Lotus is not exactly a villain. Even in her own family, the Ratliffs, that distinction has to go to her walking frat lawsuit of a son, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), and financier husband, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), who as of episode four is facing prison time for, perhaps, screwing a whole lot of people out of a whole lot of money. (“And I only made $10 million out of your stupid fucking scheme?”) But she is a very particular, pill-popping, oblivious-as-a-defense-mechanism, and weirdly snobby (her crazy shunning of Leslie Bibb’s Kate, not to mention her recent obsession with “decent people”) brand of awful here. And it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate just how funny and scene stealing—but in a non showy way or one that disrupts the flow of a moment—Posey can be as an actor, a through line in her career that dates back to Dazed and all of the great work she did in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries.
Some have slighted this season of Mike White’s show as less impactful or pointed than previous ones, but any series that introduces a Lorazepam-sloshed and dumbly grinning old-money North Carolinian with the line “We flew over the North Pole” in that brilliant and thick Southern accent can’t be even remotely bad. It’s a treat just to see Posey do her thing on-screen each Sunday night. “I was also a Tar Heel,” she announces, referring to her embarrassed daughter, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), in that aforementioned intro. “But Timothy went to Duke, Saxon graduated Duke, and Lochlan, our youngest, just got accepted to both. So you can imagine, it’s a whole thing.” Watching the hotel’s general manager, Fabian (Christian Friedel, this season’s other comedic MVP), take this all in, confused, as Victoria wraps up as if it’s the most interesting anecdote is a joy to behold.
When the shit hits the fan for this family any minute now, it will be interesting to see how Victoria—and Parker—plays it. Will she still be saying “he’s so cute” about the least cute adult son ever? Or gushing that “everyone tells me what a great man you are” to her morally indecent husband? Or generally keep up that old-school boys-will-be-boys outlook, the one no doubt shared with Parker’s character in Dazed? With White’s knotty plotting and fake outs, it’s tough to tell. But Posey is having a moment now—and one of hopefully many to come. A week back, in a charming Today Show appearance, she chatted about, among other things, the 25th anniversary of Best In Show, in which she played half of a truly awful, oblivious, braces-wearing couple. And as for the actor’s much-deserved time in the spotlight right now, let’s quote Posey’s BIS character, Meg, on her and her husband’s lamest of meet-cutes: “It’s so good.”
