Fast Times at Ridgemont High

[osprey_archer]

For a long time, I thought I hated teen movies. But after To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before stole my heart, I reconsidered this statement and decided that I only hated teen movies from the 80s.

But earlier this week I watched Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgmont High and have decided that, in fact, it’s not teen movies from the eighties that I hate, either. It’s John Hughes movies. Well, maybe with the partial exception of Pretty in Pink. But for the most part: John Hughes movies. Ugh.

(Side note: Molly Ringwald wrote a thoughtful article about her work with John Hughes in the New Yorker.)

Fast Times at Ridgmont High is an ensemble movie loosely centered around Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy, a high school freshman anxious to be rid of her virginity. (Sean Penn’s stoner Jeff Spicoli is the one on the movie’s cover and apparently the one everyone loves, but honestly he’s nearly extraneous to the movie, barely connected to the other characters, and deeply annoying. I personally cheered every time his cranky take-no-prisoners history teacher out-maneuvered him. Give Spicoli’s pizza to the other students, Mr. Hand! Do it!)

Stacy duly loses her virginity to a guy who soon disappears, which bums her out - until Mark Ratner, her crushingly shy classmate from biology who has been trying to work up the nerve to speak to her all term, manages to ask her out.

And it’s all handled so matter-of-factly - by the film itself, not always the characters, who feel every agony of things like awkward first dates. Women have sex and then get over the guy! Women have abortions without suffering great angst. Women are friends with each other and manage to remain friends for an entire movie without falling in love with the same man and ruining their friendship over him.

In fact, in this movie it’s two guys who fall for the same woman and have a big friendship-ending (at least for a few months) fight over her. I read somewhere that Heckerling wanted to try to balance out all the naked women in Hollywood movies by throwing some naked men on screen, and she doesn’t get to do very much of that here, but in other ways she subverted quite a lot of Hollywood tropes in this movie and I hope she looks back on it with pride.

Also, I am 100% into the part where Linda paints “LITTLE PRICK” on Mike Damone’s car and locker after he impregnates Stacy, and then promises to drive her to the abortion clinic - and then fails to show up. Fuck you, Mike Damone!

But at the same time, the movie treats Mike as a human being who made a terrible mistake rather than an irredeemable villain, and I liked that too. All the characters in this film are very human, and fallible, and the film is honest about them and the faces they try to present to the world and their vulnerability underneath, and that is a rare and precious thing in any movie, and especially one about teens.

Comments

[kore]

I've always liked this movie without really knowing why, but you really put it into words. I forgot Cameron Crowe wrote it (based on his BOOK?). I saw it as a teenager and remember being impressed that she got an abortion and it wasn't presented as a huge terrible trauma (let alone that she didn't die).

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, I like how the film is so matter-of-fact about the abortion, and about Stacy's sex life generally. She wants to have sex, and - it's not that she doesn't care who she has sex with - but she doesn't care whether the guy she's having sex with is The One. She just wants to like him and be attracted to him and she's not angsting about how she threw away her virginity on someone who's not her True Love.

[kore]

And at the same time it doesn't have the combined gross sniggering/really questionable elements/the rosy HEA stuff Hughes movies do (Sixteen Candles has both, with the panties scene, Jake's girlfriend being raped by the male virgin hero, and the candlelit ending with Jake and Sam).

Not to be a super downer but someone just linked me to this article on the "Original Six," six women directors in Hollywood who sued the industry over sexism https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-original-six-and-history-hollywood-sexism

[osprey_archer]

Sixteen Candles is so baffling to me. Why on earth would I root for Jake and Sam to get together after he turns his girlfriend over to the creepy male virgin? If this is Jake's understanding of consent, then Sam is not going to be safe with him and I don't want them together.

Also IIRC the male virgin ends up getting so drunk that he also doesn't remember whether he and the girl had sex, which is just the nonconsensual cherry on top of the rape sundae.

That's a good article! I'll have to include a link in the next entry where it seems like it would fit.

[kore]

Why on earth would I root for Jake and Sam to get together after he turns his girlfriend over to the creepy male virgin? If this is Jake's understanding of consent, then Sam is not going to be safe with him and I don't want them together.

SERIOUSLY. Also he has no personality. It's like the "happy ending" to Pretty In Pink, where Duckie is like "Go after him!" and I'm just like WHYYYY.

Also IIRC the male virgin ends up getting so drunk that he also doesn't remember whether he and the girl had sex, which is just the nonconsensual cherry on top of the rape sundae.

LOVELY. Rape jokes: they're hilarious! There are so many rape jokes in 80s movies. So many. In TEEN 80s movies. W.T.F.

That's a good article! I'll have to include a link in the next entry where it seems like it would fit.

I dropped the link because it reminded me of your project to watch movies by women directors, and there was a line that haunted me -- "the system failed an entire generation of women who wanted to work" -- and it reminded me of that criticism of #metoo, "But what about these male geniuses who will be SILENCED because of" blah blah, and someone turning that around -- what about all the women directors and actresses and producers and editors who were silenced, who were traumatized and dropped out, or who had their careers blocked, or who were just never given a chance at the damn job? It's hard enough to 'rediscover' women artists who did write scripts and direct and edit and whatever, because they don't win the awards and they're not in the textbooks and they get no PR while writers churn out yet another Thinkpiece on Lars von Trier. But the loss goes even deeper than that, it's all the art that wasn't made. What would the culture look like now if it had been? What would we be like? What might be different?

ANYWAY, RAPE JOKES LOL, amirite.

[osprey_archer]

I found Duckie so off-putting in Pretty in Pink that I cheered when he told Andie to go after Blane. Sure, Blane might be a pretty boy with little discernible personality beyond "smiles goofily at Andie a lot," but at least unlike Duckie he never acts like Andie owes it to him to fall in love with him. Let it go, Duckie.

I'm starting to think that genius is - perhaps not entirely a myth, then at least vastly overrated, in a way that plays up the innate talent of the artist while ignoring the structure that makes it easier for some people to make art than others.

But in fact, talent is pretty common. I realized this while reading Soviet history, where you have Stalin systematically mowing down whole generations of artists & scientists & high-ranking military officers... only for a new crop to spring up almost instantly when needed. Talent is thick on the ground. It is everywhere. Humans are positively overflowing with talent, and the thing that separates most so-called geniuses from the rest of the pack isn't that they have more, it's that they have funding to make their movies and ad campaigns and wide releases that ensure that people see them.

(There are probably individual cases where you could argue that a specific individual is genuinely So Good and Innovative that there's more than just talent going on. I don't think that, say, Roman Polanski falls in this category.)

This is all a very long-winded way to agree with your comment. If these male geniuses are silenced by #MeToo, so what? The formulation makes it sound like they are giving us something so much better than anyone else could make that it is irreplaceable (and therefore we just have to put up with their inconvenient habit of raping people), but no. They really aren't.

[kore]

The 'But What About the Geniuses' "argument" (#notallgeniuses?) always reminds me of Orwell's "If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear." But Orwell betrays his fundamental decency, as modern society is apparently prepared to say GO AHEAD RAPE AWAY.