Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Loners, Stoners, Princesses, Cheerleaders, Geeks, Jocks and Dweebs

  Chapter 1: GROSS MISCONDUCT: Grossouts, Goofballs, Virgins, Vomit, Boners and Bikinis

  Chapter 2: DEAD TEENAGERS: Boogeymen, Bloodbaths, Slashers, Psychos and Screaming Coeds

  Chapter 3: “WHEN YOU GROW UP, YOUR HEART DIES.” The John Hughes Movies

  Chapter 4: TRUE ROMANCE: Love and Affection, Hopeless Devotion and Unrequited Infatuation

  Chapter 5: BRATS OUT OF HELL: The Rapid Rise and Long, Slow Fall of the Brat Pack

  Chapter 6: WIRED: Arcade Rats, Science Fair Freaks, Time Travelers, Hackers and Teenage Geniuses

  Chapter 7: BOYS TO MEN: Hoodlums, Heartthrobs, Yuppies, Preppies, Sportos and Streetfighters

  Chapter 8: GIRLS ON FILM: Heathers, Whores, Babysitters, Bitches, Sorority Sisters and Sluts

  Chapter 9: WE GOT THE BEAT: The Ultimate Eighties Teen Movie Mix Tape

  Chapter 10: THE NEXT GENERATION: Neurotics, Psychotics, Weirdos, Underachievers and Would-be Teen Idols

  Chapter 11: END OF AN ERA: Slackers, Students, Pre-teens, Post-twenties, Kids and Clueless

  Chapter 12: DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: Where Are They Now?

  Copyright

  To my parents

  SPECIAL THANKS: Heather Shroder, Biz Mitchell, Ross Jones, Todd Williams, Lori Majewski, and Shelley Bissessar.

  Introduction

  Loners, Stoners, Princesses, Cheerleaders, Geeks, Jocks and Dweebs

  “When the causes of the decline of Western civilization are finally writ, Hollywood will surely have to answer why it turned one of man’s most significant art forms over to the self-gratification of high schoolers.”

  —review of The Breakfast Club, Variety, February 13, 1985

  Somewhere in the middle of the nineties, we stopped castigating ourselves for the excesses of the previous decade. Hindsight removed the taint from the eighties. No longer were we doing extended penance for all those years of avarice. No longer did we have to share a guilty complicity for lolling back and allowing Reagan and Thatcher to feast like carrion on the flesh of the underclass. Somewhere in the middle of the nineties, it all became so clear; the shoulder pads, the flashy cars, the lurid colors—the eighties were the fifties, an AIDS-free adventure playground with the promise of prosperity around every corner. It seems, in retrospect, like our last age of innocence. Now the emotion we feel when we look back is less shame than a mingling of amusement, embarrassment and affection. But though benedictions have been bestowed on almost every eighties artifact, from the Trumps to the Thompson Twins, Dynasty to the DeLorean, one essential area has gone largely uncelebrated.

  Whenever a quorum of cineastes and semioticians gathers to discuss and dissect the great eras of moviemaking, the eighties rarely elicit celebratory cheers and group hugging. Rather, a mention of that decade tends to provoke the rolling up of sleeves and spitting on hands as a precursor to escorting those contentious years outside and pounding the living shit out of them. The eighties, goes the conventional wisdom, was the decade when Hollywood gave up any pretense of engaging the emotions and challenging the intellect, concentrating solely on meeting the demands of the marketplace. It was a time dedicated to catering to the basest whims. It was a time when substance abuse, sadism, promiscuity and voyeurism were promoted as desirable character attributes. It was a time when movies were made for kids, and dumb kids at that. Dumb, horny, crater-faced, metal-mouthed, 14-year-old boys who lurked around the multiplex or the video store or the rec room.

  Adolescent desires have been mirrored by the movies since the first flickering images were projected against a white sheet. The Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, tossed their ringlets and mouthed silent entreaties against cruel and monstrous antagonists back in the silent days. The Depression years were marginally enlivened by the spunk of miniature adults like Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Jackie Coogan and Freddie Barthlomew, as well as the rambunctious but ultimately redeemable ensembles of Dead End Kids, Bowery Boys, East Side Kids and Little Tough Guys. Throughout the forties and fifties, studio publicists utilized the million-selling screen fanzines to foist battalions of gleaming adolescent types on a swooning cinema-going public. Teenybop audiences wanted either to inhabit or violate the sweaters of Tuesday Weld, Piper Laurie, Sandra Dee, Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood. As the end credits rolled they knew they were going to end up either with or like a moody icon, a Dean, a Brando, a Clift—or a lightweight charmer, a Tony Curtis, a Tab Hunter, an Elvis or a Rock Hudson. By the sixties, teens were mainly represented by the squealing and snarling ciphers filling the beach romps and biker flicks churned out by indie titans like Roger Corman, Bert I. Gordon and Samuel Z. Arkoff. The period running from 1968 to 1976, low on teen movies, has been celebrated as one of the most fecund in American cinema history. It was a time when a handful of gifted visionaries stamped their signatures over a number of pictures that reflected the national mood. In films like M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Conversation, Last Tango in Paris, Joe, Carnal Knowledge, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Five Easy Pieces, Klute, Scenes from a Marriage, The Last Picture Show, and Taxi Driver, we sense the fear, paranoia, frustration and uncertainty of America post-JFK, post-Vietnam and post-Watergate. Those days of risk, individuality, art and responsibility disappeared down the gullet of a giant rubber shark. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws may have been as rich in character and narrative as it was in big, bone-crunching thrills but it can be held directly responsible for initiating the ritual of the Big Summer Movie and the demand for endless spectacle. In 1977, Star Wars’ intergalactic dogfights yanked a new generation of virgin cinemagoers away from TV screens and pinball arcades and into theaters. As the seventies trundled to a close, a process of natural selection was being performed on movie attendees of a certain age. Thrillride movies (Superman), grossout movies (National Lampoon’s Animal House, Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Caddyshack) and slashers (Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes) were beginning to proliferate, and adult audiences were beginning to microwave their own popcorn.

  Thus we arrive at the eighties, the decade when the teen movie comes into its own. This was the time when the spawn of the boomers had pockets bulging with pocket money, and they were happy to lavish that coinage on all manner of electronic babysitter, from Pac-man to Pong to Porky’s. Suddenly, adolescent spending power dictated that Hollywood direct all its energies to fleshing out the fantasies of our friend, Mr. Dumb Horny 14 Year Old, because he was the one demographic whose patronage could be relied upon to give a film a big opening weekend. (The luxury of hindsight allows us to savor the irony that the feted and fawned-over execs of the day, the Ovitzes and Eisners, were driven to Rolaids and relaxation courses by the caprices of teens flipping coins over which sex comedy or slasher on which to waste their money.) Soon, the multiplex played home to a white-bread world populated by an unruly mob of alienated outsiders, rich, privileged emotional cripples, horny high schoolers, computer whiz kids, loners, stoners, princesses, cheerleaders, geeks, jocks and dweebs, all of them demanding their due in terms of attention, respect and empathy.

  Where once movie teens railed passionately against an uncaring society, against the bomb, against the draft, against The Man, the new breed of fictional adolescents worked themselves into a fever over
not being popular. These teen tribe members were brought to life by a fresh-faced cabal of young actors marked out for greatness by their winsomeness, precocity and lineage. In this decade of divorce and dysfunction, adults became the enemy. If they weren’t entirely absent (how many hundreds of films used “my parents are away for the weekend” as a plot point?) they were stumbling prehistoric buffoons or corrupt intransigent fascists standing in the way of the hero or heroine achieving their desires. Said desires were almost always of a sexual nature, though the borrowing of a car or the search for a suitable prom partner were equally weighty issues.

  Interestingly, for a period characterized by the adoption of greed as a national pastime, conspicuous consumption does not play a huge part in the teen movies of the times. Risky Business aside, many of the eighties teen flicks expressed a yearning for a pluralistic schoolyard where wealth was no longer an impediment to the interaction of previously segregated social strata, where the jock could lie down with the geek and where the punkette could break bread with the princess. In fact, John Hughes, the writer-director-producer with whose name the eighties teen movie genre is most inextricably linked, spent most of his tenure among the lockers railing against cliques and caste systems. I can’t claim such lofty moral aspirations on the part of the decade’s standby subgenres, the T&A movie and the slasher. But, deadening as these breeds of movie can be—people getting laid and people getting killed for getting laid—they resonate in the minds of a generation as formative cinematic experiences.

  Not only did untold millions of adolescents come of age watching these films, but they got to relive and replay the fart gags, food fights and fumbling first times on innumerable occasions. Simultaneous with the spread of teen-aimed movies were the rise of home video and the saturation of cable (specifically MTV, which aired countless soundtrack hits whose videos were little more than trailers for the movies from whence they came). Which is to say, disposable as most of these films were intended to be, the shit never went away. Midway through the seventies, nobody, save for some shifty types, was searching the midnight movie circuit for old Annette Funicello beach films. A decade after its release, a piece of fluff like Just One of the Guys is still a cable staple, replayed enough for it to seem like a fondly recalled hit (which it wasn’t) and a valuable social document (which it certainly isn’t). Superior movies, like the Hughes cycle, have become enduring classics of their kind. After all, every year throws up a fresh batch of brats about to get laid, get drunk, crash daddy’s car and worry about the prom.

  So is this volume intended as a shameless, rose-colored wallow in nostalgia or a serious attempt to deconstruct an era in which the appetites of the marketplace resulted in an extended period of artistic bankruptcy? Absolutely the former. Though this is by no means an exhaustive collection—I fully expect to be waylaid in the streets by aggrieved completists haranguing me for omitting Hot Sluts or Pizza Dudes Vacation—I’m digging deep into the teen toilet bowl. I hope the calcified corpses I recover are wide-ranging enough to induce both smiles and winces of recognition. If the repressed memory of hours frittered away gawping at a Real Genius, a Last American Virgin, a Better Off Dead or a Hardbodies is sent simmering back to the surface after mention in these pages, well then, my mission is accomplished.

  The selection of teen movies churned out during the eighties was ample enough to include some of the crappiest pictures ever perpetrated—the work of filmmakers baffled by and contemptuous of their audience. But it also included some—The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Pretty in Pink, The Sure Thing and Heathers, to name a few—that were good enough to act as a beacon illuminating the whole fraught process of adolescence. At any point in our lives, the need to have our existence validated is always hovering over us, but during adolescence, the yearning is particularly acute. I’d like to believe that the better examples of the field helped to salve some of the anxieties of their audience, playing a part in reassuring them that not only might they emerge unscathed from the end of their sentence of teen servitude, but that these were times to cherish. That the best of these movies can transcend its genre I can attest, recalling emerging, moist and sniffling, from a screening of The Breakfast Club in my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland. I was touched. I was emotionally shaken. I was 24. Which sort of gives the lie to Ally Sheedy’s oft-quoted line, “When you grow up, your heart dies.” Or it means I never grew up, which is the downside of watching too many of these stupid movies.…

  1

  Gross Misconduct

  Grossouts, Goofballs, Virgins, Vomit, Boners and Bikinis

  If you remember the 1986 Alan Alda film Sweet Liberty for anything other than it being 107 minutes snatched cruelly out of your life, chances are you’ll remember it for the scene in which an unctuous director (played by Saul Rubinek) outlined his three laws of moviemaking in the eighties. To succeed in the current environment, he explained, a film must contain three crucial elements. It must feature 1) Property being destroyed, 2) Authority being defied, and 3) Someone being stripped naked. The listing of these tenets was intended as a jab at the prevailing climate wherein taste, irony, subtlety and Alan Alda movies were nearing extinction and bodily emissions were received by paying audiences as manna from on high.

  Whenever I peruse an op-ed piece by some concerned commentator expressing qualms about the pernicious influence of contemporary pop culture and labeling items like Dumb and Dumber and Beavis and Butt-head key culprits in the shaping of an even more brutal and stupid America, I find it hard to resist the urge to bawl: “Have a good snooze, Van Winkle?” Where was this hand-wringer a decade ago when movie screens were awash in rivers of regurgitation, when pee, snot and doody flowed freely and when decent upstanding citizens could, at any given moment, be caught whacking off in the can?

  Just as The Beatles had Motown and the girl groups on which to construct their foundations, so the teen movies of the eighties had Animal House and Caddyshack. From the former film came the irresponsible flinging around of food that millions of starving children could put to good use and the knowledge that one’s elders and betters existed to be mocked, humiliated and ultimately destroyed. From the latter came a floating chocolate log. From such heady influences came the ingredients for the species of movie comedy labeled by some Grossout, others Goofball and still others, Tits ’n’ Zits. The basic construct of this subgenre seemed to have been carved in stone: a group of young males—stud, sensitive, blimp, blustering but inexperienced foul mouth—in feverish pursuit of sex. While slews of semisoftcore films adhered rigidly to this blueprint, there were others that paid lip service to the concept of responsibility, attempting to teach life lessons along the way. Sometimes the sensitive guy would find true love and the stud would come to the rueful conclusion that hurried, heartless, empty animal intercourse is an unfulfilling experience. The fat guy and the buffoon learn nothing in any telling of the scenario. The examples we will relive in this chapter all received theatrical release, but the most appropriate environment to appreciate them was a darkened living room, decorated by the detritus of convenience food, in the company of mumbling drunks with hands shoved down their pants.

  As previously intimated, the shadows of Animal House and Caddyshack loom large over the eighties, but sizeable as their influence was, the form and function of the Grossout, the Goofball and the T ’n’ Z was defined by two pioneering teen comedies. These we shall salute in the following subsection.

  Original Sins

  Deep in the Florida Everglades lurks a ramshackle cat-house, a grime-caked white-trash sin bin, overseen by an irascible slagheap answering to the name of Mr. Porky.

  Porky’s (1981) was the Pulp Fiction of its day inasmuch as it altered the notion of what could be put onscreen in the name of entertainment, and its influence could be felt in lesser works for years to come. Facing what would seem to be insurmountable odds—low budget, no stars, Canadian origins and a collection of reviews that were less hostile than disbelieving—Porky’s made a
n unexpectedly big stink at the box office, providing the first slab of concrete evidence that the adolescent consumers of the eighties were dancing to the beat of a different drum. Ironically, this founding father of squalid sex comedies isn’t even based in the era for which it would write the rule book. Directed by Bob Clark, who also has a preteen classic to his name in A Christmas Story, Porky’s is set in 1954 in Angel Beach, South Florida, where a bunch of Neanderthal hose monkeys—Tommy the bête noire of gym mistress Miss Balbricker, Tim the raging anti-Semite, Mickey the redneck, Meat (“Why do they call you Meat?,” dimples an unsuspecting ingenue), Billy and the elfin comic relief Pee Wee—are foaming with testosterone. Desirous of release, they travel 70 miles away from the safety of their beach town to Porky’s shack of ill repute, where they are swiftly relieved of their cash and then their confidence. First, Porky has them dropped in the foul, croc-populated waters of the Everglades, then his brother, the sheriff, smashes their headlights and extracts a stinging fine. That may be the plot of the movie, but that’s not what it’s about.

  From its opening moments, focusing on the towering edifice that is Pee Wee’s morning wood (he injures himself rolling over to hide the beast from his mother who suddenly walks into the bedroom, then he whips out a growth chart and is crestfallen, certain that his endowment is shrinking), Porky’s either had you nailed to your seat snorting with amazed laughter or fumbling for your car keys. If you remained in a seated position you paid witness to the ground being broken in the Grossout Hall of Fame. How low could Porky’s go? In the first act, the ensemble’s smuggest pair of sadists, Billy and Tommy, play a ridiculously intricate prank on their compadres, luring them into the backwoods with arousing promises of the skilled ministrations of sex professional Cherry Forever. Seconds after the dupes have dropped trou for inspection by the wry hooker (to Pee Wee: “What do you use for a jockstrap? A peanut shell and a rubber band?”), they’re chased naked and screaming into the night by a cleaver-wielding black man splattered with what looks to be the blood of Billy and Tommy. Long after the two wags have fessed up to their complex scam, a screeching Pee Wee is still scampering in a pink and shriveled state down the highway till he’s pulled over by cops who smirkingly demand to see his driver’s license.