In
the last two editions of Better Late Than Never, Scott
beat himself up at length for having never seen Harold And Maude, and Kyle
calmly shrugged off having never seen Alien. I fall somewhere between the two
of them on the guilt scale over one of the most notable holes in my cinematic
vocabulary. Okay, 1982's Fast
Times At Ridgemont High is a generational signifier for people of my age. As a superior
teen sex comedy, one whose characters actually vaguely resemble teenagers as
seen in real life, it stood out amid other films of its type and its era. Its
hellish quotability ensures that it still comes up often, more than 25 years
after it was made. Thanks to the preponderance of beautiful naked breasts, it
seems to have permanently embedded itself in the psyches of nearly all the men
my age, who generally encountered it around the time that breasts became a
fairly significant obsession.
And
yet it's just another teen-sex comedy. How could I feel too guilty for having
missed out for so long?
My
big fear with Fast
Times was
that all the people telling me it was a great little film (which is what veterans
tend to call it, rather than "a stunning masterpiece") were mostly remembering
the boobs, and how they felt about watching the movie as horny teenagers. Sometimes, watching a film at the exact right time in your life
makes you love it because it caters to your needs so well that you feel like the filmmakers understand you and those like you in an insightful, personal way. You know, the way I felt
about the John Hughes oeuvre when I saw his films as a
lonely teenager. Which doesn't necessarily mean they actually hold up today worth a damn.
Fortunately, Fast
Times At Ridgemont High operates on more than one level; it wasn't just around to satisfy
the reflexive egos (and teen lust) of teenagers circa 1982. On a wandering,
satisfyingly personal commentary track that continues a full eight minutes past
the end of the movie, director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe
seemed to be addressing me personally as they talked about why their film might
appeal to people who've actually moved past the awkward-virgin stage of life.
As Heckerling points out, the kids in the film think they're adults. They're
trying to behave like it, with some limited success. Kids of the same age (in
the 14 to 18 range) can watch the film and appreciate characters who are just
like them, ready to be grown up, and therefore not acting like the spastic
idiots of so many teen comedies. Whereas older viewers can chuckle over those
characters, and their sweet but clumsy pretensions to adulthood.
That's
a pretty accurate summation of why Fast Times is still a lot of fun, even
to someone like me, who doesn't associate Phoebe Cates' bikini-removal scene
with her first sexual awakening. But Heckerling leaves out another factor: The
huge wave of nostalgia and recognition the film raises for people who were
around and aware during the '80s.
Fast
Times At Ridgemont High is a fairly shapeless film. As a young Rolling Stone reporter, Crowe (who went on
to write and direct Say
Anything…, Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky, and—ugh—Elizabethtown) went undercover as a
high-school student in California, and wrote his book Fast Times At
Ridgemont High
as reportage on his experiences. (I'm reading the book as soon as I can get my
hands on it, possibly for a future edition of Book Vs. Film.)
So the film is pretty light on plot; it's mostly a year-in-the-life collection
of scenes informed by Crowe's repeat high-school experience. To the degree that
there's a story, it's about Jennifer Jason Leigh as a 20-year-old playing a
15-year-old lying to older guys about being a 19-year-old:
Leigh
is a virgin, but she wants to drop that label—not with the needy,
squeamish franticness of her peers in American Pie or Superbad, but in a fairly practical,
goal-focused way. She blushingly practices oral-sex techniques on a carrot with
her friend Phoebe Cates in the cafeteria at school (earning applause from a
nearby table of guys), and worries about whether she'll be any good in the sack
once she gets started. Then she has sex, and decides that it hurts, but things
will get better. She has a similarly pained but philosophical reaction when her
deflowerer doesn't call her again: She gripes about it, then moves on. The film
isn't about great loves and corny romantic wish-fulfillment, it's about early
sexual experiences, and how they tend to be awkward and unsatisfying, yet
significant. Rather than pining over the guy who got away, she moves on to
pursing other dudes, including nerdy nice-guy Brian Backer and his
ticket-scalping slickster buddy Robert Romanus. (At least, he appears to be a
slickster by high-school standards, which is to say, he's marginally less
awkward than everyone else.) And all this happens very early in the film, with
minimal muss and fuss.
But
Leigh doesn't get much more screen time than the rest of the ensemble cast.
Judge Reinhold, as her older brother, anchors a plot about how early jobs suck
just as much as early sex. After getting fired from his sweet burger-flipping
gig for threatening to kick the ass of an obnoxious customer (swearing and threats of physical
violence, the customer tells the manager), he goes through a series of
increasingly demoralizing jobs. Meanwhile, Super-Serious Oscar-Winning Method
Actor Sean Penn buzzes through the film as its iconic character, surfer-stoner
Jeff Spicoli:
On
top of that, Forest Whitaker shows up as the school's football star, a grouchy,
threatening figure with a sweet car. And Nicolas Cage—under his sole
credit as Nicolas Coppola—shows up briefly among the generic faces in the
crowd. (The IMDB says he was originally cast in the Judge Reinhold role, but
was bumped because he played it too dark; Heckerling, in the commentary, adds
that he lied about his age to get into the movie, claiming he was 18 when he
was actually 17.) Watching Fast Times today is a lot like flipping through Hollywood's
junior-high yearbook, giggling at all the geeky photos showing younger versions
of familiar faces like Leigh, Penn, Whitaker, and Cage: Even the adult cast
members, including Vincent Schiavelli as the spacey biology teacher and Ray
Walston in a great role as a hard-ass history teacher, are fun to watch just
because they look so relatively young and fresh.
First-time
director Amy Heckerling (who went on to helm Clueless, the new I Could Never Be
Your Woman,
and—ugh—the first two Look Who's Talking movies) turns the film into a
yearbook in other ways, too. It's full of early-'80s signifiers: The video
arcades packed with Pac-Man and Galaga stand-ups, the legwarmers
the girls are wearing at the senior dance, the David Cassidy feathered hair on
most of the guys, the Rubik's Cube Schiavelli plays with in class, as all his
students take advantage of his obliviousness by cheating outrageously. The
cars, the clothes, the feathered hairclips half the girls are
wearing—they all bring up giggle-inducing memories.
And
then there's the music, which starts with The Go Go's singing "We Got The Beat"
over the title credits, and moves on through The Cars, Oingo Boingo, Don
Henley, and a title song by Sammy Hagar.
[pagebreak]
And
yet apart from Spicoli's occasional venture into slang (gnarly, dude!) the film
isn't packed with the kind of teen-speak period signifiers that would make it
hard to watch without wincing. There's nothing really spectacular about Fast Times as a movie that makes it
enduring, but it goes down easy compared to a lot of bygone of-the-moment
comedies; apart from the clothes and hair (which today read more as comedy than
anything else), it doesn't actually seem too dated. Maybe that's because it
addresses its subjects with a broad, universal affection, instead of leaning on
a bunch of jokes about events of the time.
(Okay,
some datedness does still creep into the movie, particularly in the very early
scene where two kids approach Romanus, looking for scalped Van Halen tickets.
When they ask for something in the first 10 rows, he says he'll hook them up
for $20 apiece. They protest that those tickets should only be $12.50. Ha ha
ha! All that's missing is the follow-up scene where they drive to the concert,
having gassed up their car for 50 cents a gallon.)
Anyway.
What struck me about Fast
Times At Ridgemont High is how remarkable it is these days to go back and watch a
pre-Adam Sandler, pre-Farrelly brothers, pre-humiliation-comedy teen film.
There are embarrassing moments in Fast Times, but they aren't drawn out
at length; when Backer goes on a date and realizes in the restaurant that he
forgot his wallet, he squirms a lot, but Romanus shows up to rescue him, and he
gets away without exposing his error to his date. A car accident (leading to
one of the film's classic exchanges, ending with the line "First he's gonna
shit, then he's gonna kill us!") seems
to put a couple of characters in an ugly situation, but they deal with the
problem cleverly and quickly. When Phoebe Cates walks in on Judge Reinhold
masturbating in the bathroom, they're both horrified, but the moment passes
quickly.
Compare
any of this to the grinding series of vicious gags from, say, pretty much any
Ben Stiller movie post-Flirting
With Disaster,
and Fast
Times starts
looking like a tame jokefest even grandma can enjoy. There's no crotch damage,
no humorously dead animals, no pie-fucking, and no menstrual-blood-on-the-pants
jokes, either. At its most graphic, it's got a little good-natured pot humor.
'Course,
Grandma might be kind of shocked at all the nudity. Leigh gets topless a couple
of times when she gets her groove on with her non-groovy lovers, and Cates
spends that lovingly shot poolside scene in a hot little red bikini, before
peeling her top off in Reinhold's masturbation fantasy. (Keith claims that
video-store owners in the '80s were complaining that their tapes of Fast Times would come back with that
sequence almost unplayable, because it had been rewound and rewatched so many
times that the videotape had been worn down to nothing. Heckerling, meanwhile,
says that the film was considered so raunchy at the time that it originally got
an X rating, and was considered all but unmarketable until some of Leigh's scenes
were cut.)
But
one of the many charming things about the film is that these scenes aren't
really played for the exploitation factor. Leigh gets naked like it's natural,
not naughty; she's clearly focusing on her character, on the moment, and on her
sex partners, not on the audience. (She'd get plenty more practice in the years
to come.) Cates, meanwhile, is clearly playing to the audience and handing them
a big come-on, but it's funny and innocent rather than raunchy. The same could
be said of the sex plots in general; considering when the film was made, it's
downright charming to see female characters who want sex for its own sake, who
aren't using it as a weapon, who aren't ashamed or hesitant or mercenary or
portrayed as sluts, and who don't get punished for wanting pleasure. It all
feels pretty enlightened. Leigh does briefly deal with the repercussions of
unprotected sex, but that subplot is refreshingly brief and undamaging; it's
mostly there to show what a selfish twit her last partner was.
In
fact, all of Fast
Times'
twists are pretty benign. Penn feuds with mean ol' Walston, ordering pizza
during class, walking in late with a bagel crammed into his pants, and engaging
in other minor shenanigans, and Walston keeps trying to take him down a peg.
But where most campus comedies would end with a decisive, triumphant victory
for one side or the other, with Walston pushed into a pool or otherwise
publicly deflated, or with Penn expelled and headed on to a crappy life, but
maybe still getting laid in order to end the movie on an upbeat note, Fast Times eventually shows that
they're both fairly reasonable people whose goals just don't happen to
coincide. Neither one's a villain—the film entirely lacks any such thing.
It's just pure, lighthearted, relatively respectful fun. With boobs.
So
what next? Maybe having enjoyed this particular bit of '80s sextalgia, I should
move on to the other "classic" sex comedies I haven't seen, like Porky's and Meatballs. Though honestly, watching
Mr. Method play a slovenly cutup mostly made me want to revisit the Bill And Ted movies, and remember when
Keanu Reeves was briefly a comedic actor too. Those were the days.