Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  Keith’s dad (John Ashton) discovers the college money gone and blows several gaskets. Keith was going to be the one in the family who had the chance to make something of himself. “I’m not gonna go to college,” bellows Keith, grabbing his moment. “You’re only eighteen,” wails dad. “Then I’m nineteen, then I’m twenty, when does my life belong to me?” He then explains his reasoning. “In the eyes of most people around here, I’m a nothing. I want to show this girl that I’m as good as anybody else.… Didn’t you ever have guys at your school that didn’t fit in?… Well, I’m one of those guys.”

  As the date begins with Keith showing up outside Amanda’s house in a chauffeur(Watts)-driven Jaguar, it looks like he’ll get his wish. But he can’t contain himself. He starts making bitter references to the fabulous uptown life she must be used to. She can’t believe what a passive-aggressive jerk he’s turned out to be and the date looks like a disaster. Watts, for her part, is openly hostile. “Break his heart,” she tells Amanda, “I break your face.” The father of Keith’s skinhead friend Duncan (Elias Koteas) is a security guard at a museum. This is their next stop. Walking through the deserted establishment is Keith’s chance to display his sensitive side. “This place is my church,” he intones piously. “I can come here and what anybody says about me doesn’t matter.” He leads her down a corridor at the end of which is Keith’s portrait of Amanda, rendered in the ever-popular fluffy-kittens-in-a-basket school of painting.

  Gearing up to deliver the coup de grâce, he takes her to the Hollywood Bowl, where they are to be the only occupants. She opens her heart to him. “I’d rather be next to somebody for the wrong reasons than alone for the right ones.” He loftily retorts, “I’d rather be right.” Righteously steamed, she hisses, “You hypocrite. What’s hanging in that museum? My soul? No, it’s my face. You’re using me to pay back every guy with more money and more power than you.” He gives her a pair of diamond earrings (having earlier discovered she’d borrowed her jewelry from the friends who subsequently froze her out), telling her, “It’s my future.… Every cent I’ve ever earned.” No pressure there. But his not-at-all unselfish act touches something deep inside her, showing her the path that now lies ahead of her. “I hate feeling ashamed, I hate where I’m from, I hate watching my friends get everything their hearts desire. I gave in to that hatred and I turned on what I believed in. I didn’t have to. You didn’t.” Rather than allow her this moment of epiphany, Keith intones pompously, “So you won’t do it again.” And then, with the enormity of the Hollywood Bowl looming in the background, their lips meet. Watts, her heart thumping beneath her stupid chauffeur’s uniform, watches from the cheap seats.

  But we’re not quite home yet. There’s still the question of Hardy’s party. The usual moronic romping of the upper-class is in full effect as the nervous couple strolls in. Hardy immediately goes in for the kill. “She’s deceptively innocent, isn’t she?” he leers to Keith. “Did she do you?…” Keith lunges at Hardy, who tells him, “She’s the trash, you’re just a fool.” He commands a suddenly gathered clutch of monied muscle to take Keith outside and break his artistic spirit. “Why don’t you take me outside,” says Keith, causing a flicker of confusion to ripple across Hardy’s chiseled face. Amanda puts herself between Hardy and Keith. “What do you want?” He sneers at her. “I want you to beg.” And just then, Duncan the skinhead arrives with his posse of psychos, streetfighters and gangbangers. The whole tone of the event changes. Hardy is a craven jelly, mumbling entreaties to Duncan to leave. Keith goes up to him, pauses for a second, preparing you for a punch to the jaw, a knee to the groin, even a killer headbutt. Instead, he mutters, “You’re over” and Hardy reels back as if he’d just received all three blows. Amanda goes up to him and slaps him two stinging swats. Ouch. Ouch. He tears up! Score one for moral superiority.

  Watts is forced to admit admiration for Amanda. “I’m sorry if I misjudged you.” She then walks off into the night. Amanda removes her diamond earrings, returning them to Keith. “I’d rather be right,” she says. “It’s gonna feel good to stand on my own.… In your heart, you wanted to give these to somebody else.” Keith finally gets it and goes after the wet-eyed Watts, scooping her up in his arms. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, a dumb guy to the end. “You never asked,” she retorts. He gives her the earrings and says, “You look good wearing my future.”

  Now there you’ve got an ending where poor boy gets poor girl, where the rich kid is crushed by the integrity of the underclass and where the object of desire turns out to have a strong spinal cord. I’m sorry, but Pretty in Pink kills this in every way. Maybe because he’d followed his characters almost up to college age, maybe because his dialogue was being delivered by an unattractively self-righteous lead character, but Some Kind of Wonderful marked the point where John Hughes’ fascination with adolescence hit a brick wall. The movie is far from devoid of highlights. Mary Stuart Masterson never puts a foot wrong (and Hughes resists repeating the Ally Sheedy Mistake by prettying her up) and Maddie Corman is a gas as Keith’s snarky sister who refers to her sib as “The human Tater Tot.” The picture just seems a little tired. The youthful naiveté was missing and the diamond earring motif was no substitute. It’s not hollow enough to stand as proof that, yes, “When you get old, your heart dies,” but Some Kind of Wonderful definitely marks the end of the innocence.

  4

  True Romance

  Love and Affection, Hopeless Devotion and Unrequited Infatuation

  You never thought it could happen to you. You—the rabid consumer of adolescent bacchanalia. You—the avid connoisseur of indiscriminate indulgence. You—the furtive video store habitué responsible for turning movies like First Turn On, Goin’ All the Way, H.O.T.S. and First Time into Kleenex classics of a different kind. What was it that made you change your ways? The sudden, shocked realization that you were an encrusted, engorged affront to decent society? A growing disaffection for panty raids and bestiality gags? Or an aching void within you, crying out for something more, something tender, warm and true? Meaningless sex you could get in any multiplex; you were looking for something that spoke to the shudder of vulnerability within you. You—praying for that special someone to look your way and then dying a thousand red-faced mumbling deaths when they do. You—stuck in suspended animation staring at the phone. You want movies as dumb as you are. But, outside of John Hughes’ jurisdiction, classic adolescent romances were less than plentiful in the eighties. What with the grossouts, the hack-’em-ups, the ensemble psychodramas and the deluge of other subgenres, there wasn’t much space for a couple of people to take the first tentative steps towards discovering each other.

  Anyway, most of the stars of the time were so obviously stuck on themselves, you couldn’t conceive of them fixating on another. What romantic movies there were usually fixated on the inflexibility of teen cliques and the havoc wreaked by peer pressure. Sift through the available selection of what’ll-my-cool-friends-think-if-I-go-out-with-a-freak-like-you movies and you come across two great young love stories. John Cusack stars in both of them. In adult life, Cusack’s been the choosiest of actors, his reputation growing as he refuses to acknowledge material with even the merest hint of fluff in its texture. I for one, however, would be elated if he deigned to participate, now and then, in a boy-meets-girl movie. After watching him in these two films, who in the diffident, vaguely troubled, wary, unreadable constituency among us could have failed to find solace in the thought, “If it can happen to him, it can happen to me…”

  * * *

  “How would you like to have a sexual encounter so intense it could conceivably change your political views?” The opening credits of The Sure Thing (1985)—a long, lingering study of honey-limbed Nicollette Sheridan rising like Venus from the Cali surf, lathering herself down with oil and luxuriating on the sand—reel in the viewer hungry for a towel-flicking feast of jiggling cheerleaders and orgiastic excess. Walter “Gib” Gibson’s aforementioned line in getting-ta-
know-ya repartee clinches the deal. Then Gib (John Cusack) strikes out, something he’s been doing with increasing regularity since the halcyon days of junior high. Director Rob Reiner makes clear his intentions very fast, this is something that looks like your run-of-the-mill teen sex comedy, sounds like your run-of-the-mill teen sex comedy but is actually … well, I think we all see where Rob’s going. Gib wants to be That Guy, that horny wise-ass from all the other movies, but he’s not. His friend Lance (Anthony Edwards) is That Guy, the guy with the beer in one hand and the babe in the other, and now that he’s about to relocate to college on the West Coast, he’s about to be That Guy squared. Gib, on the other hand, is going to school in New England. “The Ivy League stinks, man,” commiserates Lance. “All they got there is these ugly intellectual chicks with Band-Aids on their knees from playing the cello.” This turns out to be far from the case. Beer flows, bras snap open and booming systems blast Huey Lewis across the grounds. The good times are being had by all, except for Gib, who’s floundering in a sea of confusion and despair. He eats pizza out on a park bench while his fat roomie Jimbo makes the sheets sing. His only faint glimmer of hope comes from the prim allure of Alison Bradbury (Daphne Zuniga), a fellow student in the English class run by the loopy Mrs. Taub (Viveca Lindfors). Returning Gib and Alison’s respective essays, Taub makes the perceptive point that Gib is wild and uncoordinated while Alison is overly neat and arid. “Loosen up,” cackles the prof. “Sleep when you feel like it not when you think you should. Eat food that is bad for you, at least once in awhile. Have conversations with people whose clothes are not color-coordinated. Make love in a hammock.”

  Gib is playing football with some other students when Alison and a friend pass by. Watching him watch her, one of his teammates says, “The only way she’d go out with you is through pity.” Like so many of us who have taken similar sentiments to be words of encouragement, Gib follows her into the swimming pool, tells her he’s flunking English and asks for her help, throwing himself into the water to emphasize the gravity of his predicament. She eventually delves into her minutely detailed schedule to find a window for him. Gib enters her room to find her making mumbling noises of affection to her boyfriend, telling him that she also wants to see him in L.A. this Christmas, but doesn’t know how she’ll get there. Gib, at this stage unable to refrain from acting like a jerk at inopportune moments, treats the study period as a date. He persuades the protesting Alison to join him up on the library roof. His jerkiness momentarily evaporates as he gazes up at the star-filled sky and displays his interest in astronomy, a fascination he’s had since he was six. “You’ll never believe what I wanted to be when I was six,” says Alison, moved by Gib’s unexpected sweet side to talk to him like a real person. “I wanted to be a princess.” The sight of her, open and vulnerable in the moonlight, extinguishes Dr. Gib and brings Mr. Jerk scrambling back to the surface. He tries to kiss her, she shoves him away and he hits the ground hard. “Did I hurt you?” she inquires. When he gasps “No,” she kicks him in the ribs.

  Gib is spending another night eating pizza in the hall while Jimbo hits the skins inside. Then he gets a call from the L.A.-exiled Lance. In an act that defies the boundaries of friendship as we understand it, Lance demands that Gib Christmas with him in California. “There’s a certain someone I want you to meet.” Lance instructs Gib to retrieve the last postcard he sent. Gib finds himself staring at the pouting mouth and doe eyes of Nicollette Sheridan (her character remains nameless). “You’re not going to strike out.… She loves sex; she’s a sure thing, Gib. A sure thing. Now I don’t need to explain the deep significance of those words? I told her all about you, and she’s dying to meet you, but you’ve got to get your ass out here by the twenty-second ’cause she’s leaving the next day.” The breath needed to expel the word day has barely left Lance’s mouth before Gib has fixed himself up with a ride to Cali.

  He’s sharing the car with the happy couple of Mary Anne Webster (Lisa Jane Persky) and Gary Cooper—“But not the Gary Cooper that’s dead”—(Tim Robbins) and in the back seat … guess who? The frost between Gib and Alison hasn’t quite spread to the front seat. “You guys know any show tunes?” asks Gary before he and Mary Anne burst into “The Age of Aquarius.” Soon, though, the backseat duo’s constant bickering has their peppy hosts tight-lipped and downcast. Gib turns away from Alison’s wounding disapproval, lapsing into a fantasy of the experience awaiting him. Picturing himself in a Miami Vice–style spacious but spare beachfront property, the suave Virtual Gib mouths insincere compliments to his sure thing who silences his babble with the dream retort: “Gib … you want it, I want it. You know I want it. You don’t have to bullshit me to get it. And even if you do bullshit me, you’ll still get it.”

  This reverie is a far cry from Gib’s current reality. In a room at the Knotty Pine Motel, Gary and Mary Anne quiver in misery in their bed as Alison and Gib argue over their sleeping arrangements. She refuses to sleep in the same bed with him. He refuses to leave. She yanks the sheets from the bed, stomping off to sleep on the floor. This disagreement is a breeze compared to the next day’s twister. Back in the backseat, Gib’s mustering his entire arsenal of That Guy behavior. He’s a cheeseball-chomping, beer-shotgunning, belching disgrace. When a carful of similarly stupid travelers moons the Gary & Mary Anne–mobile, Gib emits whoops of pleasure. Alison is disgusted. Her disgust disgusts Gib. He labels her repressed, mocking her lack of spontaneity (“There’s a time and a place for spontaneity,” is her attempt at a defense) with such ferocity, that she is moved to tug off her bra and flash a truck driver. Moments later, Gary, as the owner of the vehicle, is being charged with indecent exposure and reckless driving. No longer in the mood for show tunes, Gary throws the bickering couples’ luggage out of the trunk and speeds off, leaving them stranded in the middle of nowhere.

  Communication irrevocably breaks down between the two. Unwilling to spend another second in his pork-rind munching presence, she jumps into the first truck to slow down for her. A matter of seconds elapse before she finds out that the annoying immature jerk she left behind is a paragon of virtue next to the seedy leering road rat with whom she’s just thrown in her lot. “Gets lonely on the road … you look nice,” he hisses, before lunging at the shrieking Alison. And just at that second, Gib leaps from the back of the truck where he was hiding, jumps into the front seat, spooks the driver with a boggle-eyed psycho act and drags Alison to safety. He starts to do an I-told-you-so number, castigating her for leaping into a strange vehicle, when she says, “You make it virtually impossible for anyone to be grateful for anything nice you might have done.” He acknowledges the insight. She asks why he got on the back of the truck. He shrugs. “I’m the kind of guy who likes to live on the edge.”

  Alison soon gets to use a variation on the same phrase when she decides to forego a bus journey to L.A. and accompany the suddenly penniless (too many pork rinds) Gib. They wind up in another hotel room and it’s a sign of the armistice between the once-warring pair that Alison now lets Gib teach her the rudiments of shotgunning a can of beer. Tying a towel carefully around her neck, he punctures the base of the can and holds it up to her mouth, she splutters and chokes, dropping the beer and convulsing in laughter and gasps. He offers encouragement and leans over her, wiping beer from her mouth. Their eyes meet in one of those smoldering revelatory stares. He breaks his gaze abruptly and she excuses herself. He goes into the bathroom where he overhears her talking to her boyfriend. This is a sharper dose of reality than a cold shower. Jerkiness rises up in him and he surprises Alison by stomping out of the hotel room in a bad mood, winding up in a cowboy bar where he gratefully succumbs to another fantasy. “Come on, Gib, one more time,” begs the sure thing. “It was so good … confident, creative. I was overwhelmed, you’re a true artist.” The interlude fades to be replaced by the company of a couple of lachrymose locals with whom Gib gets sauced. He staggers back to the hotel room and collapses on the bed. Where once Alison would have been r
evolted, now her face relaxes enough to let that tell-tale smile of tolerance play about her mouth, and like an angel of mercy, she arranges the sheets around him.

  The next morning, he’s desperate to get out of the hotel room, while she’s fussing around, sure she’s left something behind. Finally, succumbing to his impatience, she exits the room, leaving her wallet behind. The consequences of this are felt later that night when they sit by the roadside with Alison looking miserable and Gib whining incessantly. It starts to rain. They attempt refuge in a tin shack which quickly reveals itself to be roofless. Next door is a locked trailer. Alison produces a credit card from her bag. Gib says it’s not the right tool to pick this kind of lock. “I’ve got a credit card,” she yells, pointedly. Her words sink in. Gib is ecstatic. Then her face falls. “My dad told me specifically I can only use it in case of an emergency.” Gib nods. “Maybe one’ll come up.”

  Safely ensconced in a hotel, they wine and dine like a happy couple. She even advances him the money to buy her a rose from the waitress. In their room, sleeping in the same bed for the first time as a consensual experience with neither of them drunk, they’re giggly and tentative with each other. Gib asks about Jason, Alison’s straight-arrow boyfriend. “Does he make you laugh?” Alison considers her answer. “Jason … is everything a girl looks for in a guy.” She paints a pretty picture of their life together as partners in law living out in a renovated country house in Vermont, raising basset hounds. “I want to be nice and warm and cozy … kind of like this.” She sighs. “Guess that sounds kind of tame to you.” Gib may be lying next to this girl but he’s a million miles away from her. He’s simultaneously sure of two things: how much he wants her and how much he could never give her what she wants. “No,” he replies, “it sounds nice.”