Falling into a final sure-thing fantasy, Gib wanders through the beach house looking for the hot body that’s all his. He wanders into the bathroom, spotting a familiar shape in the shower stall. He opens the door and is greeted by Alison’s smile. He wakes up to find himself cradling her in his arms. She also wakes and he pulls away quickly, flustered. “You were on my side of the bed, nothing happened.” A big 18-wheeler is their transportation for the last leg of the journey. While Alison dozes in the back of the truck, the driver asks Gib what’s in California. Gib tells the trucker about his sure thing. The vehicle goes over a bump in the road and Alison overhears the trucker repeating in awe the information Gib provided, that he’s traveled 3000 miles to sleep with a girl he’s never met. “A no questions asked, no strings attached, no guilt involved … a sure thing.” While the trucker is inspired enough by this news to put the hammer down, Alison is hurt and disgusted. When the big rig drops them off, she’s cold as ice to him, bitterly repeating the “no questions asked, no strings attached, no guilt involved” mantra and hurling her rose back at him.
But even though they’re no longer together, each feels the presence of the other in uncomfortable ways. When Alison enters Jason’s neat-as-a-pin dorm room, she’s immediately aware of how unexciting he is. For Gib’s part, meeting Lance at a babe-filled campus party, once the stuff of his desolate dreams, now fills him with wariness and reserve. “Tonight’s the first night of the rest of your sex life, Walter Gibson,” Lance proclaims. “I’m almost nineteen,” Gib bawls back, “maybe I’m getting too old for this.” Lance is aghast. “What do you want, a goddamn relationship? Every relationship starts with a one-night stand.” Meanwhile, Jason is uncomfortable with the preppie in his room who looks like Alison but is shotgunning beer and belching with delight. He’s convinced she’s been replaced by a doppelganger when Alison hears the sounds of distant revelers and begs Jason to go to the party. “Let’s do something pointless, something totally crazy,” she says, echoing a Giblike rant.
The fantasy of the sure thing is now made flesh and Gib is treating her like his maiden aunt, smiling and polite but openly uncomfortable. Then Alison and Jason arrive. Gib comes over all studly, dragging the sarong-clad Sheridan onto the dance floor. Alison throws herself at the bewildered Jason. After a quick spat by the punchbowl, they drag their partners in opposite directions. “Jason, let’s go to bed,” yells Alison. “Careful, Jason, she hogs all the blankets,” Gib taunts. “Well, you snore,” she calls back shrilly. “Not tonight I won’t,” he sneers. As they leave the party, Alison is vibrating with fury. “He doesn’t even know that girl!” Alone with that girl he doesn’t even know, Gib is suddenly subdued. Undeterred by his fluctuating moods, the sure thing reaches for him. Jason asks Alison if she’s made love with Gib. She assures him nothing could be further from the truth. “Do you love him?” he asks. This time, she’s not so quick to reply.
The next time the two meet is in the first English class of the new semester. Alison cuts Gib dead. Mrs. Taub, however, is transported by an exceptional essay from an unexpected source. She begins to read from “The Sure Thing” by Walter Gibson. “All his young life he had dreamed of a girl like this, five foot six, long silky hair, trim nubile body … that really knew how to move…” The male component of the class begins to bark and whoop. Alison shakes her head in revulsion. “From across the room he saw her. It was perfect. He knew almost nothing about her, and she didn’t know much more about him. It was exactly how it was supposed to be … he brought her to his room … she leaned over, and whispered in his ear ‘do you love me?’ Thoughts raced through his mind … ‘do you love me?’” Gib looks at Alison, she doesn’t know what to think. “He knew that she really needed to hear it, but for the first time in his life he knew that these were no longer just words and if he said it, it would be a lie … ‘do you love me?’ she whispered … the answer was no.” The class erupts in jeers and derision. Alison turns to Gib. “You didn’t sleep with her?” Gib faces her. “Still seeing Jason?” She says, “We broke up … you didn’t sleep with her.” And then they kiss on the library roof with the stars shining down on them.
Countless crimes have been committed in the name of unresolved sexual tension. Too many spats between ice-packed princesses and sweaty, bulging punks have ended up as malicious exercises in making the rich girl crawl. The speed with which Gib labels Alison repressed signals a spot of pedestal-toppling in her future. But The Sure Thing flies in the face of teen sex romp conventions. Gib’s no horny dog. Alison’s no prig. At least not after they’ve spent a little time with their defenses down. Then they’re each other’s missing pieces, a movie couple you can imagine having a life after the end credits. Though maybe a little unfeeling in the way it casts off the dead skin of Gib and Alison’s former partners, this is a film with a lot of heart. Reacting against what she probably predicted as a lifetime’s worth of nice-girl roles looming ahead of her, one of Daphne Zuniga’s next public outings was as a Mexican hooker in the movie Last Rites. The sight of her simulating anal ecstasy as the opening titles played was enough to make you forget how much she adored Old English sheepdogs. As previously stated, John Cusack, in his life as a man, would give a wide berth to any project of a romantic nature, but he saw out the eighties with a captivating performance in a work of enduring sensitivity.…
* * *
“I’m going to take out Diane Court” are the first words out of Lloyd Dobler’s mouth in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything (1989), a movie which manages to be entirely affecting and entertaining at the same time as hitting heights of parent-bashing from which John Hughes would recoil in shocked horror. Crowe’s Lloyd, though, is no Hughes hero hiding his hurt under hipster posturing, warding off rejection with his snappy vocabulary. He’s a tall, pale, vulnerable but defiantly optimistic kick boxer. He once sat across from Diane Court at a mall, and now on the eve of graduation, the only thing in his life of which he has any certainty is that he wants to take her out. His best friends Corey (Lili Taylor) and D.C. (Amy Reiner) overflow with reasons why this will not happen. “Diane Court doesn’t go out with guys like you … she’s a brain … trapped in the body of a game show hostess.… Brains stay with brains. The bomb could go off and their mutant genes would form the same cliques.… You’re a really nice guy and we don’t want to see you get hurt.” “I want to get hurt!” declares Lloyd.
“I have glimpsed our future and all I can say is go back!” This is the lovely, gifted and brilliant Diane Court (Ione Skye) rehearsing her valedictorian address in front of her father Jim (raspmaster John Mahoney) who creases with laughter. All that beauty, all those brains, and she’s funny, too. But he’s not just her devoted dad, he’s her friend. They can tell each other anything, that’s the nature of the relationship. “History, oceanography, creative writing, biochemistry.… We’re going to remember this student who said ‘Hey world, check me out!’” That’s how Diane Court is introduced to her fellow graduates of Seattle’s Lakeside High School, most of whom regard her as an alien being. Her big laugh line bombs but she presses ahead with her speech: “I have all the hope and ambition in the world, but when I think about the future the truth is, I am really scared.”
Her fears seem unwarranted. Jim Court tolerantly takes a message from Lloyd, figuring him for just another schmo, unworthy of his daughter’s attentions. The next message knocks him off his feet. Jumping in his car (and warbling tunelessly but exuberantly along with “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number”), he drives to the nursing home he runs. Practically levitating with pride, he informs Diane that she’s won the coveted scholarship, the Reid Fellowship; she’ll be studying in England. She slumps to the ground in disbelief. “You stand up straight and admit you’re special,” demands Jim. “You’re the best in the country.… One brilliant person who is so special they celebrate you on two continents.”
Even though she has no idea who he is, the courteous Diane returns Lloyd’s call. He wades through some small talk before taking th
e plunge and asking her to a postgraduation party. She blows him off, saying she’s busy. “So you’re … monumentally busy?” he asks, and this unexpected retort amuses her and holds her attention. Lloyd, a nervous talker who becomes increasingly whimsical the more he’s forced to improvise, promises to give her tips, many tips, important tips on living in England (an Army brat, he was there for two months). Surprising herself, she agrees to go with him, then reaches for the yearbook to check that she hasn’t committed to being seen with a pock-marked buffoon.
Jim Court, too, is amused by Lloyd’s babbling assurances of his stability and suitability as an escort for his daughter, but—especially after Diane has made a knockout entrance, a vision in white—he’s baffled as to what she’s doing with him. A wasted party reveler voices Jim’s bafflement: “How’d you get Diane Court to go out with you? What are you?” The answer: “I’m Lloyd Dobler.” If, as I attested in the previous chapter, the soirée in Weird Science ranks as one of the all-time worst teen movie party scenes, the raging postgrad kegger in Say Anything is one of the best. It has Eric Stoltz dressed as a rooster. It has Lloyd’s response to an impromptu bout of career counseling from his guidance teacher (Bebe Neuwirth): “I’m looking for a dare-to-be-great situation.” It has the Corey and Joe saga. “I wrote sixty-three songs this year and they’re all about Joe, and I’m going to play every single one of them tonight,” announces Corey of the guy who broke her heart and left her suicidal. “He likes girls with names like Ashley,” she wails. At that exact moment, Joe (Loren Dean) ambles in not with an Ashley but a Mimi, causing Corey to kick up the tempo, slash at her guitar and snarl, “That’ll never be me, never be me, never, never, no.” By the time she’s howling “Joe lies when he cries,” the subject of her repertoire is asking to get back together again when Mimi goes to college. This, of course, motivates Corey finally to get over him.
The party is also a belated opportunity for Diane to interact briefly with all the people from whom her intense study schedule shielded her. One girl, Sheila (Kim Heathers Walker) asks “Did you really come here with Lloyd Dobler? How did that happen?” Diane says, “He made me laugh,” which is both a “Yeah, right” moment and an “If only” moment. As dawn breaks (they’ve spent the last three hours driving around till the drunk kid in the back remembers where he lives), Diane and Lloyd stop off at a 7-Eleven for something to eat. Returning to the car, he points out broken glass on the ground for her to walk round. She tells him, “I’ve never really gone out with anyone as basic as you.” He takes it as a compliment and tells her he wants to see her all the time.
Lloyd’s girl buds are nervous because Diane’s made the second date a dinner with her dad, his accountant and a couple of his employees. “It’s a family audition … it’s not his crowd, he’s got that nervous talking thing. I told him not to speak.” The skeptical Corey says, “If you were Diane Court would you honestly fall for Lloyd?” She weighs her words for a second, then her face relaxes into a grin. She says “Yeah” and her “Yeah” is unanimous.
At the Court dinner party, Lloyd is polite and silent and uptight. Then the accountant says, “So, Lloyd, you graduated Lakewood … what are your plans for the future?” All eyes are on him. It’s a crucial opinion-forming, confidence-building (or killing) moment. The way Lloyd Dobler responds to this deceptively innocuous question is a strong indicator of character. Turning to Jim Court, who is jovially eyeing him like a snake, he responds, “To spend as much time with Diane before she leaves as possible.” But Jim’s frozen smile demands more. Lloyd tries to articulate a correct response. “A career?… I’ve thought about this quite a bit, sir. I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or process anything sold, bought or processed or repair anything sold, bought or processed as a career. I don’t want to do that.” Talk about sucking the atmosphere out of a room. This really isn’t Lloyd’s crowd. Jim Court stares at Lloyd like he’s a disease. Lloyd has more to impart. “My father’s in the army. He wants me to join, but I can’t work for that corporation, so what I’ve been doing lately is kick boxing, which is a new sport … as far as career longevity, I don’t really know…” Shifting under Jim’s get-out-of-my-house gaze, Lloyd shrugs. “I can’t figure it all out tonight, sir, I’m just gonna hang with your daughter.” A few years down the line and a speech like that would have made Lloyd the hit of the party, a living, breathing poster boy for generational malaise. But this is 1988. The adults in the room lapse into embarrassed silence and Jim looks like he’s counting the seconds till he can throw Lloyd out before the punk’s lack of direction infects his genius daughter. Attention is diverted from the black hole of Lloyd by a knock on the door. It’s a surprise visit from the IRS, telling Jim he’s under criminal investigation. Here’s where things start to go awry for the two men in Diane’s life.
“Get ready for greatness,” Corey tells Lloyd, after intuiting that he and Diane have gone all the way (in the back of his clunky Malibu to the sappy accompaniment of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”), then reading the letter he sent her. “I’ll always be there for you, all the love in my heart, Lloyd.” But Corey reckons without Jim Court’s emotional manipulation of his daughter. Using the wide parameters of their liberal relationship, his mounting IRS problems and the gulf separating her specialness from Lloyd’s schmohood, he weakens her resolve. “You owe it to yourself to be on that plane with no attachments.… Give him a present, here, let him know you still care; give him this pen.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “In a million years I would never give him a pen.” At the exact moment when Lloyd makes the big leap and tells Diane he loves her, she breaks up with him. “I feel like a dick, you must think I’m a dick.” The distraught and suddenly inarticulate Diane ends up giving him the pen before rushing out of his car in floods of tears.
For Lloyd, the downward spiral is hanging out a Welcome sign. Standing in a phone booth, soaked to the skin in the middle of a Seattle monsoon, Lloyd laments to his sister Constance (Joan Cusack) “I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen,” which, in some movies, would have been the cue for a wailing duet called “I Gave You My Heart and You Gave Me a Pen” to well up on the sound track. Taking up residence in the slough of despond, Lloyd drives through the dark lonely night, composing a letter to Corey on a dictaphone. “I hardly remember her; I’ve wiped her from my mind … this is it, the site of our controversial first date. I met her in a mall, I should have known our relationship was doomed.” Deciding he knows too many girls, Lloyd takes a detour into Guyville. The advice from the lunkheads and losers hanging around outside the convenience store is direct and to the point. “Find a girl who looks just like her, nail her and then dump her … your only mistake is that you didn’t dump her first. Diane Court is a show pony, you need a stallion, walk with us and you walk tall.…” Lloyd bleeds in front of the boys: “That girl made me trust myself, man. I was walking around, I was feeling satisfied … then she cut me loose … she won’t tell me why.” He hurls a bottle against the wall in frustration, causing a spontaneous outburst of white boy freestyling: “Wigging out, he’s wigging out … Lloyd, Lloyd, null and void.”
Back on the road to nowhere, Lloyd resumes his monologue “That was a mistake. The rain on my car is a baptism.… My assault on the world begins now. Believe in myself, answer to no one. Iceman. Power Lloyd.” Corey and D.C. upbraid him for trying to act like a guy. “The world is full of guys. Be a man, don’t be a guy.”
The ground beneath Jim Court begins to subside when he’s out buying luggage for Diane’s flight to England. Taken by the saleslady’s sunny smile and pear-shaped ass, he gives her a big grin and starts to strike up friendly conversation. Then she has to tell him his credit card has been rejected. There’s a decline code on his account. Next time we see Jim, he’s shriveled up in fetal terror, hunched fully clothed in his own bathtub, cowering from the consequences of his actions.
Lloyd launches an offensive on Diane’s emotions by standing outside her window, holding aloft a boombox blaring Peter Gabriel’s limpid “In Your Eyes.” Trying hard to stand by her Dad, she appeals to the human decency of an IRS guy to tell her the truth. He tells her Jim’s been under investigation for five years; he’s been making a tidy sum, stealing from the geriatric inhabitants of his nursing home. “We have the records.… It’s going to get worse.” Diane succumbs to suspicion and searches her house for incriminating evidence, which she finds in the form of a hidden stash of bills. She goes straight to the nursing home to confront Jim. “I told you everything and you lied to me.” Fleeing from the man she thought she could trust, Diane rushes to be with the man she should have trusted but didn’t. Lloyd is sparring in the ring—with Don “The Dragon” Wilson!—and Diane’s surprise appearance distracts him, giving The Dragon the opportunity to fell him like a tree. Dazed and bloody, Lloyd is still conscious enough to hear Diane’s whispers of contrition. “If I hurt you again, I’ll die.”
Jim is hit with a fine of $125,000 and a nine-month sentence in a minimum security prison. Lloyd turns up in the prison yard, telling the bitter, chain-smoking Jim that Diane came to see him but wouldn’t get out of the car. Still protective of Diane’s potential, Jim wants to make certain that Lloyd won’t be following her all the way to England. Lloyd says, “I’ve thought about it quite a bit.… I should use this time to make plans. I mean, Diane and I can wait for each other.” Jim tells Lloyd he made the right decision. “My daughter’s a lot different from you. She’s very successful, very talented.” Letting the beartrap clang shut, Lloyd goes on, “And then I reconsidered. I think what I really want to do with my life … I want to be with your daughter.” Jim, furious, calls him a distraction. “I’m the distraction that’s going to England, sir.” Jim is stewing in his orange prison jumpsuit. “You alright, sir?” asks a concerned Lloyd. “I’m incarcerated, Lloyd!” he thunders. “I don’t deserve to lose my daughter over this. I don’t deserve to have you as my go-between, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how she could choose to champion mediocrity the way she’s learned to around you.” Lloyd gives him a letter from Diane which is bulging with expressions of her disappointment and hurt (although he tries to comfort Jim by telling him how an earlier draft concluded with, “I still can’t help loving you”). Diane plucks up the courage to come into the prison yard. Jim clings to her, but she pulls away and, as she leaves, gives him a pen. “Write me.” Ouch.
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