Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  How do you heal a hurt that huge? In the instance of this movie, you take the insane but inevitable big-finish solution of having Lucas attempt to prove his worth to Maggie, to the school and ultimately to himself by trying out for the football team. His scrawny-as-a-bent-straw physique and close proximity to the ground would seem to render him ineligible. The coach, his would-be teammates and the school principal all order him to keep his skinny ass at a far remove from the field of play. Come the day of the big match, though, the school team is taking a beating. A distraction from the humiliation of defeat appears in the shape of the tiny figure swamped inside the football suit. It’s Lucas! The coach rounds on him. “Get off the field you pissant.” Lucas, on fire with a passion the coach could never comprehend, roars like a lion, “Don’t you call me a pissant, you dumb fucking jock. If anyone’s a pissant it’s you. You’re the second-rate coach of a third-rate team.” The coach, now with a vested interest in seeing Lucas flattened and killed, gives him permission to play. He runs on to the field, inspiring derision and jeers. His humiliated teammates try to ignore his presence, but in the last thirty seconds of play, it becomes apparent that Lucas is a slippery little character, able to outrun the rival behemoths. The crowd starts chanting, “Give the ball to Lucas.” He gets it, passes it and then vanishes under a mountain of flesh. When all the players are peeled off Lucas, he’s an immobile cardboard cutout with cracked glasses.

  Half the school maintains a hospital vigil. Maggie, Cappy and Rina go off to break the bad news to Lucas’ parents. Maggie is surprised to find Cappy driving past the big sprawling house where she supposed Lucas lived a hermetically sealed life of luxury. The car stops at a trailer park where, Cappy and Rina reveal to a shocked Maggie, Lucas lives with his alcoholic father. Oh no! Back in the hospital, Lucas and Maggie repair the ruins of their friendship. When Lucas returns to school, he’s suddenly the center of attention. Inquiring eyes and a constant undertow of whispering follow his every step till he reaches his locker. Quivering with suspicion, he slo-o-o-wly turns the key and there, swinging inside, is his own customized football team jacket. The dumbest of his jock tormentors begins a slow home-is-the-hero handclap. Seconds later, the whole school takes it up and if you don’t have wet eyes and a thick throat at this juncture, somebody switched off your life support.

  Corey Haim’s name quickly became synonymous with vapidity. His subsequent film work consisted of a smirk and a prolonged bout of tonsorial experimentation. But in Lucas, he was just about perfect: smart, funny, vulnerable, sad, likable, infuriating. He was given a character with many colors and he brought them all out beautifully. Charlie Sheen is a prince among jocks (as, of course, was his brother Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club) and, as the girl who captures the hearts of both sporto and squirt, Kerri Green is absolutely appealing. (Sheen and Green were subsequently paired, to less-enchanting effect, in Three for the Road, a romantic comedy that proved to be neither.) Untainted by a technopop sound track or the flouncy fashions of the day, Lucas is a timeless teen story that packs enough hurt to make it seem real and enough fantasy to make you believe that every underdog will have its day. After all, the little pissant didn’t get the girl of his dreams, but he had Winona Ryder as a backup option.

  * * *

  They may not have had a John Hughes godfather figure putting words in their mouth. They may not have had a collective moniker but the Next Generation had a quartet of ensemble movies in which to posture, bellow, screech, simper, sob and sulk. The hellish Goonies (1985), directed by Richard Donner with the same frenzy he brought to papering over the plotfree cracks of the Lethal Weapon sequels—was for a time, every babysitter’s child pacifier of choice, but for the over-fives it was a full-volume endurance test. Damning evidence that Steven Spielberg would stick the Amblin imprimatur on any bloated Saturday morning serial featuring kids in peril, The Goonies grouped together a bunch of brats threatened with eviction by evil property developers. They find a pirate’s map and set out to dig up the treasure of One-Eyed Willie (Spielberg: “One-Eyed Willie! That’s genius! Whaddaya want? Thirty mil? Nah, take forty. One-Eyed Willie, you guys…”).

  Thereafter you could boil down the movie’s content to one word: Waaaaaaaaah! The Goonies fall through trapdoors. Waaah! They’re chased by the disreputable misshapen sons of the harridan also in search of One-Eyed Willie’s treasure. Waaah! They fall into secret dungeons! Waaah! The open mouths doing the waaah-ing belong to a mixture of heroic guys (Sean Astin, Josh Brolin), spunky gals (Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton), a precious ethnic (Jonathan Ke Quan—Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and two heinous excuses for comic relief (Corey Feldman playing a precurser of Dustin Hoffman’s Dick Tracy mumbling guy and a terrifying chubbo called Jeff Cohen shoveling junk food into his mouth at the exact same time he was going “Waaah!”).

  * * *

  If the Goonies were incapable of shutting up for a second, the kids from River’s Edge (1986) were too numb to care about anything. The movie opens up with little deaths-head Tim (Joshua Miller) blankly destroying his sister’s doll. It’s only a short jump from there to the river’s edge where a big slab of a guy, Samson (Daniel Roebuck), sits beside the naked dead body of the girlfriend he just decided to strangle. His impetuous act has a galvanizing effect on his coterie of desensitized wastoids. In the mind of the group’s speedfreak leader, Layne (Crispin Glover, firing on all six), the murder is a good thing, a test of the kids’ mettle to which he will rise by hiding the body and protecting Samson. Matt (Keanu Reeves) is ambivalent. Samson is stowed away in the home of Feck (Dennis Hopper), a one-legged exbiker with some experience in the girlfriend-killing business who now lavishes his affection on a plastic sex doll called Ellen. Matt confides in gal pal Clarissa (Ione Skye) that he’s being struck by unfamiliar pangs of something that could be conscience. Eventually, he does the right thing and calls the cops but not before his evil little brother Tim has pulled a gun on him. Any intent on the part of director Tim Hunter to issue a wake-up call to America warning it about the state of its uncaring, dysfunctional, nihilistic offspring was squashed the second he made the decision to allow Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper to share the same screen.

  * * *

  A dead body also acts as the impetus for the quartet of protagonists in Stand by Me (1986) to assert their right to … well, to ogle a dead body. In the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s saturation success, bilious film geeks, desperate to plunge a dagger into the back of one of their own, have compiled exhaustive lists detailing the original source of every camera movement and line of dialogue the writer/director claims as his own. Few, if any, of these J’accuse documents have mentioned either Diner or Stand by Me as prime influences on the pop-culture badinage which, along with copious bloodletting, has come to be seen as Tarantino’s most publicly recognized stylistic trait. Rob Reiner’s movie, especially, is awash with summit conferences on TV themes and comic books. “Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog, but what’s Goofy?” forms the core of one discussion. “Mighty Mouse versus Superman? That’s a tough one” is another. The influence of Stand by Me can be felt further afield than Tarantinoland. When fat kid Vern Tessio (Jerry O’Connell) says, “One food for the rest of my life? That’s easy, Cherry Pez. Cherry-flavored Pez. There’s no doubt about it,” you can almost hear those self-same words escaping from the mouth of George Costanza (the success of Stand by Me gave Rob Reiner the chance to start his own production company, Castle Rock, whose first dip into TV waters was Seinfeld). Not only can the ramifications of this movie still be felt in the rhythms of Tarantino, Jerry and George, but with Stand by Me, Rob Reiner solved the increasingly thorny problem of what to do with Stephen King adaptations. The movie versions of Christine, Cujo, Cat’s Eye and Firestarter reeked of cheese; they were worlds away from the TLC with which Carrie and Dead Zone were treated. When Rob Reiner embarked on the act of fleshing out “The Body” (as the novella from Different Seasons was originally titled), he handl
ed it like an American classic.

  In their two-day trek through the Oregon woods in search of an undiscovered moldering corpse, four friends—Gordie, the sensitive storyteller (Wil Wheaton), Chris, the roughneck (River Phoenix), Teddy, the deformed looney (Corey Feldman, doing his moving performance in a film of note) and Vern, the blimp (Jerry O’Connell)—face their fears, unburden themselves of their respective angst in an impromptu therapy session and defy local hood Ace Merril (Kiefer Sutherland). Unlike The Breakfast Club’s chronic-inspired confessional passages, Stand by Me puts its kids through the wringer before letting them reveal their inner anguish. After taunting wild dogs, running from an oncoming locomotive and plucking leeches from their private parts, they’re sufficiently emotionally jangled to let it all out. Gordie, always in the shadow of his elder brother (John Cusack), is ignored and despised when the sibling dies. Chris is treated like a criminal by teachers. Teddy’s dad, who pressed an iron to his ear and gave him a cauliflower-shaped blemish, is in an institution and Vern … well, he’s the fat guy. Reiner works wonders with the book but he’s unable to do anything with its worst device: Gordie’s interminable telling of his story about the pie-eating contest that ends in mass projectile vomiting.

  * * *

  Even more sensitive than the preteens in Stand by Me were the fully formed preppies brought out of their starchy shells and into quivering, fulminating, bongo-beating life by Robin Williams’ English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989). “Carpe diem!” cries John Keating (Williams) and so successful is he in his attempts to get his students surging with the emotion of literature and poetry that they do just that. Shy guy Todd (Ethan Hawke) flings aside his fears and does some free-form improvisation, father-dominated Neil (Robert Sean Leonard) defies the parental edict and follows his thespian ambitions and nervy smart-mouth Knox (Josh Charles) screws his courage to the mast and pursues a well-born blonde. Emotion and embarrassment bump up against each other all the way through this movie. When you’re not thrilled by Keating’s classroom dynamics, you’re cringing at the WASPy bohemian enclave, known as the Dead Poets Society, formed by Todd, Neil and Knox. “Gotta do more, gotta be more…!” rage these nascent CEOs and congressmen.

  * * *

  By the time Corey Haim turned 15, he had amassed a body of work that included touching performances in movies like Lucas, Firstborn and Murphy’s Romance. He gave every sign of maturing into a dramatic actor of some promise. By the time Corey Feldman turned 15, he had attracted attention with comic turns in Gremlins and Goonies and a more serious role in Stand By Me. He seemed on the verge of blossoming into a multi-faceted star. Who Knew? Who knew that Canuck Haim would become so entranced by his own adorability that he’d become physically painful to watch? Who knew that deadpan Cali kid Feldman would end up resembling something squishy and unpleasant from The Hobbit? Who knew that these two guys would end up like a Ray-Ban–wearing version of The Defiant Ones, chained together for straight-to-video eternity? And it all started so promisingly; their skilled goofing in The Lost Boys considerably upped that movie’s lunacy quotient. Two funny guys with the same first names who polluted every page of Tiger Beat and Bop; a picture that paired these Coreys seemed like a no-brainer. But the first fruits of their shared labors, License to Drive (1988), was like an extended P.S.A. on the debilitating effect of celebrity on the young and impressionable. The film was a sporadically funny piece of nonsense about a kid (Haim) who fails his road test but boosts his grandfather’s vintage jalopy to impress a date. Haim, though, was entirely free of all the residual innocence that clung to him throughout his formative movies. He fully believed he was the hot, happening guy from teenybop fanzine pages. No matter the tone of the dialogue he was called upon to deliver, every word was pushed through lips that were twisted into a combination pout and sneer (a snout?). Feldman was even weirder and even worse. His precocity had been replaced by a battery of uncomfortable affectations: the lowering of his raspy voice, the slitting of his tiny eyes and the contemplative fingers placed around his mouth.

  Although both Coreys were top billed in License To Drive, the movie was a vehicle for Haim. The situations were reversed in Dream a Little Dream (1989). Wildly overdirected by Marc Rocco, this flick appeared at the very end of the teen body-swap cycle. Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold had changed places in Vice Versa, Kirk Cameron walked in Dudley Moore’s shoes in Like Father, Like Son. Charlie Schlatter gave George Burns a new lease on life in 18 Again! And Corey Feldman … didn’t exactly swap bodies with Jason Robards in Dream a Little Dream. One of the reasons the film tanked at the box office was the fact that nobody knew what it was supposed to be about. Feldman slams his bike into local grouch Robards at the exact moment he’s out in the back garden practicing Tai Chi. So their souls are exchanged … except they’re not really. Feldman seems to be lounging around limbo and his body shows little sign of being occupied by Robards. In fact it shows more sign of being occupied by Michael Jackson, who at that time had cultivated Feldman’s close personal friendship (someone thrust into the public eye at an early age, someone who understood). Jackson’s influence was horrifyingly visible, both in the revolting state of Feldman’s hair (dyed shoe-polish black, all stringy and falling into his face) and in the ghastly song-and-dance number he does to impress girl-of-his-dreams Meredith Salenger.

  The Coreys had movie stardom, they had adulation, they even had a joint 1-800 number. But pride—and they had a mountain of that shit—comes before a fall. Pretty soon, Feldman got hooked on heroin and was arrested for possession. He also discovered that his parents, Bob and Sheila, had been regularly pilfering the account set up to hold his preadult earnings. (In 1993, he appeared on a Ricki Lake show whose topic was Should kids divorce their parents?). Haim, too, fell on hard times, his teen appeal strictly a thing of the past. Unable to rid himself of that snout thing, unwilling to stop dying and spiking his hair, he became one of the least-welcome denizens of the B-movie jungle. Frequently reteamed with Feldman who now emitted the oily menace of a Peter Lorre, the duo stumbled through little-seen, barely believable projects like National Lampoon’s Last Resort, Blown Away and Dream A Little Dream 2, in which Feldman makes a defiant stab at proving that despite the hair and the drugs and the money, he’s still a song-and-dance man. Haim, exhibiting unexpected maturity, betrays no resentment at his reduced circumstances and enforced partnership with his seminamesake: “We’re like Bing and Crosby,” he says, shrugging cheerfully.

  * * *

  Ladies love Patrick Dempsey. Young, old, rich, poor, brilliant, beautiful, eccentric, frustrated, experienced; you name them, they wanted him. That, at least, was the impression a bunch of movies strove to create. Crinkly of eye, bashful of manner, rhythmic of limb, this Dempsey character was touted as an irresistible combination of sweet-natured naif and tireless boudoir adventurer: a boy who’ll do all the things your tired-ass old man won’t do. In the Mood (1987) tells the true story of Elliot “Sonny” Wisecarver, the celebrated teenage Lothario who took full advantage of the love-starved women left behind when the boys were out fighting for life and liberty in WW2. In Loverboy (1989), Dempsey’s supple pizza delivery boy is sliced and devoured by hungry customers like Carrie Fisher, Kirstie Alley and Barbara Carrera. In Happy Together (1989), a computer snafu sees him sharing a college room with Helen Slater. In Some Girls (1988), he’s dumped by his girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) but examined and passed around like a cuddly toy between her sisters (Sheila Kelley, Ashley Greenfield). Even her grandmother is warm for Dempsey, mistaking him for her dead husband. Dempsey’s irresistibility to older women was also evident offscreen when, at 23, he married his 54-year-old agent/manager, Rocky Parker (mother of actor Corey Parker). Sadly, the only warm body from which he failed to receive torrents of affection was the audience that consistently failed to fall for him.

  * * *

  With his every drawled utterance, eyebrow wiggle and lascivious grin, Christian Slater sends out skyscraper-high signals that he’s living his li
fe and conducting his career as an extended tribute to an actor who embodies indulgence and mischief-making. That man is Dean Martin. Not since Dino has a performer so consistently and successfully tipped audiences the wink that however serious or lightweight the nature of the project in which he’s employed, he’s just picking up a paycheck. His jack-o’-lantern grin was utilized to devastating psycho effect in Heathers; for most of Slater’s onscreen eighties, though, the eyebrows were on but no one was home.

  Whether on a skateboard (Gleaming the Cube), on a horse (Young Guns 2) or in a car chase (The Wizard), he kept on smirking and drawling, fixating on the tall, cool one that lay in wait for him after the shoot. And also, looking forward to an after-work drink. The notion of this affable dude as a voice through which the alienation, despair and unfocused rage of a generation who felt abandoned and trapped in a world they never made could scream seems batty. But there he is in Pump Up the Volume (1990), a film as sincere in its treatment of teen angst bullshit as Heathers was scornful. He plays a high schooler who is a mumbling misfit by day, but behind the console of the shortwave radio transmitter in his basement he is a howling, horny, caustic truth-teller and social satirist. He is Hard Harry, the pirate DJ who stirs a school out of its apathy. “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is fucked up?” he asks. “I’m a member of the why-bother generation myself,” he sneers. Religion, government, music, school, conventional expressions of rebellion: Hard Harry pours scorn on them. And the kids listen. They blow up their radios, they flout convention, they ask the killer question, Why? And then one of them kills himself. (Talk about ahead of its time. The last five years’ worth of Buzz Bin bands probably cribbed their lyrics from Harry’s tirades.) Suddenly, the school wants to shut down this spreader of sedition. But, as they cart him off to be deprogrammed, he throws out the challenge to the kids he has awakened to carry on his good work: “Talk Hard!”