Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Made In Britain isn’t perfect. The film could have done with one black character who, in the light of Trevor’s vile racism, offers some more intelligence and backbone than the useless Leroy, who can’t read and blithely follows the orders of a boy who calls him ‘a fucking baboon’ to the point of copying his abuse of other non-whites. It’s Leroy, rather than Trevor, who forces you to wonder about the politics of Leland and Clarke.

  But then, Leland and Clarke patently weren’t setting out to make a balanced portrayal of real people. They were deliberately setting out to shock TV viewers out of their passive state and make them frightened and concerned for the future of Britain. Unlike most planned outrage, Made In Britain turned out to be both ‘water-cooler TV’ and art of lasting worth. The major reason for that remains Tim Roth, whose wild eyes, demented sneer and swaggering gait perfectly captured an archetype of ’80s Britain for posterity, and gave it a voice that we didn’t want to hear.

  I have no idea what racist skins thought of Trevor . . . maybe some claimed him as inspirational role model. But I do know that 1982 was roughly the year that one started to notice that the marauding Nazi skin began to disappear from England’s streets, gigs and football matches. Pure coincidence, possibly. But I like to think that Trevor broke something that desperately needed breaking.

  Got to watch that liberal apathy, though. The young ’80s fascists may not have had their race war, but boys like Trevor will always exist, no matter how much we choose to ignore them. Left untended, they occasionally grow up into men who murder children in socialist Norwegian summer camps.

  RISKY BUSINESS

  1983

  Starring: Tom Cruise, Rebecca de Mornay, Joe Pantoliano, Richard Masur, Curtis Armstrong

  Dir.: Paul Brickman

  Plot: Diary of a teenage pimp.

  Key line: ‘It was great the way her mind worked. No guilt. No doubts. No fear. None of my specialities. Just the shameless pursuit of immediate material gratification. What a capitalist.’

  It’s hard to pick a favourite scene from a movie entirely composed of great scenes, but I’ll go for this one. It’s the scene where we meet the teenage hero’s parents and it is a small, but perfectly formed, cinematic marvel. The hero becomes the camera becomes us, allowing us to be directly patronised by his archly country-clubbish Mom and Pop, played by Janet Carroll and Nicholas Pryor. As we follow them around their immaculate, soulless home, Mom interrogates us about our test scores, passive-aggressively suggesting that we should take the tests again, before asking if Dad has packed her Mace. Before we can ponder the reasons why Mom needs a spray-weapon to take on holiday, we are following Dad into a room and his voice is being drowned out by the nastiest lift muzak you’ve ever heard. He asks us if we hear something unpleasant. Well, yeah . . . your fucking terrible music, Gramps. But we hear Joel dutifully answer ‘No’ on our behalf. Dad opens a cabinet and reveals an expensive stereo. The ‘unpleasant’ noise is ‘the preponderance of bass, perhaps’. The laugh-out-loud comes from the idea that this woolly din actually has any discernible low end. The delayed laugh comes from imagining this git’s reaction if you put a King Tubby record on his stereo and ratcheted up his precious graphic equaliser. You’re so busy laughing you barely notice that we’ve swung round to look at a glass egg that is the plot’s major deus ex machina.

  Mom and Pop continue to stare us down and nag us right into the airport while casually revealing the visit from a Princeton college admissions officer that will also become key later in the movie. Whether your parents were wealthy WASPs or not, the scene revives every painful, relentless, ‘No shit, Sherlock’ lecture you ever received from parents who didn’t trust you (and usually had good cause not to). The first time you watch Risky Business, you get off on the story, the gags and the satire. The second time, you start to trip on what a scriptwriting masterclass Risky Business is, with its carefully arranged foreshadowings and unforced but memorable language – ‘The preponderance of bass, perhaps’ is just beautiful – and, when you clock that the excellent direction illuminates the screenplay while never distracting from story and character, like a truly great musician serving song before self, you start to wonder why writer and director Paul Brickman never became a superstar film-maker. The guy even directed one of the most-imitated scenes of the 1980s . . . a minute or so of punch-above-its-weight imagery that invented the Tom Cruise we know and love to taunt about his sexuality.

  When left alone at home, the first thing Cruise’s Joel wants to do, naturally, is emphasise the preponderance of bass on that expensive stereo. Cue a scene where Tom Cruise dances and mimes to the unlikely strains of Bob Seger’s ‘Good Old Rock ’n’ Roll’, a piece of workingman’s bar-room boogie chosen to confront the antiseptic perfection of Joel’s suburban home and Joel’s repressed urge to be naughty . . . but not too naughty. Famously, Cruise slides into frame on socked feet, stops, back to camera, in Elvis pose, and mimes to the song using a candle-stick as mic and wearing just pink shirt, white socks and a tiny pair of white briefs, which initially make him look tantalisingly naked.

  I still think the young Cruisemeister in knickers is more likely to turn on an ageing queen who’s got a Jones for twinks who look like soldiers than the teen girls of 1983. But something clicked, because these few glorious seconds made Cruise a star. Cruise improvised the performance, flicking his head around in exaggerated musical theatre style, sinking to his knees in phallic metal homage, jumping on the sofa and miming a man attempting to have sex in missionary position while having 30,000 volts shot through his anus. But he didn’t come up with the way the cameras circle up, down and around him, being his dance partner, reflecting the director’s absolute delight in what his star has managed to produce from the basic script instruction: ‘Joel dances to rock song.’

  There is something about the scene which seems to sum up the cinema of the 1980s – the return to short-haired manliness, the get-up-and-go desperation, the swaggering narcissism, and I’m making it sound awful, and it did invent awful things, including Top Gun, but it’s a scene so short, sharp and rousing that you really do always want to be in the room with Joel/Tom, cheering and applauding and trying out your own knee-drops and candle-stick action.

  And the song, stodgy though it is, is just the first of Brickman’s many revelations of his true agenda. ‘Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,’ Seger wails, and you appreciate the delicious irony of Brickman’s anti-’80s discourse inventing the 1980s’ most stupefyingly shallow icon of white male yuppie triumph even while he was attempting to use all its visual signifiers to damn the whole Reagan era.

  The following short scene further illuminates Brickman’s point. Joel and his friends are in a diner. They are talking about someone they know who has got into Harvard, and how much money he, and hopefully, they, are likely to be making sooner rather than later. Joel haltingly questions their values. When they ask what he wants to do, he says, ‘Serve my fellow mankind.’ But before he has even finished the phrase, the shy, serious expression has started to break into the shit-eating smirk we would come to know only too well. His mates laugh approvingly at his self-mockery, and jolly good yuks are had by all. But Cruise has done enough, with a face that moves from flickering fear of exclusion to relieved resignation to the demands of the pack, to let us know that he is severely troubled by the destiny he is expected to fulfil. It isn’t just these friends or his teachers or his parents who expect him to be a self-serving prick. It’s the whole of America. What option does he have but cynicism? You feel the weight of the whole Reagan era on the souls of potentially decent American kids in the ’80s in this tiny, almost incidental scene. That’s how good Cruise and Brickman are in Risky Business.

  It reaches the point where every scene is a fiendishly clever, dark laugh. The bit where one of Joel’s horrible mates brings his girl round to fuck in his bedroom because they know his parents are away is a sly nod to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, another great anti-corporate comedy. When Joel and
business studies partner Barry (Bronson Pinchot) get tired of listening to the upstairs grunt ’n’ groan, we see an automated garage door rise precipitately, a sexy muso-funk lope taken straight from a car ad slams in, and we are staring at the back of a gleaming Porsche. The car backs a little towards us. It stops, and so does the music, abruptly. Joel has stalled the car, and we’re reminded that, no, actually, this isn’t an ad for a Porsche lifestyle, and the sound design is so exquisitely timed, the wink at us gets another laugh. Genius, really. And we haven’t even got to the meat of this matter, so best I stop stalling.

  As we’ve learned from the film’s opening scenes, Joel Goodson (geddit?) is a mediocre and well-behaved upper middle-class student who is near-traumatised by failure anxiety and so obsessed with sex that he has weird dreams about naked women in showers. When his parents go away without him, he is encouraged by his cleverer and wilder friend Miles (Armstrong) to invest the money his parents left him in a wild night with a hooker. After a false start with a black transsexual (memorably portrayed by Bruce A. Young), he purchases a night of sin with Lana (the spectacularly good de Mornay), who, as well as possessing all the right moves, also gives a passable impression of a non-sex-industry-employed cute blonde who actually likes him. Being a gauche motherfucker, Joel leaves Lana in the house alone and comes back to find that his mother’s fabulously expensive Steuben glass egg has gone. When he tracks Lana down to retrieve it, he soon becomes a junior yuppie-in-peril as Lana’s greasy pimp Guido (Pantoliano) chases him with a gun.

  Various sneaky plot points – including a growing hands-across-the-classes bond between Joel and Lana, and the accidental dumping of the Porsche into Lake Michigan – lead to the inevitable, when, in order to make enough money to repair the car, Lana and Joel transform his house into a brothel. But even though Lana is giving Joel a crash-course in the sharp end of supply-side economics that his business teachers only theorise about, there is one major crasher at the profitable sex party. Remember that Princeton admissions officer? Joel didn’t. Now transformed from nerdish innocent into shades-wearing flash bastard, Joel is forced to conduct a humiliating interview about his future education in the midst of an illegal orgy. While the Princeton man investigates the madness, Joel and Lana disappear and have sex on a train.

  When Joel returns, he finds that Guido has burgled the entire house and is holding the contents to ransom. But Joel has made enough money as a pimp to pay the ransom, fix the car and get it all sorted before Mater and Pater return. It turns out that the Princeton man was very impressed by his entrepreneurial skills after all, and grants Joel admission. All’s well that ends well. Until Ma notices the tiny crack in her Steuber egg . . .

  The ending of Risky Business is a fascinating story in itself. Brickman originally conceived of an anti-climax where Joel fails to repair the damage and get into Princeton, and he and Lana sit on a roof and talk about the disaster. The studio did one of those director-baiting test screenings and demanded a more upbeat ending. So Brickman delivered the ‘triumph’, but undercut it all with Tangerine Dream’s dreamily mournful electronic soundtrack, Cruise’s cynical sneer acknowledging the hollow, ironic victory of getting into Princeton by giving the admissions officer free sex with prostitutes (‘Princeton can use a guy like Joel. His exact words!’ Joel’s father pants delightedly), and a final Joel–Lana scene in a restaurant that quietly accepts that the enormous gap between their prospective futures means that they will never see each other again. Clips of the school’s Future Enterprises awards, where students are congratulated for making profits of $850 from paper-towel holders, are mocked by Joel’s helpless concern for Lana’s real-world capitalist concerns of prostitution, violent pimps, daily degradation, all conveyed with almost no dialogue, and no grandstand emoting.

  Still not ‘upbeat’ enough. Cue a further, short tacked-on bit where we see Lana and Joel walk through a park, behaving like boyfriend and girlfriend, joking merrily about the rules of selling your body for chump change as they stroll off into the Chicago night. It’s a travesty. Brickman gets to get half of his way in the 25th anniversary edition of Risky Business, presenting the second version as an ‘alternate ending’ without the entirely phoney park bit.

  The first time I saw Risky Business, I was surprised that Tom Cruise had ever been so good in anything, and shocked that a film that I’d always thought was a nasty frat-boy sex comedy with added Cruise-in-Ray-Bans appeal was so good. The second time I watched it, the penny dropped and I realised that the movie is a masterpiece. Imagine, perhaps, that some sensible person had wrested Wall Street from Oliver Stone’s sledgehammer grip and given it to Michael Mann. Or that someone had persuaded Mike Nichols to remake The Graduate for sadder, harder, greedier times.

  The final irony lies in the ensuing career trajectories of writer/director and star. Tom Cruise went on to become Tom Cruise. And no wonder. The wonderfully adult, complex chemistry with Rebecca de Mornay. The brilliance of his comic reactions in the hilarious Porsche-in-the-lake scene, and the tragic vulnerability he displays when he runs to Lana for comfort. The entire transition from anxious ingénue to slick swaggering pimp is really something very special. But Brickman directed just one more obscure movie and wrote little besides. What happened?

  Well, obviously, I have no idea whatsoever. But a piece of info included on the Risky Business trivia thread at the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) keeps worrying away at me as these kind of things sometimes do. According to this, the failing sunglasses brand that is the Ray-Ban Wayfarer multiplied its sales by 2,000 per cent after Risky Business became a hit among teens. In the movie, Brickman uses Cruise’s donning of the shades as a signifier of hubris and loss of innocence. But on the successful publicity poster they just look like something that makes a screen stud look even studlier, and that’s what Reagan’s materialist teens took away from Risky Business.

  So Hollywood could obviously use a guy like Paul Brickman. But, considering the utter loathing for corporate values that power this brilliant movie, perhaps just the once.

  MEANTIME

  1983

  Starring: Phil Daniels, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Marion Bailey, Pam Ferris, Alfred Molina, Jeff Robert, Tilly Vosburgh

  Dir.: Mike Leigh

  Plot: Thatcher’s teens, in all our ugly glory.

  Key line(s): Hayley: ‘What you been doin’?’

  Colin: ‘Nuffin.’

  Hayley: ‘Ain’t you bin out?’

  Colin: ‘Nah.’

  Hayley: ‘Just stayed in?’

  Colin: ‘Yeah.’

  Hayley: ‘Did ya?’

  Colin: ‘Yeah.’

  Meantime is Mike Leigh’s most underrated film, perhaps because it was made for British television rather than cinema. It showcases three iconic young English actors at their peaks. It’s a bracingly accurate document of a time and place – Bethnal Green, East London, 1983 – we know as Thatcher’s Britain. It is made from the angst of its time – unemployment, generation gap, council estates, demoralised working-class victims, racism, government leaving the youth on the shelf – yet rejects preaching and anger in favour of bitter comedy and Leigh’s ability to take our boring, mundane selves and make us worthy of being watched. It’s the perfect bookend to the explosive sensationalism of Made In Britain (see here), because, while Leland and Clarke’s Trevor is a vision of just how bright and bad alienated British youth can get, Leigh’s three hopeless losers are what most alienated British youth are . . . ugly, awkward, rootless, inarticulate or, in the case of Phil Daniels’s Mark, bright enough to occupy the high moral ground but too frightened of failure to make that into anything meaningful.

  Meantime also scribbles a strange footnote into the margins of pop; Graham Coxon of Blur happily admitted that his dress and demeanour during his band’s peak years was heavily influenced by Tim Roth’s Colin, an open-mouthed, spittle-flecked semi-autistic kid with learning difficulties, dressed in NHS specs and a green parka more muddy than moddy. And how the hell the b
oy made that work says something about why Blur were the best thing to happen to British guitar pop since The Smiths, who were, after all, led by a man who made glam style out of a hearing-aid. We Brits are at our best and most subversive when we align ourselves with the damaged and distressed.

  Meantime begins with one family visiting another. The boys Colin and Mark are forced to tag along with miserable mum Mavis (Ferris) and dad Frank (Robert) to the suburban home of Mavis’s sister Barbara (Bailey) and her successful husband John (Molina). Within minutes we have a complete picture of every major character quirk and every dimension of division between this family rent asunder by social mobility and lack of same. While Mavis and Barbara fight to be in control of the environment, pompous John lords it over the weaselly, sneering Frank with talk of home improvement. Mark is a permed and bespectacled Johnny Rotten with a ’70s footballer moustache, saying no to everybody and everything, intent on making everyone as uncomfortable as possible. Colin is a shuffling, confused child who shrinks away from Mavis’s offhand physical abuse like a kicked dog. The small, dark, bland interiors seethe with the conflagration of competing economic and family resentments.

  And the miracle of this scene? It’s funny. Not American Pie, snort-beer-out-of-your-nose funny . . . but comically resonant of the swirl of petty jealousy and neutered rebellion that is family life among the working and lower-middle class of England. It’s a house you’ve been to, and people you know, and, if you’re very lucky, you’re laughing at the fact that you’ve escaped. Or laughing darkly at the fact that you haven’t, not really.