Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Matt: I’m not really sure what these kids are rebelling against. Religion?

  Me: Actually, this scene [Reverend Moore is talking to a group of pensioners about the wonders of living in a small town until you die] is more deliberately scary than anything the law is threatening to do. So many American movies are terrified of small towns. Probably because all the writers live in New York and LA. On the other hand, look at this whole redneck dance bar scene. This is a Utopian vision of what a bar full of drunk country-ass shitkickers in cowboy hats would be like. Except for the total absence of black, brown or yellow faces. That’s accurate. What would’ve happened if Ren had taken them to a rave?

  Matt: Their minds would explode. That would be the best comedy scene ever. Bacon and Singer rolling into a hip hop or house club and dancing like that. Personally, I’d be happy in any bar playing Footloose by Kenny Loggins. What a song. And I love the idea of a cowboy rock shack where everybody’s just dancing and getting along. No bar fights. The floor’s clean. Hot girls dancing with fat guys. It’s a little vision of heaven. Until Willard starts a fight, of course. Lori Singer grows on you as the film goes on. She might not be conventionally that hot, but she’s a good actress playing a character with no inhibitions.

  Me: I think John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest are so key as Ariel’s parents. They are the big thing this movie has over, say, Dirty Dancing. They’re so good that they give you this huge sense of back-story: of why their lives have turned out like this, of why Beaumont is like it is. They take corny conservative Mom and Dad and give them dignity and dimensions. They have a tragic air without saying very much.

  Matt: Definitely. You buy them. The film really isn’t about dancing at all. That’s just the sideshow. It’s a film about families attempting to grow as people. And someone thought, ‘let’s have some dancing in it’.

  Me: It’s an updated ’50s teen movie about dysfunctional families and misunderstood teens. At last . . . my favourite bit of the movie: Ren teaching Willard how to dance in montage, to the strains of ‘Let’s Hear It For The Boy’ by Deniece Williams. Movie magic.

  Matt: You couldn’t get more gay if you tried.

  Me: See this bit? It’s almost like Ren has Willard on a lead . . .

  Matt: . . . and Willard is staring at Ren’s arse. Bad ’80s montages, though: fucking fantastic. Now they’re frolicking and gambolling through a field. They’re so very much in love. And look at that last Chris Penn gesture . . . ‘Take me, Ren! Take me!’ How did they get away with this?

  Me: Everybody was so hetero in the ’80s they just didn’t notice. They thought it was innocent macho horseplay. Now, here’s the bit where I think they get confused over exactly who The Reverend Moore is. On the one hand, he wants to ban all forms of hedonism, including pop music, dancing and booze. On the other . . . he’s a liberal crusader when it comes to book burning and sacking progressive English teachers. I think they needed him to shit or get off the pot at some point, repressionwise. And here’s the bit of feminist iconicness from Ariel. Chuck is beating her down but she just keeps getting up and fighting back.

  Matt: She does kind of bring it on herself, though. She didn’t need to hit him first.

  Me: Oh . . . come on. He does call her ‘a bitch in heat’!

  Matt: Ah! So we should all be beating each other up over words now, eh Dad? ‘My, you’re a horny dog.’ BOOF!!!

  Me: You’re so literal.

  Matt: Whereas, Kevin Bacon’s character is very moral. It takes him till almost the end of the movie to even kiss Ariel.

  Me: Mate . . . he’s gay. He may not know it yet. He may not fully understand it. But he’s hating every second of that snog. He’s picturing Willard.

  Matt: I’m not even gonna try to argue. He’s frolicking in the woods with his friend in a cowboy hat, who keeps dropping to his knees and beckoning his penis on. Meanwhile, this hot girl is begging him to just kiss her and all he keeps saying is, ‘Hey . . . maybe one day.’ This is a pity kiss. She’s been beaten up by her ex. Her dad hates her. ‘Oh . . . let’s do her a favour’ . . . HAHAHA!!! ‘Only fairies dance.’ You mentioned that line in Popcorn, didn’t you? One stray homophobe while everyone else in the school is going, ‘Whoo! Dancing!’

  Me: I quite like the fact that the big triumphant moment, when they win the right to hold the dance, is quite quiet and muted. Lots of conspiratorial smiling. No whooping and hollering and throwing their hats in the air. Wait a minute . . . where did all The Kids suddenly get motorbikes from?

  Matt: So these kids have all got cars, motorbikes . . . and tractors. Is this town really rich?

  Me: Beaumont must have been one of those towns that really benefited from farm subsidies.

  Matt: And the school is the dream high school. No one’s uncool. No one bullies. Everyone just wants to dance. Incidentally, Lori Singer’s dress for the dance is horrible. Whatever happened to Lori Singer?

  Me: This is a recurring theme in this book. Blah Blah is really great in this movie. And then . . . nothing. My theory with Lori Singer is, like a lot of women in Hollywood once they’re not kids anymore, she was caught between two stools. She’s not a character actress. But she isn’t pretty enough to be the romantic lead. The typical thing about lousy, one-dimensional roles for women in Hollywood movies. You’re either the sex symbol or Mom. Nothing in-between.

  Matt: The beginning of the dance, where they’re all too awkward to do anything, is hilarious. The guy who picks his nose and wipes it on his posh trousers. These kids are badly in need of liquor and drugs.

  Me: But that gives Ren the opportunity to show them how to have an urban good time . . .

  Matt: . . . By clicking his fingers. These kids have never been allowed to dance . . . yet they can break-dance. And body-pop. And do The Robot. Someone’s been living a lie.

  Me: It’s because Kevin Bacon told them they can. The citizens of Beaumont are forever waiting for a strong leader to tell them what to do next. Basically . . . Kevin Bacon or John Lithgow do something and they all fucking do it.

  Matt: Perhaps that the true message of Footloose. If anyone mildly charismatic comes along . . . follow ’em. To the ends of the Earth. Or until someone else mildly charismatic tells you to do the opposite.

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  1985

  Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson

  Dir.: Robert Zemickis

  Plot: Reagan’s America turns back the clock.

  Key line: ‘Yeah, well . . . history is gonna change.’

  Back To The Future, like a lot of the most successful ideas, came from a man holding on to a stray, random thought. Co-screenwriter Bob Gale stumbled upon his father’s high school yearbook and, as he noticed that Dad had been class president, wondered if he would have been friends with his own father if they had gone to school at the same time. From this weird rumination came the most unitshiftingest teen movie ever and highest-grossing film of 1985; a phenomenon that spawned two money-spinning sequels, fairground rides, best-selling video games and enough nerdy internet obsession to pull off the Star Wars trick and qualify as mainstream heavy-hitter and cult.

  Of course, that nice little Dad-loving genesis story doesn’t flag up Gale’s darker thoughts about time travel. Because BTTF’s main source of memorable humour runs more along the lines of: what if you copped off with your own mother when she was still young and hot?

  But all this – and the brilliant Industrial Light & Magic special effects, the parade of memorable set-pieces, the wish-fulfilment happy-ever-afters – distracts from BTTF’s true agenda. Which is providing a visual accompaniment to the Reagan administration’s populist desire to wipe the complex web of America’s triumphs and disasters of the 1960s and ’70s out of history, and turn back the clock to a semi-mythical 1950s, when America was strong, values were small-town, money was abundant, hair was short, men were men and women were grateful. If the future wants to know what America wanted to be in the mi
d 1980s it could do the hard work of reading old newspapers and writing history books. Or it could just save a lot of time and anti-spirit-of-Reagan intellect and watch Back To The Future.

  Let’s begin with Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly, possibly the only iconic teen character to be so anti-rebellious that he rejects slouching, nicotine, alcohol and sugar . . . the guy’s like a skateboarding billboard for Diet Pepsi. We know peppy Marty’s a healthy, red-blooded American male because he plays self-indulgent electric guitar, turns the collar up on his denim jacket, dreams of owning flash cars and looks at other girl’s arses while his own girlfriend is talking to him. Jennifer, along with Marty’s Mom, is one of only two vaguely developed female characters and her and Mom’s jobs are to talk to their men about their wants, needs and ambitions, being dutifully supportive, while never acknowledging that they might have any of their own. But Marty is duty-bound to zone out of Jennifer’s selfless chatter when he gets a whiff of unconquered pussy, and Jennifer just smiles gently and competes harder for his favours. She is as natural a woman as Marty is a natural man. During the movie, we learn a great deal about what Marty McFly wants. We never learn what any female character wants because it’s understood that all they want is a man.

  Before Marty changes history according to his own tastes and aspirations, the McFly family are sad and ugly because they are working class. They have a family member in jail, they speak in broad accents and Dad is bullied by the same guy who bullied him in school because his inability to mark his territory with force is a sign of irredeemable weakness. Mom is rubbish simply because she’s chubby and homely and insists on talking incessantly. They have no money and are almost presented as criminals for having failed economically.

  The new improved McFly family are happily-ever-after wonderful because they are middle class. They are wealthy enough to have acquired nice things, no one is in jail and, most importantly of all, Mom is good because she is slim. Maybe, in another potential sequel, Marty will just give her what she wants and fuck her.

  Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown is allowed to be nuts and Einstein- ugly because he has mastered nuclear technology in the era of Reagan’s Soviet-baiting ‘Star Wars’ space bombs. He is especially heroic because he cons Libyan terrorists out of bomb-making materials.

  The movie is littered with Reagan references. Perhaps they were nothing more than entertaining ‘in-jokes’, but they looks to me like deferential doffs of the cap to their great leader, who responded in kind by loving the movie so much he referenced it in a speech, as did his successor George Bush Senior.

  But, in historical revisionism terms, the most astonishing scene is the Chuck Berry bit. Chuck Berry isn’t in it, of course . . . that’s the whole point. You remember . . . Marty has to dep on guitar with the black band at the high school dance. He plays ‘Johnny B. Goode’, complete with trademark, rock guitar-inventing Berry licks and even the famous duck walk. And the bandleader Marvin Berry sneaks off stage to call his cousin Chuck and give him a blast of ‘that new sound you were looking for’. So . . . a nerdy Caucasian who thinks sugar is the work of the devil actually invented The Devil’s Music.

  I’ve never been able to watch this scene without being stunned at the chutzpah. Forget the ‘joke’ for a second: this is a movie aimed at white teenage boys for whom rock has become the only music that matters, and BTTF goes right ahead and grants those boys their dearest secret wish: a rewriting of history where the annoying truth that African-Americans invented everything that they find enjoyable is reduced to dope-smoking negroes grinning with joy as Whitey shows them the future. The evil lies in the fact that the joke is clever, and the scene rousing (Fox, incidentally, was neither singing nor playing the guitar). It makes you nod your head and tap your feet to the racist subtext. It may be the most sinister scene in movie history.

  Now, if I had use of a souped up DeLorean and was writing in the rabidly right-wing ’80s, I’d be written off as a loony leftie and accused of not having ‘balance’. So here is the balance. Gale and Zemickis went all out to make their audience feel good about themselves and did it so well – the Chuck Berry scene is counter-balanced by Goldie Wilson, the black boy who travels from sweeping up in a diner to mayoral candidate by knuckling down, working hard and pursuing that American Dream – they earn the right to slip in a few home truths here and there.

  Zemickis presented us with the difference between Hill Valley in the ’50s and the ’80s by building a pristine ’50s town square on a studio backlot and then trashing it for the ’80s scenes. This neatly reflects some sadness at the spectacle of an ’80s America where town centres are dying and the cinemas are now houses of porn and Godbothering evangelists. There’s a clever irony when those images are juxtaposed with Marty’s relief at being home: ‘Everything looks great,’ he exclaims, and the next shot is of a very modern building . . . The Bank Of America.

  Ideal Mom is now a sexual liberal, rather than the original prude. Ideal Dad is not head of a corporation, but a science-fiction writer, a creative type. But then again . . . revenge on bully Biff consists of middle-class Dad treating him like a blue-collar slave. Marty’s final triumph is having that gleaming 4×4. And, underlying absolutely everything, is a horror that presumably plays as comfort to a nation where only one in ten people ever bothers to own a passport. No matter how Marty or Doc Brown alter history, all of the movie’s characters are destined to remain in the same tiny town, knowing the same even tinier amount of people for their entire lives. Even Frank Capra injected some sense of darkness into that model of living in It’s A Wonderful Life.

  But BTTF works because it is a magnificent piece of film-making. That’s how The Man gets you . . . he shows us bright, shiny things and brainwashes the world into walking over its fellow man to get them.

  There is, for example, genuine screenwriting genius in the deus ex machina whereby a flyer given to Marty by a preservation campaigner contains the information needed to ensure our boy can return home. The flyer contains the exact time and date in 1955 when a bolt of lightning hits the town’s clock tower, and a bolt of lightning is the only thing that can generate enough power to revive the time machine. Not only does this make the plot work, it also sets up a perfect, suspenseful action set-piece while managing to say sly things about the exact nature of time, and boys who never clean their clothes nor empty their pockets, and the importance of preserving history, and even as I’m writing I am filled with envious feelings towards the problem-solving talents of really, really good storytellers.

  Because Back To The Future is a great teen-sci-fi-comedy-adventure movie. It sells you Reagan’s America with such a light touch you barely notice that that’s what it’s doing, at a moment when Reagan had barely landslided his way to a second term. And the big twist is that some of what it has to say about what America Corp can offer is true.

  At one point, Doc Brown expresses his desire to travel forward in time and see who wins the next 25 World Series. But even Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale would probably have scoffed if you’d told them that, as that last ball gets pitched in the last of those baseball games, Goldie Wilson has become President. Of course, what Barack Obama didn’t tell the American people about, along with the name change, was that his political career was all the idea of a skinny, peppy white kid wearing a life preserver.

  THE BREAKFAST CLUB

  1985

  Starring: Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy

  Dir.: John Hughes

  Plot: One learns valuable lessons at school. But not from teachers.

  Key line: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’

  The death of John Hughes in August 2009 felt significant to the over-35s. The obvious irony of a man so associated with teenagers dying relatively young – of a heart attack, aged 59 – twinned naturally with shared memories of seeing films like The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink (see here) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (see here) for the first time, and gave us one of those
short, sharp insights into our own mortality.

  Hughes is also entirely associated with the 1980s, which has been the hip decade to reference in pop culture for some years now. He directed his last film in 1991, and although he continued to write and produce through the ’90s, nothing made the impact of his ’80s movies. He slid into a reclusive semi-retirement in the first decade of the 21st century, unable, perhaps, to really excel at writing adult stories, yet equally unable to relate to The Kids any more.

  Home Alone was Hughes’s big commercial blockbuster, and he enjoyed some adult comedy success at the end of the ’80s with Planes, Trains And Automobiles and Uncle Buck. But it’s the run of mid-’80s teen comedy-dramas that have become enduring cults, defining both the ‘Me Decade’ and the art of the teen movie for many.

  The Breakfast Club remains the key Hughes film because it changed teen movies overnight. Before The Breakfast Club, the introspective, self-analytical teenager in film was always an outsider, or rebel, occasionally even a monster; a fledgling intellectual made lonely and driven crazy by insisting on thinking rather than acting. The Breakfast Club insisted that even the pretty, popular, athletic teens had ‘issues’ which could only be made bearable by talking them out, preferably with other teens. This dialogue-heavy, almost-theatrical film made teen movies into therapy. From The Breakfast Club onwards, we have expected our screen youths to be hyper-articulate about culture, the social world and, especially, themselves.

  It begins with one of the great all-time openings in teen cinema: the ludicrous ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ by Simple Minds plays, and the credits morph into a delicious ‘you grown-ups will never understand!’ quote from, of all things, ‘Changes’ by David Bowie. ‘And these children that you spit on . . .’ etc., etc.

  The black background shatters to the noise of dubwise breaking glass revealing the exterior of Shermer High School. A montage of still shots of key American high school images – the cafeteria, a piece of wood where a bored pupil has scratched ‘I’m eating my head’, vandalised lockers, ‘I don’t like Mondays’ etched into a wall, classroom, gym – ensues, while a voiceover by the as yet unseen Brian Johnson reads out the beginning of the essay that he has written as part of his Saturday detention punishment for bad deeds unknown.