Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Society leers at us through an initial gauze of typical teen movieisms thrown slightly off-kilter. Rich kid Billy, despite being both short and white, is the basketball hero of Beverly Hills Academy, which of course means that he wipes the floor with his nerdy class president rival in debate just by turning up . . . even when distracted by a mean girl flashing her skimpy briefs at him while he’s on the podium. Nevertheless, his parents don’t seem to like him, even when he throws a meathead who appears to be trying to rape his sister out of the house, and his sister, who they seem to like way too much, has big lumps throbbing away in her back when Billy helps zip up her dress. The only place Billy can take his increasing feelings of spooked alienation is the office of his therapist Dr Cleveland (Slack), who puts it all down to typical adolescent angst. And one might buy that, if Billy wasn’t catching sister Jenny (Jennings) wanking in the shower while wearing her arse and her tits on the same side of her body.

  Soon, Jenny’s apparent stalker Blanchard (Tim Bartell) has accosted Billy and played him an audio tape of what seems to be his entire family taking part in an orgy at Jenny’s ‘coming out’ party. When Billy leaves the tape with Doc Cleveland, he returns to find the tape doctored and Blanchard conveniently killed in a car accident. Society then goes on to make you snigger and puke at Billy’s quest for the ’orrible truth while simultaneously bamboozling you with exactly what gorgeous pervert Clarissa (classic seduction line: ‘How do you like your tea? Milk? Sugar? Or would you like me to pee in it?’) and her monstrous, moronic, furball-regurgitating mother have to do with it, in a brilliant B-movie that melds the bad taste aesthetics of John Waters and David Cronenberg into a messy mutant bleurghfest.

  In fact, Act One has the sun-drenched, pretty-pretty and camply over-acted aesthetic of Beverly Hills 90210 if John Waters had ever decided that his future lay in TV soap, before Act Two becomes a three-way wrestling bout between Scooby-Doo, Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers and Twin Peaks. Perfect preparation for an Act Three, where we learn that Billy has not been looking for anything. He’s been the star of a sick interactive theatre-piece where an alternative human race called The Upper Classes have been watching him attempt to fit in with their bizarre customs for 17 years until judging him ready to eat, along with Blanchard, who is not dead. Yet. Cue the scene that proves there’s something more repulsive than the blood and guts of most splatter movies.

  The good folk of Beverly Hills don’t so much eat Blanchard as absorb him while turning him inside out while he is still alive. Their faces attach to his body and stretch into alien pig snouts. They ooze into him, and the disfigured gourmets bathe in his body fat. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first saw the movie, but it’s a hell of a lot more original and genuinely nauseating than the cannibal feast one has been expecting for an hour or so. It’s the sex angle that really fucks you up, that young girls are gleefully writhing in human goo with fat, ugly old men. The spectacle reaches its peak when the old Judge who leads the society gives poor Blanchard a fist-fuck you’ll never forget. Eewww! really doesn’t cover it.

  As Billy tries to escape, the Whitney family home becomes a house of horrors where every sight is worse than the last. The effects are so disgusting and maniacal that they can only have been devised by a man called Screaming Mad George. The man is a genius. But one who I never want to meet alone in a dark room without witnesses.

  Billy, aided by Clarissa, her monster mom and his friend Milo, has to escape by way of what seems to be a futile, sado-masochistic fistfight. The way he turns it round has to be seen to be believed and I ain’t even going to try and describe the levels of sick and wrong.

  Pamela Matheson almost steals the show as the lovably grotesque Mrs Carlyn. But the stars are undoubtedly Screaming Mad George’s make-up bag of horrors and Yuzna’s surreal switch from camp teen thriller spoof to, arguably, the most repulsive 30 minutes ever put on celluloid. Watch. But don’t eat beforehand.

  1990s

  EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

  1990

  Starring: Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Vincent Price

  Dir.: Tim Burton

  Plot: The world was never meant for one as beautiful as Johnny Depp.

  Key line: ‘If he weren’t up there now, I don’t think it would be snowing. Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it.’

  I actually had to have a heated debate with myself about whether Tim Burton’s greatest work was a teen movie. Then The Missus interrupted before me and I came to blows, pointed out the whole angst/alienation/doomed first love metaphor, reasoned that the story is told from a teenage girl’s viewpoint, and rested her case. This made me very happy, because Edward Scissorhands is one of my favourite films, and one that repeatedly accesses my inner tortured goth and shows it pictures of abandoned puppies in black eyeliner until it blubs like a little bitty baby.

  First off: I realise I’ve pulled this gambit already – way back in the West Side Story entry (see here) – but the list of actors that could have played everyone’s favourite Punkenstein monster is just too weird to ignore. Let’s get the probably apocryphal one out of the way first: rumours, unsubstantiated by Burton, have always persisted that first choice was Michael Jackson. Now, I get why this urban myth persists. Jacko was a real-life Edward: black man-turned pale-skinned alien, body and face made by surgery, permanently startled look, attempted to present himself as too innocent for this world. But a cursory watch of The Wiz and Moonwalker (see Popcorn) confirms that he couldn’t act. And Tim Burton was fond of actors. And how much would you have had to pay the mad fucker to be anything other than the ludicrous ‘King Of Pop’ figure he was by 1990? And I’m getting out of here before I say something I regret about the sickening, sentimental reaction to his death from people who wouldn’t have let the guy within 10 miles of their own kids.

  Nope, the confirmed ones are interesting enough without fantasising about the fanciful. Take Robert Downey Jr. Now, the guy definitely has the acting chops and the built-in bizarro. But one suspects that the possibility of the now cleaned-up superstar taking enough drugs to wander into one of the houses in Lutz, Florida (where much of Edward Scissorhands was shot) and clamber into bed with the kids might have made him difficult to insure.

  Tom Hanks was mooted, and was obviously the safest bet. But he turned it down for . . . Bonfire Of The Vanities! HAHAHA!!! The greatest compliment you can pay everyone’s fave nice-guy thesp is that his career hardly missed a beat over that comically bad decision.

  Next up is . . . William Hurt. Yes . . . William Hurt. The same William Hurt who was 40 years old in 1990. One can only imagine that having done a gay cross-dresser in Kiss Of The Spider-Woman had immediately qualified the annoying ham for anything involving heavy make-up and being abnormal in middle-American terms. I’m actually genuinely disturbed by my mental image of Hurt as Edward Scissorhands. Maybe Family Guy should give that skit a go.

  Which leaves only one. You’ve guessed who it is, haven’t you? Burton talked to Tom Cruise about the role and, to be absolutely fair to California’s most admired Robert Smith clone, did so reluctantly at the behest of his paymasters, what with Cruise being The Hottest Actor In The World Right Now right then. Apparently the collaboration was brought to an abrupt and propitious halt when the grinny Scientologist asked if the film could be rewritten to have a happy ending. I’ll leave it there.

  So Burton took a chance on a pretty 27-year-old failed rock star who had risen to fame in a truly dodgy-sounding US ‘teen cop’ show called 21 Jump Street and whose movie experience largely consisted of being sucked into a bed and blown back out as a fountain of blood (see A Nightmare On Elm Street, here). And what a chance, eh? Johnny Depp made himself into everyone’s favourite actor and studly sex-muffin while wearing a costume and make-up that took two hours a day to put on (and around 30 seconds for Winona Ryder to tear off, one assumes, pruriently).

  If you haven’t seen this movie – well, actually, don’t sit around reading, for goodn
ess sake! Go watch it. Now, dammit!!! – then Edward Scissorhands is a modern fairy-tale, told by an old lady to her grandchildren, and set in a bland suburb based on Burton’s childhood home of Santa Clarita Valley, California. Edward is a boy who has been made by a crazy inventor, played by Vincent Price in his final movie role. Edward has scissory appendages because his ‘father’ died suddenly of a heart attack before he could give his creation human hands, leaving the boy, who looks like an extreme gothic teen, permanently incomplete.

  He lives alone in a spooky castle overlooking the town until Peg Boggs (Wiest, wonderful as the nicest Mom in teen movie history) discovers him while doing her Avon-selling rounds. Heartbroken by the idea of a boy living alone, she brings him home. He and her teen daughter, Kim (Ryder), fall in love. But the path of that stuff runs even less smoothly when holding hands involves unwanted amputation and many blood transfusions.

  Meanwhile, the neighbours, who, like all small-towners, cannot accept anyone or anything different, react to Edward with horror, then curiosity, and then a willingness to use the boy for his extraordinary hedge and hair-clipping skills, and even, in the very funny shape of Kathy Baker’s Joyce Monroe, as a sexual exotic.

  Edward’s nemesis is Kim’s ex, boorish jock Jim (Hall), who cons his ghostly rival into crime and ends up dead. The good neighbours become an angry mob. Edward has no choice but to leave Kim for ever and return to his isolated castle, before a society that doesn’t understand converts him into kitchenware. By the tale’s end, we realise that the teller is Kim, now an old lady and still broken-hearted over her immortal first love, who must spend his eternity alone, sculpting ice with his scissorhands, giving the town snow. As Ryder, in outrageous senior citizen make-up, delivers the last beautiful, bereft line of dialogue, you realise that the film hasn’t just been a perfectly realised metaphor for outsider teen angst and doomed teen romance taken to a poetic extreme; Edward Scissorhands is also about the sad inevitability of ageing, and the film’s afterburn isn’t Edward eternally alone in his tower, but Kim Boggs, living and soon dying, with the memory of a perfect lover she could never keep, too ashamed of her appearance now to contemplate seeing him again.

  This compelling idea of the woman who grows old and the man who stays young – a subconscious acknowledgement of humanity’s completely different treatment of ageing in men and women – recurs repeatedly in romantic teen fiction, and Twilight (see here) is just as much Son of Edward Scissorhands as Daughter of Buffy. Like Edward Cullen, this Edward is an exaggeration of the weird, cool, pale boy at the back of the class, a dangerous alien sex object who only one girl – that would be you – understands. The love is doomed from the start, and, like Angel in Buffy and Edward in Twilight, there are fundamental reasons why your love can’t be consummated, and those reasons are entwined with death, making the boy both safe and frightening all at the same time; a perfect metaphor for the raging war between hormonal desire and fear of sex that every young girl must overcome. At least, so I’m guessing. I’m a boy, in case you were wondering by this time.

  Most of the movies in this book are flawed. That’s one of the things that makes teen movies so lovable, the way film writers and directors have to use the tension between personal stories and exploiting a market, serving an audience who are both cynical and easily bored, often on small budgets or under pressure from producers who always think a lighter, happier tone makes more money.

  But Edward Scissorhands is an exception. I’m not sure if a perfect movie exists, but I know this one doesn’t hit one false note. The cast are excellent. The production design and visual palette are extraordinary, with suburban settings cleverly made more comically grotesque than alien creature or spooky castle. The dialogue is funny and gloriously camp without veering into smartarsery. The film moves effortlessly from a modern take on Charlie Chaplin and ’50s sitcom and soap, into darkness, violence and haunting sadness without leaving the viewer disoriented. And Danny Elfman’s beautiful and instantly recognisable score manipulates your emotions utterly but forgivably, finding a singular sound made from equal parts Prokofiev, nursery rhyme, Disney cartoon standards and the theme from the first series of Star Trek.

  But, in the end . . . it’s Johnny Depp. I mean, really. How does he give a grotesque and comic creation so much emotion, particularly as he has to play the whole movie with his eyes in permanent shock mode and his mouth pouting like a duck’s asshole? The whole performance is like some kind of physical miracle, with so few words needed that you begin to question all those cultural quips about how awful mime is.

  No wonder Burton and Depp went on to form a creative partnership lasting eight movies over 21 years and counting. Edward Scissorhands was Burton’s own teen angst made into the stuff of myth and legend. A gothic youth misfit in wealthy WASP California, Burton felt that he was so unpopular and alienated that he couldn’t reach out and touch people as a kid. He came up with the metaphor to match his miserable memories, and urged screenwriter Caroline Thompson to take his look and experiences and come up with an allegory that blended Burton’s resentment of jocks and babes with Frankenstein, Beauty And The Beast, vampire lore and Edgar Allan Poe . . . and then watched as something that pretentious was given substance and soul by this unlikely genius who had spent his twenties thus far doing dumbass teen fodder. Hell . . . I would have married him.

  And, actually, if you nip now into Google Images and take a quick look at a picture of Depp as Edward Scissorhands right next to Helena Bonham-Carter . . . maybe he did.

  DAZED AND CONFUSED

  1993

  Starring: Jason London, Sasha Jenson, Rory Cochrane, Wiley Wiggins, Milla Jovavich, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck

  Dir.: Richard Linklater

  Plot: The post-grunge American Graffiti.

  Key line: ‘It’s like the every-other-decade theory: The ’50s were boring; the ’60s rocked; and the ’70s, oh God, they obviously suck, right? Maybe the ’80s will be radical. I figure we’ll be in our twenties . . . Hey, it can’t get any worse.’

  Richard Linklater’s second film marks a sea-change in teen movies. But it is also a fascinating bundle of contradictions. It looks and behaves like an independent film, but was financed by Universal studios. It was hugely influential but resolutely bombed at the box office. And it is, at one and the same time, a virtual remake of American Graffiti (see here) while negating everything American Graffiti stands for.

  In George Lucas’s 1973 hit, the director revisits his own teenage years to tell a story about one night in the lives of four school-leaving teen boys. The tale is played out to a soundtrack of 1962 hits; period clothes, cars, architecture and slang are scrupulously revived and revivified; and the movie effortlessly evoked nostalgia for Americans of his own age while also entertaining ’70s teens with plenty of sex, swearing, comedy, romance and neat stuff with flashy motors. Rather than following one linear plot, the movie flits around from one tale to another, presenting life more accurately as a series of vignettes. Because the budget was small, the film was dependent on strong, funny dialogue and the excellence of a virtually unknown ensemble cast.

  But the Lucas agenda was full of regret and suppressed anger, because the film made an argument that life was more innocent, and therefore better, before the advent of the youth-driven cultural rebellions of the 1960s. While the meat of the movie was all fun without consequences, the revelation of the main characters’ destinies provided a dark postscript that insisted that this moment in their lives was as good as it got.

  In Richard Linklater’s 1993 miss, the director revisits his own teenage years to tell a story of one night in the lives of a group of teen boys and girls who have just split high school for the summer holidays. The tale is played out to a soundtrack of 1976 heavy rock hits; period clothes, cars, architecture and slang are scrupulously revived and revivified, and the movie sought to evoke nostalgia for Americans of his own age while also entertaining ’90s teens with plenty of sex, swearing, comedy, romance, violence and
neat stuff with less flashy motors. Because the budget was small, the film was dependent on strong, funny dialogue and the excellence of a virtually unknown ensemble cast.

  But the Linklater agenda contained no regret or suppressed anger because the film made an argument that life was more cynical, and therefore better, after the advent of the youth-driven cultural rebellions of the 1960s. The meat of the movie insists that all teen fun has consequences, and that some of it is really no fun at all, because being a teenager involves being around teenagers who are far nastier than you. And the movie gives no clues at all to the destinies of its characters, because it doesn’t care. When you’re young, you live in the moment, and the future is largely unthinkable, and if you knew it, it probably wouldn’t make any difference to your immediate priorities: sex, booze, drugs and trying to avoid getting the shit kicked out of you while retaining your dignity in front of boys you look up to and girls you want to look up at.

  Moreover, while any kid seeing American Graffiti in 1973 couldn’t help but notice just how different pre-Beatles kids looked to them, and inevitably felt they were watching their parents, any kid seeing Dazed And Confused couldn’t help but be struck by how little difference there was between a teen of ’76 and their own long-haired, baggily jeaned, rock-loving and dope-smoking selves. Linklater uses his own childhood to talk to contemporary Cobain kids about theirs, and, with a central story that revolves around one pretty, strictly non-meathead jock’s refusal to be bullied into temperance by his football coach, gives a big thumbs-up to the ’60s most enduring achievement: the empowerment of the young to make their own choices and refuse to follow the diktats of authoritarian elders. In literal terms, Randy Floyd’s refusal to sign ‘the pledge’ may not quite carry the risk of burning your Vietnam draft card. But, once you’ve followed Dazed And Confused’s low-key conflict between easy-going long-haired bohemians and short-haired, hierarchy-obsessed buffoons for 97 minutes – it comes close.