Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies

by Jonathan Bernstein

Overview

Jon Bernstein, film critic for Spin magazine critiques his favorite teen movies from the golden age of the'80s. The Brat Pack and their contemporaries have grown up, but celluloid has them flickering forever, angst-ridden, haunted, guileless, cocky, stripped to their briefs, and all dressed up "pretty in pink."

"[T]his is really a fan's, not a film student's, book, and as such, a lot of fun." - Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466890626
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	230
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Bernstein is the former film critic for Spin magazine and the author of Pretty in Pink.
Jonathan Bernstein is an aviation author, historian, former attack helicopter pilot and current director of the US Army Air Defense Artillery Museum. He is the author of three Osprey Combat Aircraft volumes, and has also had books published by Squadron/Signal Publications and Elephant Books. Jonathan is a frequent contributor to National Guard Magazine, Supply Line and Armor Journal.

Read an Excerpt

Pretty in Pink

The Golden Age of Teenage Movies

---

By Jonathan Bernstein

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1997 Jonathan Bernstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9062-6

---

CHAPTER 1

Gross Misconduct

Grossouts, Goofballs, Virgins, Vomit, Boners and Bikinis

If you remember the 1986 Alan Alda film Sweet Liberty for anything other than it being 107 minutes snatched cruelly out of your life, chances are you'll remember it for the scene in which an unctuous director (played by Saul Rubinek) outlined his three laws of moviemaking in the eighties. To succeed in the current environment, he explained, a film must contain three crucial elements. It must feature 1) Property being destroyed, 2) Authority being defied, and 3) Someone being stripped naked. The listing of these tenets was intended as a jab at the prevailing climate wherein taste, irony, subtlety and Alan Alda movies were nearing extinction and bodily emissions were received by paying audiences as manna from on high.

Whenever I peruse an op-ed piece by some concerned commentator expressing qualms about the pernicious influence of contemporary pop culture and labeling items like Dumb and Dumber and Beavis and Butthead key culprits in the shaping of an even more brutal and stupid America, I find it hard to resist the urge to bawl: "Have a good snooze, Van Winkle?" Where was this handwringer a decade ago when movie screens were awash in rivers of regurgitation, when pee, snot and doody flowed freely and when decent upstanding citizens could, at any given moment, be caught whacking off in the can?

Just as The Beatles had Motown and the girl groups on which to construct their foundations, so the teen movies of the eighties had Animal House and Caddyshack. From the former film came the irresponsible flinging around of food that millions of starving children could put to good use and the knowledge that one's elders and betters existed to be mocked, humiliated and ultimately destroyed. From the latter came a floating chocolate log. From such heady influences came the ingredients for the species of movie comedy labeled by some Grossout, others Goofball and still others, Tits 'n' Zits. The basic construct of this subgenre seemed to have been carved in stone: a group of young males—stud, sensitive, blimp, blustering but inexperienced foul mouth—in feverish pursuit of sex. While slews of semisoftcore films adhered rigidly to this blueprint, there were others that paid lip service to the concept of responsibility, attempting to teach life lessons along the way. Sometimes the sensitive guy would find true love and the stud would come to the rueful conclusion that hurried, heartless, empty animal intercourse is an unfulfilling experience. The fat guy and the buffoon learn nothing in any telling of the scenario. The examples we will relive in this chapter all received theatrical release, but the most appropriate environment to appreciate them was a darkened living room, decorated by the detritus of convenience food, in the company of mumbling drunks with hands shoved down their pants.

As previously intimated, the shadows of Animal House andCaddyshack loom large over the eighties, but sizeable as their influence was, the form and function of the Grossout, the Goofball and the T 'n' Z was defined by two pioneering teen comedies. These we shall salute in the following subsection.

Original Sins

Deep in the Florida Everglades lurks a ramshackle cat-house, a grime-caked white-trash sin bin, overseen by an irascible slagheap answering to the name of Mr. Porky.

Porky's (1981) was the Pulp Fiction of its day inasmuch as it altered the notion of what could be put onscreen in the name of entertainment, and its influence could be felt in lesser works for years to come. Facing what would seem to be insurmountable odds—low budget, no stars, Canadian origins and a collection of reviews that were less hostile than disbelieving—Porky's made an unexpectedly big stink at the box office, providing the first slab of concrete evidence that the adolescent consumers of the eighties were dancing to the beat of a different drum. Ironically, this founding father of squalid sex comedies isn't even based in the era for which it would write the rule book. Directed by Bob Clark, who also has a preteen classic to his name in A Christmas Story, Porky's is set in 1954 in Angel Beach, South Florida, where a bunch of Neanderthal hose monkeys—Tommy the bête noire of gym mistress Miss Balbricker, Tim the raging anti-Semite, Mickey the redneck, Meat ("Why do they call you Meat?," dimples an unsuspecting ingenue), Billy and the elfin comic relief Pee Wee—are foaming with testosterone. Desirous of release, they travel 70 miles away from the safety of their beach town to Porky's shack of ill repute, where they are swiftly relieved of their cash and then their confidence. First, Porky has them dropped in the foul, croc-populated waters of the Everglades, then his brother, the sheriff, smashes their headlights and extracts a stinging fine. That may be the plot of the movie, but that's not what it'sabout.

From its opening moments, focusing on the towering edifice that is Pee Wee's morning wood (he injures himself rolling over to hide the beast from his mother who suddenly walks into the bedroom, then he whips out a growth chart and is crestfallen, certain that his endowment is shrinking), Porky's either had you nailed to your seat snorting with amazed laughter or fumbling for your car keys. If you remained in a seated position you paid witness to the ground being broken in the Grossout Hall of Fame. How low could Porky's go? In the first act, the ensemble's smuggest pair of sadists, Billy and Tommy, play a ridiculously intricate prank on their compadres, luring them into the backwoods with arousing promises of the skilled ministrations of sex professional Cherry Forever. Seconds after the dupes have dropped trou for inspection by the wry hooker (to Pee Wee: "What do you use for a jockstrap? A peanut shell and a rubber band?"), they're chased naked and screaming into the night by a cleaver-wielding black man splattered with what looks to be the blood of Billy and Tommy. Long after the two wags have fessed up to their complex scam, a screeching Pee Wee is still scampering in a pink and shriveled state down the highway till he's pulled over by cops who smirkingly demand to see his driver's license.

Then there is the running gag of junior gym teacher Coach Bracket's desperation to discover the reason his shimmering distaff counterpart Miss Honeywell (Kim Cattrall, the only Porky's player to go on to anything like regular employment) is nicknamed Lassie. He finds out when he drags her up to the boys' locker room and she becomes so howlingly inflamed by the torrid aroma of lingering boy sweat that he has to cram a jockstrap in her mouth. But more, much more than this, the defining Porky's set piece, the moment burned into the memory circuits of a generation, and the moment which threw down the gauntlet to a million villains looking to get into the teensploitation business, was the legendary girls' shower room scene. This is where Angel Beach's roaring boys squat peering through holes punched in the walls behind the shower room, thus affording them a free, full-on, towel-flicking, buttocks-lathering peep show. "I've never seen so much wool," hyperventilates Pee Wee. "You could knit a sweater. It's got to be the biggest beaver shot in the history of Florida." At that exact moment, the squashy rump of a big-boned bather blocks Pee Wee's view. "Move it, lard ass!" he bawls, breaking the boys' cover.

A salient reminder that we're observing another age comes from the girls' reaction. They like the fact that they're being watched, posturing for their voyeurs' entertainment. Tommy responds by sticking first his waggling tongue, then his wiggling dick through the peephole. He fails to see the entrance of his eternally forbidding nemesis Miss Balbricker, who dispatches her charges. It takes a few moments for Tommy's organ to come between her crosshairs, but when she spots it (it's cheerfully chirping, "I'm Polly the Penis and I just love to have fun"), she takes immediate and decisive action. She grabs hard and holds on with a double-handed grip. The Big Yank is followed by a scene with Balbricker in the dean's office demanding justice ("I've got him now and I'm not going to let him slip through my fingers") in which the actors portraying teachers are called upon to pantomime hysteria for so long and so loudly that they must have been coughing up blood and particles of lung by the time "Cut" was called.

Porky's thin sliver of plot contained its more serious passages. Principally, there was the case of Tim. Pounded and abused by his leather-clad, boozing badass dad ("He tore a guy's ear off"), Tim attempts to take out his frustrations on Jewish high-schooler Brian Schwarz, but Brian is no whining Woody Allen asthmatic type. He shrugs off Tim's catcalls of "kite" (sic), but doesn't stand down from a schoolyard face-off. "When you're Jewish you either learn to fight or you take a lot of shit. I don't like to take shit." So saying, he flattens Tim. This provides the impetus for Tim to reject his loser of an old man and bond with the former target of his prejudice. Brian is also instrumental in the movie's climax. Still smarting from the rough handling he received at Porky's hands, Mickey the redneck sets out for the Everglades to seek revenge. He returns a bleeding pulp. His colleagues decide payback is overdue. Utilizing a combination of trucks, boats and chainsaws, they destroy Porky's. (A moment of pathos ensues when the owner surveys the wreckage of his establishment and wheezes: "It's gone. Porky's is gone.") There's a chase back to Angel Beach where Mickey's brother, the sheriff, shoots out the lights of Porky's car and extracts a fine. The conquering heroes are met by a marching band and the cheers of their peers. As the movie concludes, Pee Wee almost gets laid.

When set against the welter of soggy sex farces that would spring up in its wake, Porky's seems like a model of restraint and even, kind of ... classy. Atrocities like the Screwballs and Hardbodies series were packed with 28 year olds grimly going through the teen pussyhound motions. The cast of Porky's actually seemed to be enjoying themselves. Dan Monahan, the sprite who played Pee Wee, brought a giddiness to a role that, in the hands of other actors, would have you renouncing your membership in the species. Although a Guy Movie to the nth degree, it boasted a couple of memorable female roles. Canuck screen vet Susan Clark strolled sardonically through her scene as Cherry Forever. (About Pee Wee, she sneers: "We're going to have to tie a board across his behind or he's liable to fall in.") Kaki Hunter, who plays Wendy Williams, the inspiration for Pee Wee's attempted devirginization, performs the same function in Porky's that Julia Louis-Dreyfus does on Seinfeld. On absolutely equal terms with the boys, she's able to mock and humor them, even when they pull the geriatric workplace prank of asking Wendy to find a friend of theirs. Her unfazed shrug after repeatedly yelling "Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?" is a charming moment.

Two sequels, Porky's 2: The Next Day (1983) and Porky's Revenge (1985), followed. The first revolves around the boys' attempt to save their drama class production of Romeo and Juliet after a coalition of Christians, KKK members and city councilmen object to a Seminole Indian being cast as the male lead. The second had Mr. Porky (absent from The Next Day) return with the intention of blackmailing the school's basketball coach for gambling debts. By this time, most of the cast looked like they were only sticking around to pay for their own kids' expensive orthodontic work. Though Porky's was eventually superseded by a decade's worth of teen comedies, whenever a locker-room raid was on the horizon, its imprint was unmistakable.

* * *

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) is more than just a Grossout pioneer. In its variegated vignettes are many moods, nuances and flavors, almost as many as in the components of the Sherman Oaks Galleria in which its ensemble lurks and works. But if you consider the scenes which made the biggest and most immediate audience impressions, and those which still have influence at this very moment, you will think of 1) Sean Penn saying "You dick!" to Ray Walston, 2) Phoebe Cates fellating a carrot and 3) Judge Reinhold wanking in the crapper. So it is that Fast Times takes its place in the pantheon.

In the seventies, Cameron Crowe was one of Rolling Stone's star reporters. He was 16, an almost unheard-of age at which to hold down a position of influence at a magazine staffed by wizened men of letters. But Crowe radiated a boundless enthusiasm for the stuff that made the graybeards wince. The Eagles, Frampton, Fleetwood Mac, you name it, he raved about it, and without the ironic distance that makes today's seventies boosters such insufferable company. The luster of Stevie Nicks was quick to dim and Crowe discovered what it takes most American rock writers a lifetime to learn: theirs is no fit gig for a grown-up. He left behind the pressures of the bimonthly deadline and, for the purposes of a book project, went into deep cover at an unnamed American high school (thought to be Clairemont High in San Diego), still fresh-faced enough at 21 to pass unnoticed among the student body. A year's worth of observed and overheard language, fashion and lifestyle choices formed the content of the Teen Like Me exposé Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The book quickly became a movie. Written by Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, Fast Times was a launching pad for a shoal of young actors including Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Eric Stoltz, Forest Whitaker, Anthony Edwards and Nicolas Cage.

Establishing a teen movie convention, it takes place in a world entirely uninhabited by parents. Establishing another convention, it takes place in a world almost solely inhabited by whites. (The awed reaction to Forest Whitaker's fierce football star is almost subtle compared to the sense of Otherness with which blacks are regarded in subsequent films.) It is, of course, most immediately memorable for Sean Penn's audience-slaughtering performance as the sweet-natured, brain-fried surf savant, Jeff Spicoli. Spicoli—the man who, while talking on the phone, will beat himself about the head with a shoe ("That was my skull, I'm so wasted"). Spicoli—the man who will wreck Charles Jefferson's car but show no fear, even though Jefferson's younger brother predicts certain death ("Relax, my old man is a TV repairman, he's got an ultimate set of tools. I can fix it"). Spicoli—the man with a respect for history ("So what this Jefferson dude was saying is, We left this England place because it was bogus. If we don't get us some cool dudes, pronto, we'll be bogus, too ..."). From his choking enunciation to his beautifully staged classroom duels with Ray Walston's Mr. Hand ("C, D, F, F ... what are you people, on dope?"), Spicoli is up there with Belushi's Bluto as a bad influence of heroic proportions. The character has continued to reverberate down the years, detectable in the personas of Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth, Pauly Shore and Kato Kaelin.

If Spicoli was Fast Times' hit, Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy Hamilton was its heart. "Brad, your sister's turning into a fox," observe associates of senior Judge Reinhold as his little sib passes by. And therein lies her dilemma. While simmering with womanly desire, she's still awkward and self-conscious (and still packing a little baby fat; a pre-Madonna pot pokes out now and then). Her best friend Linda (Phoebe Cates), the epitome of sophistication and experience, is appalled at Stacy's late development ("God, Stace, you're fifteen!"). Attempting to fall into step with the sexual status quo, she gives her number to a sluglike salesman who eats at the mall pizzeria where she works. He takes her to the make-out rendezvous, The Point, and slobbers on her while she stares at the ceiling. She agrees to go on a date with bashful Mark "Rat" Ratner (Brian Backer), a colleague at both Ridgemont High and the mall (he's the assistant to the assistant manager at the multiplex). The Rat is buoyed with advice from his weasely friend Mike Damone (Robert Romanus) the scalper ("When it comes to making out, whenever possible put on side one of Led Zeppelin 4"), but blows the date big time, taking Stacy to a swank eatery and then forgetting his wallet. Nevertheless, she asks him back to her home (her parents are—of course!—away for the weekend). They sit in her bedroom leafing through a photo album and then she offers herself to him. He starts to respond, then makes a mumbling excuse and flees her bedroom. It's too much for him!

Stacy rebounds to Mike, whose professional gregariousness ("Can you honestly tell me that you forgot the magnetism of Robin Zander or the charisma of Rick Neilsen? I Want You To Want Me? The Dream Police?") seems to cross out the possibility of his being clumsy or inexperienced. In the event, he knocks her up. Although he grudgingly agrees to give her a lift to the abortion clinic, he leaves her in the lurch. It's left to brother Brad, whom she tells she's going bowling, to take her. When she emerges, Brad's waiting for her, sympathetic and nonjudgmental.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Pretty in Pink by Jonathan Bernstein. Copyright © 1997 Jonathan Bernstein. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction: Loners, Stoners, Princesses, Cheerleaders, Geeks, Jocks and Dweebs
Ch. 1 Gross Misconduct: Grossouts, Goofballs, Virgins, Vomit, Boners and Bikinis
Ch. 2 Dead Teenagers: Boogeymen, Bloodbaths, Slashers, Psychos and Screaming Coeds
Ch. 3 "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies." The John Hughes Movies
Ch. 4 True Romance: Love and Affection, Hopeless Devotion and Unrequited Infatuation
Ch. 5 Brats Out of Hell: The Rapid Rise and Long, Slow Fall of the Brat Pack
Ch. 6 Wired: Arcade Rats, Science Fair Freaks, Time Travelers, Hackers and Teenage Geniuses
Ch. 7 Boys to Men: Hoodlums, Heartthrobs, Yuppies, Preppies, Sportos and Streetfighters
Ch. 8 Girls on Film: Heathers, Whores, Babysitters, Bitches, Sorority Sisters and Sluts
Ch. 9 We Got the Beat: The Ultimate Eighties Teen Movie Mix Tape
Ch. 10 The Next Generation: Neurotics, Psychotics, Weirdos, Underachievers and Would-be Teen Idols
Ch. 11 End of an Era: Slackers, Students, Pre-teens, Post-twenties, Kids and Clueless
Ch. 12 Don't You Forget About Me: Where Are They Now?