Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. I'm Chase Paduzniak here with my co-host Sam McElhaga. Thumbs up. Oh my gosh, 100%. It's because it's Good Friday and I know what my Lord is doing for me today and I need to do something for him and that's to pronounce Sam's name correctly.
Speaker: ah So I have to say this this was my pick for sort of a solo outing. And I usually despise Cameron Crowe, who wrote this movie. I don't like most of his films. This might be the only one I can tolerate.
Speaker: And Sam, it does not sound like you had the same ah experience. Yeah. mean I don't know if it's just like burnout and exhaustion that made made me sort of hate it. But yeah, I hated it. Yeah.
Speaker: It's weird because it's not like a snobbery about the genre of like high school movies, right? i can Yeah. I yeah have known in my time to enjoy Superbad, to enjoy a Clueless, which is by the same director. But yeah, i just it felt like like a rambling and non-linear, but not in like an intentional way. And...
Speaker: I don't know. like The characters felt like completely undeveloped and um the stakes were very low, but not in like again like not in an intentional way of like, oh, we're we're doing like a realism thing here where we sort of remove the Hollywood stakes and show you a real... like It didn't feel like cinema verite or like fly on the wall.
Speaker: it just Yeah, I don't know. it just its i don't think it knew what it wanted to be. and I do need to come in there and say that aside from being preserved by the Library of Congress for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance, it is a movie famously that Cameron Crowe wrote after disguising himself as a high school student and just observing California high schoolers.
Speaker: Which is in and of itself is so odd. Well, it's a very Gen X approach. it will a Yeah, it's like kind of gonzo journalism, but like the the method I don't dispute the methodology, I just dispute the ends of said methodology. like yeah like I don't go undercover, like flying the wall journalism is stuff something that I've done, and um yeah it can be very useful, but like that the object of said investigation is just like, what why?
Speaker: well But that actually, I think, gets at why this movie fits for the purposes of this podcast, because the 80s and ninety s are the home of the teen movie, like as a genre, when the high school movie, the idea of high school is this. Just so just quickly, I'm just imagining Cameron Crowe dressed up as a Monty Burns, dressed up as Jimbo James, like a three-way meta sort of funnel. It makes me think of Homer Simpson going up to the movie theater and saying, hello, I'm Mr. Burns. The guy goes, okay, just tell me your first name, Mr. Burns. He goes, I don't know. All that would go back to college to the nuclear engineering, he just screams nerd, which is like a riff on Animal House, right? Yeah. Like the 1980s kind of college movie. Yeah, I mean, I i guess that I maybe harbor some sort of snobbery around the high school genre in the sense that maybe I secretly think a little bit that it's like an appeal to people who peaked in high school.
Speaker: And I'm probably not yet far removed enough from ah high school to feel that particularly nostalgic about it. Well, this must be very different than your high school experience. This is a public high school in you know in California, so I have to imagine...
Speaker: I got the the benefit of both going to, as we call it, comprehensive school up until 15, 16, and then going to, as we call it in the UK, public school ah from 16 to 18. So I had sort of both experiences. um Some similarities of like comp like a kind of British comprehensive school. and I went to one in the South, on the South Coast, which is probably the closest you're going to get to California. Yeah. The saddest thing you've said since this started.
Speaker: Yes. Which I should caveat is still very, very far. But yeah, that I mean, like, that I suppose the the one saving grace of the high school film genre is the kind of tropes that are played on, sort of developed through this kind the canon, right?
Speaker: Which is kind of the voiceover, the narration of the kind of the the central character, the sort of montage vignette bit where they sort of break down the social groups on the ah the canteen. cafeteria tables, you know, the jocks, the nerds, as very sort of like an interest in archetypes.
Speaker: And like, you know, how those things are established and how they're subverted, I guess, can be kind of enjoyable as a sort of way to switch off your brain. um Yeah, it was interesting this film in the sense that like if we didn't get into the generational discourse, it, I think compared, compared to like a later sort of millennial touchstone film, like super bad, the characters in this felt much, much older. Like it could have been, if you sort of weren't watching properly or doing something on your phone, you could almost mistake it for a college movie in the sense that it's if effectively just like 15, 16 year olds driving around.
Speaker: Effectively, we like, mini-adults, which I found very, very strange, I suppose. One, from a cultural perspective of the UK, like, that's not happening as a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old in the UK. And then secondly, I suppose, from a generational perspective, I think, yeah, the high school movie of the sort of late two thousand twenty ten s I think it's much more interested in immaturity rather than of maturity in high school students. I'm thinking of Superbad, the Joan of the Hills character who obsessively draws like more and more elaborate and of Picasso-esque cocks.
Speaker: the entirety of the film. And he has to go to therapy for it. Yeah. Which, like, there's nothing quite like that, like, yeah, even, like, the topic of sex is, like, quite serious and earnest in this film.
Speaker: Like, it's not played for laughs, it's not, like, disgusting or visceral or sort Rablasean in Affect, it's quite sort of straight down the line. See, I had no idea what to make make of this film, either from a sort of aesthetic perspective or from like a sociological perspective. I was just baffled by it. Well, we should probably say it's Fast Times of Ridgemont High. i mean, hit that should be clear from the title, I'm sure. But, well, it's funny because Crow, I think here, and Heckerling, who's the director, Amy Heckerling, with him,
Speaker: seem to have wanted to make quote-unquote more realistic high school film, which I think is part of actually what you're maybe picking up on in the the greater sense desire for maturity. So like in this period, right we've got kind of two different sorts of high school film.
Speaker: You've got your Porky's style high school film, which i don't know you've ever seen Porky's, but it is... no no. It is the kind of movie that if you made it now, the director and writer would need to be publicly executed in order to sort of like bring peace back to society. Like it's it's a movie set in the 50s about just very horny high schoolers who just go around being extremely horny. And like that is, there's no seriousness to it.
Speaker: It is just like, we're going to go into the gym and find a little hole in the girls' locker room and look through it and be like, whoa, hubba hubba. Yeah. Well, this is the strange thing about Fast Times at Richmond High.
Speaker: It was a film about sex that like felt, one, not very countercultural in a period that was ah in the midst of Reaganism. Obviously, you've had the sexual revolution in the 60s, but we're kind of like in a period of counter-movement against that.
Speaker: And yet, that the kind of like sexual liberation that the characters kind of take for granted. like There's a part where a 15-year-old girl has to have an abortion, and it's not even presented as a moral issue.
Speaker: yeah in a way that it might have been in the ninety s or in the fifty s In 1984, what were we in? The movie came out in 82, so we're in like the very early 80s. Yeah, so we're in like Reagan's America right now. and One of the the the female leads so gets pregnant around 15, and yeah she has to get an abortion. And there's no moral quandary about this.
Speaker: or moral dialogue around it. It's just taken for granted. It's barely a plot point in a way. It's not even at the hinge of the film in any sense, um which I found sort of interesting as a historical artifact. well Yeah, well, and the other kind of teen movie is the John Hughes sort of classic, you know, we're talking about 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink, you know, these kind of very earnest but also intended to be pretty funny characters Yeah, high school movies. The Breakfast Club is probably the one that's still the most famous out of that, which by the way, every student I've ever asked about The Breakfast Club like in my own you know age current 17, 18 year olds hate it, which just goes to show how much you know high school experience has changed.
Speaker: And Crow, I think, here is kind of like hitting the hinge point between those two things because the John Hughes movies start to come out a little bit later in the 80s, right? They start to come out ah in the throes of Reagan's America, whereas something like Porky's comes out 81.
Speaker: So we're still in this like 70s wild, we're doing sex all the time and it's so cool kind of thing, right? Yeah, yeah. We are still in the hangover of the late 70s, I suppose, right now, aren't we? The Stokastri administration. and you had that in Sean Penn's character, Spicoli.
Speaker: Yes. But yes, he's like this kind of very 70s surfer bro. I think what's interesting about Amy, Hickering is her ear for teenage sort of slang, right? It's like Clueless, which she directs in 1995, is obviously like a touchstone for a certain kind of like Valley Girl slang that becomes ubiquitous in the ah by the mid-2000s, suppose.
Speaker: And yeah, she's kind of doing the same thing here with an earlier surfer-style dialect or sort of mannerism um with the 70s in Sean Penn's character. er What's his first name? Something Spicoli, I don't know.
Speaker: Jeff. Jeff Spicoli, who, interestingly, if you go to like the cast list or something, at least on Wikipedia IMDb, is listed first and is probably the most fondly remembered character from this movie, which is kind of bizarre because he is a relatively... might like He definitely does not carry...
Speaker: the moral weight of the film in any particular way. He's very much like the comic relief character who also stands in for kind of the idea of rebellion, the very famous scene where he's sort of in this eternal struggle with Mr. Hand, his history teacher, and he just orders pizza to the classroom and then Hand gets back at him by having all of the students eat the pizza and Spicoli is sort of thwarted like Those are the moments that for a Gen X viewer who like talks about this in Facebook groups, I did my research.
Speaker: Okay, they're doing this now. They're like, Spicoli, man, like that. I knew so many Spicolis. That was that was it. That was what the 80s were all about. And I think that that's kind of telling because everything you've said so far, Sam, has been about how the movie is...
Speaker: In a lot of ways, a bizarrely like it's kind of a conservative movie. I mean, yes, you but you talk about the abortion thing. I don't mean it politically. I just mean it represents this movement towards this less wacky, less sexed up, more moralistic, quote unquote, more real in that sense, 80s teen movie.
Speaker: But what everybody remembers is the pothead character who's like the only real rebel in the film. Yeah. And that in a way, to me summarizes Gen X, like the desire to remember the moment of rebellion and when in fact, like they're very much in the midst of moving out of the seventies and moving out of the moment of like, I don't know, just a liberation that that decade is supposed to represent, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, and it does have, even though it's it's not sort of substantively politically conservative, it has a kind of formal or structural conservatism in the sense of, you know, it's it's almost like a moral a morality play for the various different characters, but in quite a subtle, I actually kind of appreciate quite a subtle way in the sense of like,
Speaker: Each character, and again, the stakes feel very low and the tension isn't really there, but they do all go through certain kind of moral lessons, right? So the Stacey character, who's 15, the main female character is kind of led astray by a her older friend who's obsessed with older men. ah the The film sort of kind of horrifically opens with what I would consider a statutory rape. She sleeps with a 26-year-old, right? um And that's kind of completely uncommented on.
Speaker: The morality is perhaps... The morality that is in the film is adjusted in personal trajectories rather than individual instances of trauma, which I think is like very Gen X rather than millennial. right like The millennial film version of this would focus on that moment.
Speaker: There'd be a huge emotional fallout from it. Whereas in Fast Times, it's just sort of glossed over. like This is a thing that happens... It's really like not the ideal thing to be happening, but like, it's kind of like in the universe, the film has to happen to teach the character, whatever the morality lesson is that she's going to learn, which eventually basically is that, you know, she shouldn't listening to a stupid ah older friend and she'd be dating the nice sort of Jewish boy. He's the same age as her. He's a cinema rusher is very kind and sympathetic. And um that's the right thing to be doing.
Speaker: And then for the other characters, I mean, for Spicoli, there's this kind of, he c he's in this conflict, constant conflict of his history, teaching Mr. Hand, but eventually him and Hand come to this kind of mutual understanding at the end of the film and a kind of sort of a reconciled.
Speaker: And then there's Brad, who's Stacey's older brother, who's sort of, you know, very diligent and hardworking, slightly sort of consumerist. And he's sort of, yeah, learning both how not to get fired from jobs, but also that sort of money and I suppose personal possessions aren't exactly the be all and end all.
Speaker: But that's what makes the movie feel so strange. and you know Listen, I enjoyed it more than you did, but it does feel sort of like this rear guard action against creeping Reaganism or something in in the sense that...
Speaker: you know I watched Wall Street, the Oliver Stone movie last night, and that is very much like Oliver Stone in his heavy-handed way being like, the new class of capitalist overlords are are going to turn into Elon Musk and rule the world. going to be honest, he called it correctly. That is what happened.
Speaker: But that's a movie that by 1985, when the movie takes place, that's already like well underway. Yeah. In 81, 82, I think that's less visible to the average person. And so this decision to kind of get in at the ground level and say, hey, Brad, it's not all about working at All-American Burger and getting your buddy's jobs there to like, I don't know, build your entrepreneurial set and feel important. Like maybe you just need to be happy with yourself.
Speaker: like it It does feel like this attempt to reckon with something that's coming. And I will say the scene where Stacy gets picked up, for lack of a better term, by this 26-year-old is very bizarre in itself because she's his waitress and he goes, I'll have a...
Speaker: chicken parm, Diet Coke, and your phone number. And she's sort of like, ooh, and like immediately gives into this. And I think that is one of the these kind of Gen X realities or Gen X myths. You were talking about kind of statutory situations.
Speaker: The free-flowing sexuality that now needs to be like recontextualized or remoralized in some way. Like the sex revolution has happened. This is going to happen. But we can't just have it be the 70s where like,
Speaker: That's all fine somehow. And like you grow up and you're like, oh yeah, that was actually really formative for me. And I do have to give Heckerling some credit for shooting that sequence in this sort of like awful way where they just have sex for like 35 seconds in a dugout in a baseball field.
Speaker: And it shot from really far away and it's just like, ooh. like There are these like stirrings of what will become the response to like what will really take shape in like the women's movement of the 90s and then obviously like Me Too later on. It like is dotted with these weird early attacks on this culture that will only become more dominant through the 80s and 90s.
Speaker: This kind of sexual licentiousness or aggression. Yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean, even maybe I'm just so used to films that are so overtly moralised now that it fell flat, not of its own sort of intention. I mean, even the sort of conflict between Mark Ratner, the sort of nice so Jewish boy, he is this usher.
Speaker: and Mark Damone, who's a sort of ticket scalp, kind of sleazeball character, their best friends, and they end up sort of competing over the Stacey character, who sort of has sexual encounters with both of them, Mark Damone later, after he sort of finds out that Ratner's in love with her.
Speaker: so there's this betrayal that happens, and yet... Yeah, again, it's not played for laughs, it's not played for tension, it's just sort of seems be a fact to the movie, which is then reconciled at the end of the school dance. But that hinge point happens maybe 20 minutes before the end, and then it's resolved 20 minutes later.
Speaker: Maybe, yeah, like it's it's too true to life. I don't know. But yeah, it it lacks some of the dramaturgy that I was kind of hoping for. Well, there are moments of... Because again, you know I do think of the 80s teen movie as being a very, i don't know, slapstick, comedic sort of thing, whether that's in the John Hughes way or in...
Speaker: you know the more sort of overtly raunchy way of a movie like Valley Girl that comes out later with Nicolas Cage or you know these sorts of things. And this movie does have those moments. like I'm thinking about the date that Stacey and Ratner go on, where it's at, for some reason, a German restaurant, which is really bizarre. like The idea of being like, oh, on our first date, we'll go to the Sausage Palace. like that That makes sense. And then they're seated... Yeah, they just eat like let' just eat like absolute mounds of sausage. Well, because he's forgotten. so I do like that scene. and i Because it first of all, they're in these gigantic chairs. So there are these two children. in like He's sunk like four feet below where he should be. And he's just sort of sitting at this gigantic table.
Speaker: You know, the mise-en-scene is really reinforcing that he's out of his element. And then he realizes he's forgotten his wallet. And so Mike Damone, the, um you know, sort of cool character, has to call him to be like, I forgot my wallet, dude, like whatever. And they have to keep eating this food over and over again because they can't pay because he knows he doesn't have any money. So he's just asking Stacy, Jennifer, Jason, Lee, like...
Speaker: you sure you don't want another Diet Coke? like I could go for another Diet Coke. like I think that would be fun. But that is the scene where Damone realizes he has a crush on Stacey because he shows up and they sort of make eyes. And i do think there is something to that as like the weird freedom of the high schooler where like you're attached to your friends.
Speaker: You're not actually as attached to your friends as you think you are because the second you see a hot girl because you're like 16 years old, You're like, I'm going i'm going for that. i'm you know Screw, screw Retner. I'm going for this. And there is...
Speaker: I think a kind of an honesty about that, and I think it is interesting and bizarre to me, and I kind of touched on this with the Spicoli thing earlier, that the way the movie is remembered is not for its honesty. It's remembered for its goofishness, which it is probably the least goofy of these 80s high school movies. It's like there's something going on there with Gen X's memory of itself, the kinds of movies that it was presenting to itself, and it only wants to remember that part.
Speaker: It's yeah, it's incredibly ungoofy. I mean, beyond like Sean Penn having a stupid surfer accent, it's quite straight laced. And for a film set in Southern California as well. I mean, like, yeah know you've not been to California, I haven't even been once. I mean, we we need to bring back in Eddie to sort of locate the milieu here.
Speaker: It's San Diego. I know that. So it's... Like lower middle to middle class San Diego suburbs. That's kind of the vibe. Yeah, it that's an actually a very important point, I think, about these 80s movies, these these teen movies.
Speaker: And Sam and I have spoken about this before, the very different definitions of middle class in the UK and in the United States. And in the United States... And I think this is fading a little bit now just because our country is tanking. It's like we're trying to give Britain a run for their money in terms of how quickly we can see ah a downfall.
Speaker: But in the US, for most of my lifetime, the idea has been that everyone wants to identify as middle class. Like we've all, you know, what's the Ayatollah line where he says, Alexis de Tocqueville, whom I assume all Americans have read. Like it does it does feel sort of like that where everyone is like, no, no,
Speaker: If I make $600,000 a year, I'm still middle class because there's still someone richer than me. right There still are a bunch of rich people up here. And then as long as you're not in like grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding poverty, you are like, no, I might not be the wealthiest middle class person, but I am middle class. yeah And this is a these kind of movies really showcase that in an unconscious way because everyone is sort of...
Speaker: the same. like you you get the There are hints that people are maybe in slightly different you know social milieu, like the Forrest Whitaker character, who is the only black character in the movie. who Yeah, he's the linebacker. Is that linebacker? I don't know.
Speaker: I forget what his position is, but he's like the star football player, which is so funny because I just went over to the Wikipedia page and it just describes him as, quote, a a star football player, so I have no idea. But he, you know, he's got this really nice, like, older car that he's super possessive of that, like, represents something. And I think the idea is that he's sort of there because of his football talent as much as anything else. And there is some, like...
Speaker: celebration of the kind of material goods that might be slightly outside of the norm for this community. Like Brad drives up at the beginning of the movie in this car and it's oh, Brad, what's up, man? Like he's saying hello to absolutely everybody. He's got his awesome car.
Speaker: But like outside of these moments of kind of like slight consumerist distinction or sort of racial distinction, Everyone is kind of just middle class. No one is, you you have to work a job after school because gosh darn it, that's what a great American does to become an adult. But there's no like, yeah I have to work at the burger factory because otherwise I'm not going to build the resume I need to like, you know, enter the workforce. It's very...
Speaker: Yeah, i mean know that's ah that's a great ah review on Letterboxd, which was Dazed and Employed. Yeah, like that is i mean that is kind of it. like It's a movie in which, yes, it is very California.
Speaker: Yes, it is very specific, like Surfer San Diego, California. But really, only Spicoli gives us that reality. it It sort of otherwise could be any other place in the United States that was like predominantly white.
Speaker: Yeah. Essentially. I was going to say also compared to later high school movies, that the sort of idea of like class, there's a very American way of dealing with it, which isn't like a cultural, but it's just like, he's rich, right? It's you think about mean girls or clueless, right? There's a very strong sense of like one character being less wealthy than the other characters who are sort of, you know, one character is maybe middle class and the other upper middle, sort of like just rich, um, like mean girls or clueless. Um,
Speaker: Or in her later film that i actually didn't realize she directed in until i looked up before we started recording, which is Loser. Oh, I love that movie. I love them. It's not a very good movie, but I love it. I can't help it.
Speaker: No, and i I think I saw it when I was about 18, which is about a Midwestern sort of cow country farmer kid from Minnesota or something, played by Jason Biggs, going to and NYU in the early 2000s. And sort of his alienation at the sort of, suppose, cosmopolitan, you know, sort of elite who he's surrounded by. So she clearly, I think Amy clearly has...
Speaker: a sort of eye for that stuff. mean, she does it in Clueless as well. But yeah, it's interesting that in her first sort of formal feature, ah Fast Times Original High, that that's not there so much. Like, um yeah, I think there is a flatness to it, both racially, right? Like, one, there's no Hispanic characters, I don't think. And two, the white characters and the African-American characters, there's Frostbush's character and his younger brother, who's also African-American,
Speaker: They're just like part the gang. There's no real like discourse around racial difference at all. um And yeah, again, like you said, there's no real class difference. Everyone's kind of like, yeah, we kind of have a small house and there's a little there's a pool outside, but it's a small one. And we work jobs outside of school, but that somehow mysteriously allows us to buy Buicks whatever.
Speaker: The other thing that's missing is like this a sense of popularity, right? like um That you get in the 2000s of sort of the the cool kids and the nerds. I think there is a sort of stereotype of the jock or whatever. But Brad is an interesting character in that he's kind of a good-looking, tall guy. He's kind a jock. He has a nice car.
Speaker: But he's also kind of a loser because he works fast food joints. And he keeps getting turned down by women because he's wearing like a pirate costume. LAUGHTER And then the Ratner character is kind of the closest you get to a kind of archetypical nerd. But he's also like fairly successful with women. He has friends, you know, he goes out to parties. it's Yeah, there's there is this kind of almost like pre-lapsarian equality coming on in the film. that's just I think maybe why I was so confused by it. Like, um that's certainly the tropes that I sort of associate with this genre were sort of absent.
Speaker: And like in other films that we've done, we did kids, right? And streetwise, which are props to the other two teenage films that we've done in this, this season, Detroit rock city and Detroit rock city. And the the kind of pre-lapse area in equality that you get in kids or streetwise is kind of explained by the fact one of the streetwise everyone's homeless and two with kids that it's New York and it's big enough and crazy enough and chaotic enough that like no one would care about that kind of thing.
Speaker: But yeah, This is yeah San Diego, it's suburban San Diego, which is kind of the perfect topographical area for petty factionism and hierarchy and vanity small difference and stuff to play out. So I it's quite interesting that it didn't.
Speaker: Well, and I think the other side of that is one thing that has come up occasionally on this podcast is sort of Gen X as the last generation that really got to experience the kind of boomer idea of the subculture as this like very strong lived reality, right? We talked with Charles Pinion about the kinds of ways you would get your special music that you could then build your catalog and be like, I'm now a punk or whatever, or him talking about skinheads coming to the shows and causing trouble, or talking to C. Derek Varn about...
Speaker: the kinds of zines you would produce that had like ah maybe a 10 mile radius at best that you could hope for them to actually like grow over, but you were looking for your people. This is a movie where you get sort of like quote unquote subcultures, right? Spicoli is a, is a surfer.
Speaker: The Mike Damone character is some sort of, i don't know like proto Columbine guy. Like I don't really know what he is or how you describe it, but he is obviously different than the other characters, right?
Speaker: But yeah, at the same time, he's less troubling than a sort of Columbine shooter type in the sense that he's like quite good looking, he dresses kind of well, he's into music, people come to him for like tickets. like yeah He's like fairly liked, actually. like and and but He's not bullied. I don't think there's ever a point where he's bullied by anyone. No, well, that's kind of what I mean, is that like you get these signifiers. Like Spicoli, for example, he's sort of a shithead surfer guy who's like, Mr. Handman... like i' um I didn't mean to be late. you know, the new schedule, it's like crazy, man. Like he's he's given these sort of, these outward appearances of a certain kind of character. And Damone is given these appearances of like, I don't know, it's it's a fixture on like 90s TV shows, sort of like the scalper kid.
Speaker: i don't know how else to describe it. Like I'm thinking of a a show like Recess or Hey Arnold, like a type. Yeah, he's kind of wearing like a backwards flat cap and like a white Harrington and like ah a checkerboard scarf. It's kind of like New Romantic-y.
Speaker: But yet, yeah, he's not like given that much definition. like He's got some of those music posters in his room, right? And then Brad is sort of all American. Forrest Whitaker is the big athlete. But none of those subcultures, those things that would have been real at the time, again, think about something like Detroit Rock City where those kids are in love with Kiss.
Speaker: like like they are They're basically the Kiss guys. and they will do what it like they They will beat up a bunch of hippies if that's what it takes to get to the Kiss concert, right? Yeah. Or even, again, we when we spoke to to Charles Pinion about like the metalheads in the car as like the other group of people who are you know who who sort of kill our main character and then he's brought back. Here, those subcultural differences are almost just...
Speaker: personal preferences that have no impact on your relationships. it That's the prelapsarian idea, right? That like you can somehow live out your individuality, but in such a way that is in more or less total harmony with those around you without any kind of like, oh, once I put on the white face paint or like the powder of a goth or something, like I'm marking myself as other.
Speaker: No. like You could do that in this high school and still hang out with Brad, probably. And that's a very... a weird thing because it's, there's a way in which that they want that to be realistic. It traces to me some of the stuff we've talked about with Gen X's like idea of how America is supposed to be.
Speaker: If that makes sense, like, Yes, my entire Facebook profile is just pictures of Freddy Krueger, and I only do posts that are about how good ICE is and ah how important it is to legalize and make sure that legal kratom is available at smoke shops.
Speaker: But like I should be able to get along with like a ah lib woman from Minnesota who wears her pussy hat while like streaming on Blue Sky, right? Like that is something that like a certain kind of exer seems to want to believe. And I think that's part of why they get so mad about like the existence of polarization in American politics, or at least that's what I'm posing. Yeah, I think that is definitely ah a through line. I mean, these characters are, I suppose, borderline Gen X slash Generation Jones. I think the actors are all Gen Jones. That's the early 60s.
Speaker: But the characters they play, i think I did the math on this, would have been Gen X actually properly. Like literally just the very beginning. Because if if they're born in, say, 66, they would be 15 and 81, right? So it's, you know...
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. But i think the actual actors are more sort of 1960, 1962. But that makes sense because you get older people to play solid younger people in high school movies, famously, right? Like, I think famously, like, American high school movies, there's like 32-year-olds playing 17-year-olds sometimes, which is, anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, I think one of the three lines here is definitely this kind of sense of, oh, everyone's an individual. Like, if you make any generalization to a certain type of Gen Xer, Or i make any statement in the aggregate. Like, well, there's always an exception to that.
Speaker: Or, you know, well, you know I know someone who's not that. And it's like, well, yeah, talking about averages now. No, that is... And it's funny because there's a ah version of that that comes out in like internet discourse from, i think, millennials and Xers especially, which is the like, someone makes a ah Twitter post and, you know, about, I don't know,
Speaker: ah you shouldn't order Uber Eats every single day, you know, three meals a day. Like, that's not good for you or good for anyone. And the person being like, well, you know, actually, my legs were stapled to the floor by my friends in high school, so I'm actually not able to move. And the only way that I can eat is is to order Uber Eats. It's like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's such a like a left tail such statistical situation. It doesn't disprove the general rule. It does kind of come from this, though. I do think this film is interested this film is interested in that kind of thing, isn't it? It's like, well, he's a jock, but he's also like sensitive and a bit of a loser. Well, he's a surfer, but he's actually secretly great at historiography. Yeah. Yeah, there's always like a a kind of like exception to the rule in this film.
Speaker: think it's quite interesting busting stereotypes, man. Well, this is this is where I think we have to talk about Cameron Crowe, who is one of my great sort of cinematic enemies. and i Sam, do you know a lot about Cameron Crowe?
Speaker: I was shown um Almost Famous, which I'm pretty sure is about a semi-biopic of semibiop hit his teenage life as a Rolling Stone reporter. That made me physically nauseous. One of my most hated movies of all time. and Can you go into it? Because that's like, that we should probably say, if we do do a little um diatribe on why hate it, but it's probably a movie we should say for the Boomer season if we ever do one, because it is like Boomer mythology. Well, and that's the thing. Crow, I think, is born in like 57 or 58. Yeah, 57, I just looked. so like And for example, on his Wikipedia, his web website is listed as theuncool.com, which, facts. But Crow is, yeah, he's a late boomer who I think is very, very interested in kind of like youth culture, which itself is a very boomer thing to be interested in. you know He is too young to be of the Woodstock generation and gets to be that group of boomers who grow up mythologizing the
Speaker: elder boomer silence who actually got to participate in what we call the 60s, right? The older brothers and sisters and cousins of people like Cameron Crowe. And so I think one of the reasons I hate Almost Famous, i mean, there are many, many reasons I dislike that movie, but one of them is that it itself mythology lacks like It's like a really bad version of 24-Hour Party People. It takes its material extremely seriously. It takes the idea of being a music journalist at that time so seriously as if as if it is yeah Woodward and Bernstein.
Speaker: As a journalist, I'm just going to say, you should never take any music journalist seriously. Well, which is... i i mean, that it is funny because... It's a movie because that's the thing. It's all about these parts, right? Like the music of the 60s and early 70s is the most important music that was ever made. Fact, like no question. definitely like the Facebook guy, isn't it? It's like, a man, remember there real rock and roll?
Speaker: No, it is. I mean, I'll never forget going over to my neighbor's house. And, and you know, listen, he's he's a true boomer. He's probably a little bit younger or a little bit older than Cameron Crowe. And he still plays music. And, you know, i respect his musicianship and his talent.
Speaker: But, like, I went to his house once and he was just like, they haven't made any good music since the 70s, man. Like, that's just a fact. And I'm like, i don't I don't know. like There's a lot a lot of good bands came out after that. So there's that. And then on top of that, there's the like the act of following and reporting on that is the most important thing you could possibly do in the entire world. right And then above and beyond that, it's the...
Speaker: this was so important that I need to mythologize it in a movie about myself, which is just like so up its own ass. And I just, I think the nausea came in part from realizing while watching movie, like, oh, this is all entirely serious. Like in order for me to enjoy this, it would need to like recognize its own, its own overinvestment in itself, which 24 hour party people does a good job of doing because of the way it plays with ah the Tony Wilson character.
Speaker: Almost Famous doesn't do that. And Cameron Crowe's movies are sort of, I think, infected with a certain variety of... i i don't want to call it hyper-sincerity because I have nothing against sincerity.
Speaker: But everything I am making is the most important thing. And it's like, man, you just made a movie about a bunch of guys in an apartment building while grunge was happening. It's not the most important thing that ever happens. Like, let's lay off a little bit.
Speaker: And I think that overinvestment in the importance of even the high school experience and its seriousness is kind of a an American trope, if not a Gen X one. And saying that Cameron Crowe takes to this like extreme place and does so in all of his other films as well. So I just...
Speaker: I just can't i can't handle that with him. I can't handle it with his films. I haven't seen all of them. Maybe some of them are better than others. I don't know. But the fact that he even called his memoir The Uncool to me is like so telling about who he is.
Speaker: A through line of Cameron Crowe is the absence of parents, right? Like in Almost Famous and in Farsheims. Do you see a parent ever? You might not now that i Yeah, because there's that scene where the older guy sends flowers to Stacy and she finds him on the counter and is sort of like, oh, did did mom and dad see? And Brad's like, no, they're not home yet. So yeah, they are kind of always completely absent. That's a good point. Yeah, that's the swing pool scene as well, where she's coming. My mum's going be home anytime. You've got to go when she comes. or and There's like another part where that like the mum and dad are just on a holiday or something, and Brad and her are just sort of looking after the house.
Speaker: I also think this shows up in the Spicoli scene. When we talk about kind of the class politics of the movie, we left this out, but Spicoli, and this is always the case in these American movies, is kind of the poor kid. Like you can just tell by, usually there's just kind of a white trash vibe. It's dirty. There's stuff everywhere.
Speaker: um But his family would still definitely identifies like lower middle class. In any case, when Mr. Hand comes or when he is bothered, the Spicoli character, whenever he's bothered, it's always his little brother who's like waking him up or getting him or this or that. It's never the parent.
Speaker: So there, and I think that to be fair to the movie, i think one, yes, that's a latchkey kid kind of eighties thing. But it's also that the movie, it takes the idea of being a high school student very seriously. As a result, I think it really wants to establish this like horizontality, like you and your siblings, you and your friends, you and your coworkers, right? Like we don't want to introduce that additional element of the parent, but you are right that it's a constant theme here and probably in Heckerling's or Cameron Crowe's other movies.
Speaker: yeah it's um i mean that it's Yeah, it's interesting there's this kind of like function, there's a very sort of interesting lack of dependence, right? That almost everything is self-sufficient and self-contained. They wouldn't even need the parents to be there. i mean, it's the opposite of, is it Pascal who says, was it Voltaire who said, like if we if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. Almost in this sense, it's the opposite of that, like um there is no need to invent parents. Yeah. The parents might as well not exist in the film because they all have cars, they all work jobs. yeah Effectively, it's like self-contained, sort of self-functioning, self-replicating community, and which is very odd. that's like There's real interest in the dependency of childhood or the fragility of it, really. You just made me think about something, which is that is like a kind of movie in the late 70s, early 80s. I'm thinking of a movie like The Warriors, which is a movie about sort of like street gangs, right? like And obviously, it's a very, very, very different take.
Speaker: But there is a sense in which the absence of parents here is so ubiquitous is to not require further commentary. Do you know what I mean? Like it it is simply being a teenager means being this sort of little autonomous adult who is going to go about their life, make their friends and move on. I mean, another great example of this is just like college. Like my wife and I were talking about this as we watched it. It's, Not a movie in which the experience of high school seems to have any meaningful relationship to the idea of going to college, right? As someone who works in that environment now, that is the horizon, right? In a community that is probably not that demographically different from what we see here in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Speaker: Everyone is thinking about Where am I going to go to college? Where can I get the most money to go to college because of how expensive it is? And what major am I going to do because I need it to be practical enough to allow me to get a job, right? that's ah That's a huge thing in high school right now. Whereas here, it's just like, you kind of just have fun, man. It's like, whatever. And it's cool.
Speaker: you know it's It's fine. It's totally cool. And i do wonder about the extent to which that affects Gen X parents in their relationships to their own kids going to college, but... Yeah, it's interesting that the sort of T, the characters, it has a college being mentioned. there's i think it's Leanne, who's Stacy's older friend who works with her sausage shop or something. not quite sure. It's a pizza, like Italian restaurant. Pizza, pizza.
Speaker: She, at the end, it has that very like, that trait of like where they are now sort of thing. Really the freeze frame. They have the text the bottom. I forgot about that. Did that originate with Fast Times? I don't know. I don't know, but it definitely is an early instance. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, she is it sort of makes the claim that she's now at the University of California Riverside, and she's dating her like psychology professor. Which is facts, yeah. There's that mention of, yes. And then the Mark Ratner character, I think the by biology teacher says that he's his star people. And he's kind of coded as this is kind of you know sort of fairly clever, sensitive boy.
Speaker: And yet there's no real mention of university with him either. um Yeah, it's an interesting difference again with the sort of 90s, 2000s films where there is a kind of overriding concern about college as a destination by the time you get to the late 90s. I'm thinking of like um the film Orange County. um With Jack Black.
Speaker: Yes. And the main character in that is a kind of a boy, teenage boy, 17, 18. He's picked up Steinbeck and sort of Faulkner and stuff. And I think he finds out that Steinbeck went to Stanford.
Speaker: and he wants to become a novelist until he decides, I have to go to Stanford University because that's where Steinbeck went. I think you're in the fact that Steinbeck dropped out. But anyway, so the whole film is kind of like, yeah, like geared towards this horizon of Stanford University.
Speaker: Even in like at the primary elementary school film, like um Talking Jack Black, like a school of rock, right? Like there's a character in that played by, I can't remember her name, the main female, young sort of child female character that is obsessed with getting into Harvard, aged like 10. Oh, i'm Miranda Cosgrove. Yes. So yeah, i mean there is definitely, ga it's interesting to shift from, I suppose, only, what, 15 years, 16 years, 20 at the most, between a sort of yeah high school experience that doesn't have college as the terminus to one that very much does for like most people.
Speaker: You've moved me to share a story about myself here and Miranda Cosgrove, which is that at some point in like, it's probably like early high school, hard to remember exactly. i had watched iCarly, obviously School of Rock was big in my mind. And I sort of convinced myself there had to exist a Miranda Cosgrove dating contest, which just to talk about like the imaginary. So I like remember going online and looking and being just deeply disappointed when there was not the opportunity to go on a date with Miranda Cosgrove. Well, it it's just blowing my, I've just looked her now, it's blowing my mind that she's older than i am.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes it Well, a School of Rock is like, it's got, it's like what, 2000 and yeah, three. yeah So, I mean, she would have to be, yeah, she's my age essentially. She's very slightly, which let's be honest, even a better reason for her to have had a dating contest that I could have participated Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's the other thing about ah Fast Times that find interesting is no one's like a... I think later high school films are quite interested in outliers. Be that in kind of solidly boring identity terms. So, you know, outlier in terms of being queer or whatever.
Speaker: But also like outliers in terms of intelligence when being really dumb or really intelligent. Like, you the sort of the prodigious kind of person who's destined for the Ivy League and is kind of alienated by their peers at the kind of boring public school they're at. um I think of like Rushmore, right? By Wes... Wes Streets... Wes Anderson. Wes treating as the health secretary of the UK. I don't mean Wes treating, I mean Wes Anderson. Rushmore was like interested in a character who is incredibly intelligent, not that academically capable and is sort of a working class kid at a very elite prep school rate. And yeah, again, this film, no one's really an outlier, be that sort by identity marker or intelligence or culture. The one thing we get, you know we mentioned there's like a total unaccounting for racial difference, but there's one very, very brief nod to this, and it's not it's not in any way addressed, and it's just sort of part of the soup the movie exists in, which is that they're scalping tickets. The Damone character is scalping tickets.
Speaker: And most of the people are coming up to him, I think it's like, um Alice Cooper, Van Halen, right? These kind of classic late seventy s early 80s, KISS style arena rock bands kind of tending in the metal direction.
Speaker: And when the Forrest Whitaker character comes up and he sort of is like twice the size of Damone, I think it's Earth, Wind, and Fire he's trying to get tickets for, it which is a much more like black-coated character.
Speaker: a group, right? And that is it. It is literally just maybe the music you listen to, and that is the only hint we're even going to get that something is wrong. And I almost imagine that that's intended to be like a little joke for the mostly white audience of the movie. Like, oh of course, Forrest Whitaker is he wants Earth, Wind, and Fire tickets for his younger brother and not Van Halen tickets, right? Like, that's that's it.
Speaker: That's all we get. Yeah, and I mean, at this point, again, you'd perhaps ask yeah the ghost of Mike Davis. About how Hispanic San Diego was. I mean, it's right across the border from Mexico. We don't get any sort of sense that it's this close to Tijuana, that it's that close to Tijuana, or any sort of Hispanic presence in the film at all.
Speaker: I don't know what the demographics of San Diego are like. in the I would imagine. I mean, San Diego is a weird place because it is very Hispanic, yes, but also very wealthy in certain parts, right? So, for example, when a play...
Speaker: that I worked on that it comes out of or has something to do with me foundation through which Sam and I met, it was called Here There Are Blueberries. It debuted in San Diego, and so I flew out to to go see the first performance. And it was in La Jolla, which is this very like gay, wealthy suburb of San Diego. At the same time, san Diego is very defense-coded.
Speaker: because there's a huge naval port there. It's a very military city. There are a lot of military contractors and analysts in and around it. um It has this reputation for being kind of like slightly more conservative by California standards because of that.
Speaker: So like I don't know that the movie deals with any of that at all. It's just like we're in a suburb that may as well be Chicago, like in a John Hughes movie, except that you know it's warm and Spicoli is a surfer, which would be impossible if you were outside Chicago, and that's kind of it. Yeah, I was trying to locate for a long time. It kind of felt like it could be anywhere in suburbia until you suddenly see the kind of the strip with the the sort of palm trees. So, oh, okay, wait, I'm, I'm, I've looked it up. I am wrong. We've been mistaken. He did his research in San Diego, but the school itself is set in the San Fernando Valley, which is just above LA. Well, that makes more sense with Amy... ah Heckerling, heckerling.
Speaker: Heckerling, yeah. Clueless is obviously the sort of archetypical daddy girl film, so she's kind of keeping things in the same place, isn't she, in that sense? Yeah, it's it's an interesting thing to now think of it as more of an L.A. movie, because first of all,
Speaker: The 80s was, for reasons that I guess make sense given the glitz and glam of the of the Reagan years, obsessed with LA, specifically in the world of like high school. right I'm thinking of a movie like Valley Girl that will come out with Nick Cage, who by the way makes his debut in this movie as one of Brad's co-workers. Fun fact.
Speaker: He's credited, I think, as Nicholas Coppola still at the time. He's not yet actually Nick Cage. Yeah. But LA as this, I don't know, archetypical high school experience or this this sort of the one you want to see represented, whereas of course something like Kids, which we talked about a while ago, like that is a kind of high school experience, but New York is so chaotic and crazy that you can't set like an all-American high school film in LA or in New York, excuse me. That's just not going to work, right?
Speaker: Yeah, like imagine being like a jock in the sort of orbit of like telly and then... Yeah. It's just like, yeah. What would that even mean? Well, because that's the other thing. Like, what would a jock be in New York City? ah A jock would probably, for the most part, be like a black inner city youth or like, you know what I mean? Like, it wouldn't be like, you know, Johnny football, right? Like that's not, that's not who you would be in the context of a New York game. Whereas is in California, I guess you can still kind of imagine that you're in Iowa. Yeah.
Speaker: but cooler, right? like You're having the same experiences. you good like One thing we haven't really talked about that's at the center of the movie, and probably if we're talking about Gen X, should be maybe maybe should have been the center point of this conversation, is the mall, right? It opens in the mall. They all work in the mall for the most part. The mall is where they go to hang out. The mall is where you go to pick up chicks. The mall is so self-contained that...
Speaker: The Ratner character even complains, I hate working at the movie theater because it's on the wrong side of the mall. It's not near the food court where all the action is. The mall in this movie, it is it is their lives. We, for the most part, only see them at the mall, at school, or in a couple of cases, driving around. like That's it, or in each other's homes. But like the mall is the external space where they go and locate themselves when they are not at school and when they are not at home. it Yeah, which is interesting because it contains or confines or shuts up the sort of stochastic chaos of like actual life in a way that yes for kids, which is like a film about being on the street, um doesn't, right?
Speaker: Kids, there's constant kind of serendipity and people into the crossing and encountering each other. yeah The bit where they beat the shit out of a guy with skateboards because he kind of annoys them. Yeah, all of that is sort of foreclosed by the moor culture, which is kind of the...
Speaker: Obviously, people can come in and out of the mall, but yeah, the sun kind of it does feel like it's sealed in vacuum somehow. Well, because it mediates all those experiences, right? Again, like Stacey at the beginning wants to get picked up by this 26-year-old at the mall.
Speaker: Ratner is observing Stacey because she works at the food court across the mall. and sees her there and at school, but can't get to her because of the distance between his job and the mall, or and in the food court, right? The arcade is where all of the kids go to play games. It's sort of like the thing that allows a certain version of the prelapsarianness we were talking about earlier, where like not only are the bad things kept out, but it gives you a playground on which to have these experiences. It controls them.
Speaker: Right. It says, okay, this is where we're going to do sociality. We're going to do it at school. We're going to do it at the mall. That is going to be it. And I believe there's probably a certain degree of realism to that because if you're in 80s California, you need a car to go anywhere, basically. Right. It's not going to be like a movie where you're walking around the streets. Right.
Speaker: And you all work there. So of course that's where you're going to be after school. Your friends are all there. So it's where you're going to go to hang out. And I think there is something to the the tension that exists between the latchkey kid autonomy and freedom that Gen X prizes so much and the reality of the like sort of biodome in which they were allowed to actually exist as teenagers for the most part. Like, yes, they went and did their hijinks or whatever. But by the time they're in high school, it seems like they really were content to just, you know,
Speaker: go there and hang out and have, in many ways, a very safe high school experience because it was contained. Yeah, and it's interesting that the the valley is an interesting sort of space in limbo in the sense that it's suburban, but it's urban at the same time in that feasibly these people, these teenagers have access to it. If they wanted to drive for the Sunset Strip or drive into a weird bit Silver Lake and find a subculture, they could do that.
Speaker: They have cars and like they're in a huge city. And yet, for all intents and purposes, they're in this closed loop that could be a suburb in Ohio or Idaho or something. thing right like I find that kind of curious if that's a particularly l LA thing because you like if you're Growing up in the equivalent suburb in like London or New York, people I know who've grown up in equivalent suburbs in those places, in a ye because you're in an area that is contiguous with the the larger urban zone, you know you access those things. Driving to Detroit in Detroit Rock City, like the the decision to be like, okay, we know we're in ah stupid town in like Ohio or wherever they are in that movie, right? And we need to go to Detroit because that's where rock is happening.
Speaker: Yeah, and yet in this film, as that everyone seems very content to sort of live out this kind of mid-century American Fordist life of just sort of, yeah, like being in your weird private spaces, or your high school, your house, the mall, your car.
Speaker: And that's like fine. Like... There's no real anxiety about that or sort of opposition to it Well, I think then maybe as we wind towards the end, it's worth thinking about, at least to me, how the hermetically sealed nature of the movie, the sort of safety of the movie, this kind of like ideal teen period where you're allowed to experiment and figure things out, but in a fundamentally non-dangerous way, or even when danger does come, it's not that big of a deal. You sleep with 26-year-old, you sleep with two friends and get an abortion,
Speaker: none of these things are like actually affecting your life in a meaningful way, seemingly. was going to say, that's it lacks the morality of the 90s in the sense that I feel like a 90s film would be like, oh, and you know, she was destitute and she's dropped out of college.
Speaker: But it also like doesn't moralize it in a positive way either. like ah Stacey's trajectory isn't moralized as in this is liberation and this is... a good It's just kind of like... Yeah, it's interestingly sort of nonplussed about the whole thing. It's just like, oh, these are things that happen. and But I'm interested in thinking about, just by way of closing, like what that tells us about the kinds of people who enjoyed this movie as teenagers today. Because, like, obviously, the late 80s, early 90s is defined by, like, the fundamental risk of youth, right? Teen pregnancy, the crack epidemic, the gangland epidemic of, you know, especially LA. And granted, those things are
Speaker: not necessarily associated with white middle America, but they do start to form this backdrop to how it is that we think about what it means to be a teenager, right? In the same way that, I don't know, serial killers do for the 70s or something, like you're at risk. This seems to exist in this moment between the risk of the 70s and the sort of like fallout of the where...
Speaker: where Violence comes back in a big way. The inner cities of places like New York are sort of fully, you know, not emptied out, but the Summer of Sam happens and things get worse and worse until they don't, right? So, like, how is it that these people now think, is this why they idealize it? Do you know what I mean? Like, why they think things are so much worse? Because in their minds, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was kind of real.
Speaker: And there was something idyllic about it. and You didn't really have to worry about anything. And so now they have meltdowns in, like, Ulta stores. you know because it's not that way anymore. I don't know, maybe. Yeah, it's I found it to be yeah illustrative of kind of like a mass affluence that was perhaps always imagined, but you it was never as good as maybe it made out to be retrospectively, but was you know comparatively in some senses, especially if for the white middle class.
Speaker: And it's yeah it was fascinating to kind of look back on as a so historical relic And it kind of explains that Gen X and Gen Jones' and Gen X's view on kind of... i mean's ah i mean, there's noxious memes about you know like people being like, oh, I paid for my college tuition while like working in a far suit joint one summer.
Speaker: But there's something like fabulous about that like social contractual implicit promise of like mid-century capitalism that... you know If you work, you can buy like you can you can do things, you can have freedom to a certain extent. You can buy the car that allows you to get around. You can you can indulge in your hobbies, to whatever. like Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: it's it's yeah It's obviously a tainted promise, but the that end of the bargain is maybe being held up in the sense that wages were you know in ratio to assets and costs much, much higher at this point in time. That's kind of what I was trying to say about Wall Street earlier, than the movie, the Oliver Stone movie, that like the early 80s is this weird moment where we've gotten beyond the the problems of the late 70s, stagflation, the you know the introduction of the Fulker shock, all of this stuff.
Speaker: And like Reagan is in America is supposed to be turning itself around. We haven't yet started to understand like the culture of corporate rating that this kind of neoliberal change is going to make possible. And we're kind of just in a moment where like things are buoyed a little bit and you still kind of think of yourself as someone existing in the early seventies or the fifties. It's just like a teen who's having fun, man.
Speaker: And that's great. And in a few years, that's not going to be the case, but we don't know that yet. And I will i will say... I was going the interesting admission was that my parents are sort of the same age as these characters, sort of 65, 66, 67, 68, that kind of era.
Speaker: And they said that one of the things that really characterized their high school experience was one, fear of AIDS, that maybe slightly later, but fear of AIDS and fear of nuclear holocaust. and And neither of those things come up.
Speaker: Not even in the least. um And especially, the nuclear thing is sort of like... kind of always a constant. Do you know what I mean? like It's through basically the 50s through the early 90s in waves, right? There are you know various like salt treaties and nuclear sort of proliferation agreements that try and solve this problem. But in this movie, you would think politics had been solved.
Speaker: There's a sense in which... we kind of just carry on with our lives. we We're at the moment of post-politics are almost here, and and and or even anti-politics in the Jaeger framework in an odd way. But I will just kind of close out by saying that I think it is very interesting, Sam, and we started by saying this, that we've barely spoken about the plot of the movie because the plot of the movie really can just be characterized as a bunch of quote unquote middle American teenagers have sets of experiences that are like mildly annoying and difficult for them and that they take relatively seriously because they're teenagers, but that find relatively easy resolution
Speaker: um that allows them to go on with their lives. And then we get this you know these these freeze frames at the end telling us what becomes of them. But there isn't that much to talk about in the meat of the script. It is occasionally funny. It is occasionally maybe a little bit heartwarming.
Speaker: I'm sure it generates nostalgia for the viewers who knew it at the time. But like it's almost more interesting as an object in terms of what it doesn't say or doesn't think about. right You kind of have to read it symptomatically because what it's saying is you know lukewarm water, essentially. There's not not a whole lot there. Yeah, it did feel a bit like I was like yeah like diving into a lukewarm hot tub as someone like injected me with like euthanasia.
Speaker: It felt like dying. I'm kidding. You've just summoned this horrible image to me of like, you know, America has now legalized physician-assisted suicide for any reason. and there's like a spate of Xers going out with like fast times at Ridgemont High on a TV, like the Spicoli pizza scene. And, you know, they're they're being sort of put down like a cat or a dog. And they're sort of just the last thing they hear is Spicoli going like, no.
Speaker: crazy, gnarly Mr. Hand, bro. like They're just sliding into into rest. Into nothingness, yeah. like Forget about Strozneck. This is not Ian Curtis. We are not in the world of Ian Curtis right now at all, which is weird because this is like almost exactly the same time.
Speaker: Same generation, yeah, basically. It's a couple years removed. It's not that far away. you know i suppose you'd have to you'd have to make this film in like Detroit or something to get... Well, but even then, like Detroit Rock City is a movie about how Detroit's like a rocking place. Gene Simmons, man, he's freely. like it's I mean, part of that is racial, right? Part of that is um class-based.
Speaker: But it's a movie that doesn't even understand its own class basis, or at least doesn't over... I don't think Cameron Crowe's capable of thinking about those things because of when he grew up and the kind of person he is. But you really get that feeling you know here, more more than even in his other movies, I felt so. Yeah, I mean, it it is like a golden... is it Thomas Jefferson talks about the golden mean. Or as it Tocqueville talks about the golden mean, that everyone in America is effectively like... No one is aristocratically wealthy and no one is um yeah're sort of destitutely poor in the way they are in Europe. that America is going to create this kind of like you know a society which is you know has differences in wealth, but they're all within these kind of reasonable boundaries that allow for democracy. Yeah, how's that going? I think it's quite a Tocquevillean film, isn't it? No, it is. It really is. Like, you see various characters' houses, and they're all the same, within reason, right? They're all kind of... Yeah, Spicoli's the only one where it's like, he he's kind of white trash-coated, but it's not, like, severe. You don't see the outside, and you don't know, because you don't see the outside, because you only see Spicoli's room, which is, like, plastered in, like, nudie masks. But, like, yeah, I guess maybe you can guess, but, like...
Speaker: Yeah, we don't know. Well, and you know, a scene we didn't mention ah that kind of goes with the nudie mags is where Brad is kind of at his lowest because he's been fired from the job where he's kind of the big man on campus. And he's fired for having like the closest thing to a um falling down style outburst.
Speaker: that we get in the movie, which is basically a guy wanting a refund on his breakfast because it it isn't on the sign the best breakfast he's ever had, right? And so he's like, I want my 250 back. and i And he just like flips out at him and gets fired, which is like the only moment of real anger or tension in the movie, funnily enough, which is around this sort of like the world of the being a consumer or having a a job in the service sector.
Speaker: But later on he's at his worst. He's his pirate shirt because he's working at like... the sit-down version of Long John Silver's. And he goes to his ah the bathroom basically to masturbate because he's seen his sister's friend, Linda.
Speaker: And she walks in on him and is like horrified and he's mortified. And in like an American Pie moot type movie, a later movie, it would be so much grosser. like He would... ejaculated exactly the moment she comes in. It would get on her or something like this. like you know Or everyone at school would be like... if He'd slip up in there and concuss himself. Yeah, exactly. He'd like crack his neck. The next... It would have be a hard cut to him at the hospital with like his pants having been cut open and a neck brace. like you know But like nothing comes of that. It's just like an embarrassing moment and the movie just moves on. And that's it. and Yeah, the stakes... That's actually something that's interesting about the film is that the stakes are incredibly low. like I associate high school films with like this omnipresence omipresence and of like cringe and sort of potential for social embarrassment. right like The character's always being put in situations that are going to like make you viscerally... kind of Send you back viscerally to your own high school experiences of like sheer humiliation and embarrassment.
Speaker: And this, yeah, no one... Everything is kind of like, there's no differentiation between events. like Everything is kind of emotionally on the same level. like It's like Cameron Crowe and ah Amy Hickering took with a bunch of SSRIs.
Speaker: It's just it's really flat. like I don't know. Well, it it is funny you say that because that would tend in a way to making it unrealistic, at least as high school is understood now and certainly was when I was growing up, which is that It is a time in which you take the small things incredibly seriously. When events happen to you that every adult in your life doesn't know what to say to you besides, it really is fine. It's not a big deal. But to you in that moment, you may as well be like you know living in Poland during World War II. Right.
Speaker: Like, you know what i mean? Like that is that is, everything is charged with significance. And I don't know realistically if high school actually did just feel different then for the reasons that we've already talked about economically speaking, socially speaking in terms of cinematic and cultural representations of these things. But it is kind of missing.
Speaker: And it makes you wonder about what that means for gen X now. But maybe, shall we leave the listeners? They've finished their commute. They're at work. They want to hear the end of this, but they're like, I got to go in. I'm going to be late.
Speaker: but I have to finish the episode. So I will just say like, rate, subscribe. It's all free right now. Patreon, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you locate your podcasts.
Speaker: But with that, I will just say go home, draw a warm bath, put Fast Times at Richmond High and knock the television into the bathtub. See you guys later. Bye.
