Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. I am your co-host Chase here with my co-host. I'm both your co-host and he's my, well anyway, my co-host Sam. ah How are you doing, Sam?
Speaker: There's some infinite recursion going on here. I don't think quite honest going. Well, the infinite recursion that we're dealing with is of course, the infinite recursion of the teen movie in which every teen movie is, of course, just a reference to another teen movie, to ah a teen reality. In this case, that teen reality being one's Sweet 16, the Sweet 16, which I did not realize was a thing in the 80s. I still don't understand quite what it is because it's just not a thing in the UK. Yeah.
Speaker: Interesting. I don't know where the Sweet 16 comes from because I went to an all-boys high school. So obviously, I was not like directly dealing with many Sweet 16s. There's, of course, the Quinceañera, but that's 15. Yeah, i was going to say. And not at all something done by like random white Americans.
Speaker: And you've also got Bar Mitzvah and Beth Mitzvah, which is slightly, that's 12, 13, isn't it? Yeah, that's younger. So I know where it comes from. I think of it very strongly in terms of the TV show we had, My Super Sweet 16, which was sort of just about like bratty, very wealthy 16-year-olds, like wanting to have the most insane party, like kind of Project style parties. Yeah. But here, and listener, perhaps you've guessed or already knew because of the episode title, that we're talking about John Yoo's 1984 movie, Sweet 16. John Yoo's 1984 movie, 16 Candles, which frankly is on here almost exclusively as just like a sop to the fact that it's one of the biggest Gen X teen movies of all time. Like virtually every Xer watched this movie at some point. I did as a millennial, but for them it was defining.
Speaker: We already did Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And Sam, now that you've been exposed to two of the eighty s American teen films that kind of represent different approaches, which did you prefer and why?
Speaker: Well, I would say one that it's definitely one that has flown under the radar, I think, for British Gen Xers. In my experience, it's it's the big ones are probably Breakfast Club.
Speaker: Does it say anything with the boombox? Yes. ah Yes. us And then there are sort of nicher ones I've encountered before. It's an Elmo's Fire. Pretty in Pink. Pretty in Pink, yeah. And obviously Ferris Bueller's Day Off is probably the one that most of like my friends' Gen X parents would make us watch.
Speaker: ah with I think Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the one that really sort of hit a nerve with British Gen Xers, to say the least. there Yeah, Sixteen Candles, i ah under the radar for me. So it's, yeah, I had no preconceptions really going in. I think I preferred it to Fast Times. I don't didn't really enjoy either film particularly that much. um You know, I think perhaps there is a natural constraint whereby the sort of teen movies of your own adolescence are like forever sort of like enjoyable and relatable, but the teen movies of anyone else's adolescence are kind of confusing and annoying.
Speaker: So rather than dazed and confused, I was confused and annoyed. Well, I do, I found that kind of interesting because I had not seen 16 Candles in a long time. And I remember thoroughly disliking it the first time I watched it, like as a teenager or whenever it was.
Speaker: And I was kind of going into this viewing it as a just like a ah Herculean task, you know one of the things that had to be done. And I ended up liking it more than I expected, which I think might be a cancelable offense given the content of this movie. um I was expecting it to be very sincere, not sincere, kind of almost like somber. Like, I don't know. I was expecting it to be very, my memories of it were like her sitting around like a birthday cake being like, no one understands what it's like to be 16.
Speaker: But it's actually substantially goofier than that, which I did appreciate. yeah and not Not goofy enough for you. i don't know. I'm still processing it. um Maybe this is when we tell listeners that this is a back-to-back recording situation. We've also spent a lot of our... and we We did, the let's say, the Meteor option brother first before doing this one. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's it balances, to be fair, to give it its due, it balances the kind of like schlocky, slapstick, gross-out teen stuff with a broader concern with family, right? like um This is a film where family ah a family is at the forefront. like Samantha Baker is main character, played by Molly Ringwald. Her family are very much present in this film um in a way that I think families are sort of less present in other high school dramas. So her father and mother and her two sets of grandparents and her, think she has a younger sister, a younger brother, and then an older sister.
Speaker: So it's it's just kind of, and it's set in this, ah you know, kind of like Kevin McAllister style, huge suburban sort of big house in the Chicago suburbs.
Speaker: And it's, yeah, it's a house teeming with life, right? it's There are people sort of coming out of doorways everywhere. Yeah. But yeah, it's a house that's like chintzy and kind of in that very 80s way. And every room is like a different part of this kind of like extended family universe. So the younger brother's room is like full of like you know baseball clubs and like pictures is of nude women, which is a bit odd for a 12-year-old boy. But hey, it's the 80s. We're going to be coming back to that sentence a lot in talking about this movie. yeah There's a lot of...
Speaker: Very dissonant stuff going on. But yeah, ah yeah her room is is one way and her older sister's room is another. and Yeah, I appreciated that part of it. I think that it's a film that's very much like actually doesn't abstract the teenage experience from family. Because ultimately, like most teenagers, do the defining sort of conditioning part of your life is your family.
Speaker: um So I like i liked, i thought that was, you know, the sentimentalism of that was was quite enjoyable. And now for the bad. Yeah. No, so it it's, well, first of all, of course, John Hughes also wrote, he wrote and directed this and he wrote Home Alone.
Speaker: so unsurprising that we get a similar kind of milieu, both in terms of geography, right? Like kind of upper middle class Chicago suburbs, but then also just that like literally it looks kind of similar because, you know, this is what he's interested in.
Speaker: the i mean, I'm sure many, many... actually, i mean, given... i don't haven't looked into the age demographics of our listeners, but there is probably a chance that many haven't seen this movie ah since I don't think it's had the staying power of something like The Breakfast Club.
Speaker: Although most of my students at school hate The Breakfast Club because it's it's the one that survived and so they watch it and then they just despise it. um But... why well For what reason? I mean, to be honest, my memories of The Breakfast Club are not particularly positive either. i might like it more now. I don't know. But um I think they they see it as kind of goofy and unreal.
Speaker: You know, i mean, especially, i think the the subcultural groups of the 80s as represented in a movie like that are not like terribly available to them. And also, i mean, maybe it's just my school. we don't We don't do weekend detention. So there's probably a degree to which that also seems sort of totally out there. i don't know.
Speaker: But the teenage experience is kind of different. i mean, it's the same in many ways, but they're you're so plugged into communicating with everyone that the kind of conceit of the breakfast club, which is that like you're not allowed to communicate with anyone, which then leads you to befriend people you wouldn't like otherwise befriend, is probably a little off or weird for them, I would wager.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think social hierarchies are perhaps both more accelerated and extreme, but also somehow more horizontal at the same time in a kind of contradictory way. Yeah, I think that that's... I mean, i remember someone... might have been former guest Eileen Jones actually talking about how... Because her nephew or niece or some relative of hers who was younger, the prom king and queen were like nerds at the school. like you know, that's certainly unthinkable. Well, actually... don't know. so I was deeply confused by...
Speaker: I was at the University of Virginia for a year, if listeners don't know. And the University of Virginia is dominated by secret societies. I can't remember the names of many of them now. The Sevens, the Red Devils, the Green Devils, don't something like that.
Speaker: And they're very elite, and they've been going for hundreds of years. And i'm my perception of similar things in Britain was that you when if I ever encountered anyone from these secret societies, they would be... I don't know, sort of chisel-jawed, you know, sort of ah eternal aristocrats in a sort of Nietzschean way. I think I ended up at a house party with a bunch of the green devils and they were all nerds.
Speaker: Maybe that's the nerd society though, you know, who knows, maybe that's the secret secret. They had like green robes and they had a big frat house and like they were, you know, they had Latin and, you know, and yeah, they were all such dorks and kind of like was quite,
Speaker: Yeah, something of the egalitarianism Americans, so it was good. the Tocqueville strikes again. Tocqueville strikes once more. So the sort of more or less the plot of the movie is just that Sam's 16th birthday has come and gone and her parents have forgotten because her sister is getting married.
Speaker: And as a result, two different pairs of grandparents are in town. Her younger brother and her older sister, who's the one getting married, they're all there along with her parents. She's in love with a boy at school named Jake Ryan. Who's kind of like a knockoff Jacob Elordi. Yes. he iss oh jokey will lord is knock off him you know He's a hunk. He's a hunk. He's a hunk. And one of the things that makes the movie very interesting from my perspective is that, and this is something I liked about it, is that it's not a movie that's actually about getting him to like her. he immediately... just decides he likes her. The reason they're kept apart sort of has to do with her being depressed about no one remembering her 16th birthday, and then alternatively just sort of like the minutia of teenage life that like never land them in the same place at the same time, realizing their mutual affection.
Speaker: which is kind of sweet. I think from the perspective of our podcast, it's probably important that we speak about um the, I'll call them the racial, part that the the politics of the film, which is, I think, mostly what it's remembered for now.
Speaker: um There is an exchange student from... ah It's not really described where. His name is sort of like Chinese-Vietnamese combination. He says Banzai at one point, which in the actor, I think, is Japanese-American.
Speaker: so like, you know, very 80s, very sort of like othering of anyone who's from East Asia. His name, quite famously, is, of course, Long Duck Dong. um And he, whenever he comes on screen...
Speaker: They sort of like, they bang a gong. There's a point where like, what basically sounds like the opening to Hong Kong Garden by Susie and the Banshees plays when he comes on screen. But it's like completely unexplained why he's there. He's like an exchange student staying with the pair the grandparents, but there's no further contact. Like, why are they hosting this first? What else are they exchanging with? They don't have a child. Like, who is the exchange? she and its It's like, it seems like needlessly inserted into the, doesn't it doesn't advance any of the dialogue really.
Speaker: No, he's just totally... But here's the thing that's interesting about Long Duck Dong. I'm not going to... I do think there's something about his character that is indicative of, let's say, 80s and therefore the world in which Gen X grew up American racial politics.
Speaker: which is that, yes, he is comic relief. He has virtually no personality. There's a point where he's using four two forks like chopsticks to eat like a quiche off the table and doesn't understand what a quiche is. I am in no way denying that the movie is a deeply racist in that way.
Speaker: I was, however, interested in the fact that a lot of his purpose early in the movie is actually to show how provincial and sort of Midwestern the family is. um You know, where they're sort of like, they're making fun of him, they don't really understand him at all.
Speaker: um There's a point early on where they make they make Molly Ringwald take Long Duck Dong to the school dance that she has to go to that night. like they it's It's bizarre. They see him as a person, but also think it's like totally fine to build an entire world around nothing but mocking him.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's odd because you think that's going to be used as a point of tension, right? He's going to be invited to the dance and then he's going to be a suitor along with ah Jake and along with this nerd character as Ted, isn't it? Ted the Geek.
Speaker: Yes, Long Duck Dong's character is sort of going to be function structurally as a kind of a accelerant if so of the awkwardness, right? that He's going to embarrass her somehow. yeah And yet none of that happens. he He goes to the dance and he turns into like, to to steal a Gen Z online, he turns into like a Chad. Yeah. He's very cool. This is kind of what I mean. It's like such a bizarre ah universe here because he shows up, he immediately gets with this sort of like r Crumb woman who I thought was an adult for much of the movie and only realized later was meant to be a fellow high school student who like spends parts of the movie like more or less bench pressing him. and you know, so there's this weird like... So what? Like...
Speaker: Like, kind of racist. Like, oh, he's small because he's, you know he's Asian. He's being effeminized by this, like, big sort of milk-fed Midwestern woman. And yet, at the same time, he's, like like, stealing cars and he's got, like, wrap round shades on. He's, like, smoking.
Speaker: Yes. Yeah, he's he calls himself, that he starts calling himself the donger at one point during the movie. um he very It's odd. It's odd because it's, like, it it's totally playing into just this variety of racial tropes.
Speaker: But you can see how, like, I can imagine... kind of like a Gen X guy defending the character by being like, yeah, but he's cool. Like, do you know I There's this weird, like, we've talked about the weird racial politics of the 80s where, like, it's no longer acceptable to just be you know, I don't know, like a white citizens council person more or less um in sort of, like, everyday life.
Speaker: So you build in this Asian character who, like, again, literally when he comes on screen, they bang a gong almost every single time. Like, there is no escaping this. Yeah. But they're like, oh, no, no, but he's cool.
Speaker: He's got like this ah kind of like American gladiator-style woman that he's like kind of climbing up like a tree at various points in the movie. And you you get this with other... There are other sorts of like little symptom moments that rise up, too. Like, for example, early on when the geek is hitting on Molly Ringwald on the bus, because she doesn't want to take the bus, right? Because she's 16 now, so she can drive, and it's shitty that she has to take the bus.
Speaker: And she calls him, um I'll just say, ah a word that Sam could use with respect to a cigarette, but not with respect to a person. that i can i could also say i could also use it in respect to meatballs. ah Oh, i that's news to me. um Meatballs, cigarettes...
Speaker: And bundles of wood. um but Oh, yes. yeah So referring to you know him that way, and it's just this really bizarre moment where it's just like it just comes out, and it's totally unremarked upon. At least I was sort of just like, this is good she's doing like homophobia to the guy who's hitting on her. like It's all very...
Speaker: It's all very strange. There are also like ah lots of people in... I've never seen one in real life, and I don't know whether they're just a sort of phantasm of the sort of boomer in Gen X imagination. You get them in The Simpsons quite a lot, these kind of like over-the-head braces. Oh, yes. Like Lisa Simpson is threatened with one, isn't she, at one point? They're kind of like these horrible medieval-style Spanish Inquisition torture contraptions. and i might no one ever had one of those, did they?
Speaker: No. Not that I've ever seen in real life, but you know older older listeners, if you could weigh in on this. Because there is this scene, so yeah i'll I'll run through the plot very, very quickly. Basically, the geek ends up befriending Molly Ringwald because he kind of befriends Jake who asks about Sam, Molly Ringwald.
Speaker: And he's like, oh, he's actually into you, which then leads Molly Ruhl to give him a kiss. And later on, as the geek continues to try and get them together, potentially one of the most, you know let's be honest, you're cucked characters in 80s cinema, maybe of all time. He then is sort of rewarded by Jake with Jake's girlfriend who is pissed drunk and passed out.
Speaker: And i was that was probably the most jaw-dropping part of the movie to me where he's like where he literally says, because you know the geek ah Ted is like, well, you know I could drive her home, I guess, but like I can't drive. i don't have a car. She's going to freak out when she sees me. And he's like, well, you can use my dad's car.
Speaker: i don't I trust you, you don't need a license. And um she's not going to know the difference. So like go ahead, do whatever you're going to do And I was just like, holy shit. like this This is really telling me a lot about, um let's say, the the views on gender that you know Riot Grrrl music is reacting to in like the early 90s and late 80s. This is nuts. um But then it's even weirder because the girlfriend character, whose name is, I think, Caroline, she ends up kind of falling in love with Ted the Geek and they're like kind of become a couple themselves so there's like sexual transgression results in like romantic euphoria it's very bizarre very very bizarre yeah the whole sort of universe of the film is very odd it's not woke no but it's not like anti it can't be anti-woke because it's pre-woke right
Speaker: Yeah. um it's It's not anti-woke in the way of having any sort of... It doesn't have a frame of reference to be anti-woke. It's sort of like organically itself, I suppose.
Speaker: um But that's telling to me because it's a movie that feels it can just include these things. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's no... The movie made i like six times its budget or something. Like, this is a very successful movie. So obviously, this did not...
Speaker: offend white America when it came out, at least not like by the numbers. You know what I mean? Yeah, we should say this is John Hughes' first film, I think. His first directed movie. Yeah, and it was kind of crazy. He got like three, I think it was a bundle of three films in a contract.
Speaker: It was Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and then Ferris Bueller's Day Off are the three that he directed um kind of in a row. And this is something, not that anyone really needs to care about this, but what's fascinating about the Hughes movies is those three, I think, are 84, 85, 86. Yeah.
Speaker: So he's just churning them out. like There's this point in the mid-80s, which is you know the oldest Xers at this point are 19, 20 years old. So this is really for those like early mid-Xers as their teenagers to just kind of take in. I think it's one of the reasons we kind of like had to do one of these movies to me because they are both in reality and in terms of nostalgia- The teen movie, they are super bad. Do you know what I mean? like That is what we are looking at here, the super bad of the mid-1980s.
Speaker: These movies that define how an exer, as a teen, starts to think about their own experience cinematically. If you take Superbad as a reference point, Superbad is, and I think we've discussed this in the Ridgemont High episode, like it's simultaneously much more overtly sexual.
Speaker: think there's a Seth Rogen character who's obsessively drawing penises in more elaborate and abstract ways. There's a Picasso penis, a Vermeer penis. And yet it is obviously, it's not woke in the kind because it comes out, what, 2010 or something? So it's not... 2007, sorry. 2007, yeah. So it's pre-woke. I mean, it's it's post sort of political correctness of the 90s, but it's pre sort of the modern iteration of woke. So it's ah it doesn't include things like date rape effectively in a sort of, and if it did, it wouldn't be in a sort of neutral to a positive way.
Speaker: Superbad is much more raunchy, it's much more explicit, and yet it's also much more moral about things that we're now moral about today. And yeah, obviously, ah Sixteen Candles is in some ways much more innocent as a film.
Speaker: But much more evil at the same time. Yeah, it's like innocently... Yeah, like, Superbad is, like, depraved good. Sixteen Candles is, like, innocent evil. Two things. It makes you realize, first of all, like, why the sort of, like, PC movement of the 90s happened. Because if you're just, like, throwing this at teenagers, you're like, yes, there's a character who's named Long Duck Dong.
Speaker: He sort of gets, like... are crumbed by this gigantic woman who has no reason to exist. and like Literally, you could remove those scenes in the movie and nothing would change. like Nothing would be different at all. But it also goes some way, I think, to explaining a certain kind of X-er, because we've talked about X-ers being actually the biggest Trump demographic. People think it's boomers, but by numbers or by percentages, it's X-ers.
Speaker: And you kind of can be like, yeah, they grew up on movies where it was just like totally fine to have the nerd get the jock's girlfriend as spoils for like allowing him to be cuckolded by the same jock who he's making this arrangement with. And you see that, and you know, even the fact that I think there's one black character in the entire movie who's in the background at the dance. Like that is sort of as far as any sort of broader like racial inclusion goes in the world of the movie. Yeah. He's like constantly being like forced back into the dance. well
Speaker: I was confused by that. Were the teachers trying to make him stay? there's something going on there. I i don't 100% understand it myself. But you're like, okay, so these are people who probably didn't like PC that much when they were 25 old in the and then there're fifty And, you know, they're um being asked to not have movies that have guys named Long Duck Dong in them. And they freak out. And I'm not in any way trying to justify that at all. I just think that it... Seeing this is sort of like... It unlocked for me the severity of the discrepancy between where we are now and where we were then. Because if I think about like...
Speaker: a movie like Kids, which or even you know Charles Pinion's Twisted Issues, both of which we discussed in terms of kind of like the colorblind desire of the time. right like People of all races are just kind of there. We're doing Martin Luther King stuff.
Speaker: I think the flip side of that is like, yes, but we're going to be able to do a lot of really racist jokes. And that's sort of the trade-off, right? like I can bully you. We're all friends, whatever, but I can also do this. like I can't imagine...
Speaker: I don't know, being like an Asian American teenager and going to see this movie and being like, oh good, the representation I got is Long Duck Dong. I can't have been a particularly good experience. But also in Siam, Long Duck Dong has a last laugh because, you know...
Speaker: Well, that's what makes it bizarre because it's like self-justifying. you know It's like, yeah, hes he's cool. He's cool. Well, I didn't just mean individually. I meant civilization. they like Oh, well, yes. the The Baker family, Samantha's family, you know if you think i don't they're all unemployed now.
Speaker: Long Duck Dong is now like a plenipotentiary like bureaucrat in the CCP. of Kids at Harvard. His children are like a Harvard. is They showed Deng Xiaoping this movie and he was like, he has one goal to find Long Nook Dong and and make sure that he andies enters the party apparatus and to ah obliterate the family responsible for this this assault.
Speaker: To me, it's even telling the way in which the character isn't like a particular kind of Asian. I mean, listen, I'm not an expert in sort of East Asian anything, but according Wikipedia, he's supposed to be Chinese. But like okay, to me, Duck, especially with the C, codes very Vietnamese. Okay?
Speaker: Long can be a Chinese name. Dong can be a Chinese name. Fine. He says bonsai at one point when jumping out of a tree. um He's just there to be a guy because Long Duck Dong is a funny name.
Speaker: like When he's got his head on the sort of gigantic bosom of the Arcrumb Amazon that he's dancing with at the dance, she goes, what's your first name? He's like, Long. I'm not doing the accent. Yeah. I'm definitely not doing the voice thing of Long Duck Dong in this movie. What's your last name?
Speaker: Dong. She goes, what's your middle name? Duck. And she sort of looks quizzically at him, but it doesn't bother her at all. Like they just know that that's the joke. And so we're going to expose you to the joke. Yeah, I i think there there's some underlying anxiety, right? Like if you think about a book like City of Courts, which comes out in 1990, there's this obsession with ah just of Japanese industrial corporations replacing American corporations in LA.
Speaker: And I think this was even happening earlier in the nineteen eighty s And obviously Chicago is kind of the manufacturing belt. The Midwest, also you know you've got a strong auto industry there. And I do wonder if this kind of yeah like composite Asian character is a kind of subtle sublimation of that realization that hey we're at the start deindustrialization as well right so yeah and I'm sure there were sort of Japanese car companies buying up American ones and laying off workers and I wonder if that this character is some kind of like compensatory projection I mean, and we we saw some of this in Fresh Kill, too.
Speaker: The sort of like mega corporation of the world that sort of is like becoming fully multinational and sort of destroying you know other parts of Asia. um Although, obviously, this movie is in no way concerned with that reality in an explicit way. um But yeah, i mean I think one of the things worth talking about in the movie to me also is like the you mentioned the presence of her family.
Speaker: You would think going back to a movie like this, the kind of like latchkey dynamic would be a little bit stronger. But it's actually a movie and maybe a protest too much, I don't know. But about sort of like the warmth of family relationships, like it is considered very sad. Her family realizes they've forgotten her birthday and are extremely apologetic. But she's also extremely understanding of that fact.
Speaker: Later on, she sort of like overcomes her feelings about, you know, her family forgetting in part through a conversation with her father that they end by being like, he says,
Speaker: Well, I don't think I can go to sleep, Sam, if I don't think that this conversation helped you. So lie to me. She's like, okay, dad. And, you know, it's very much like you need your dad, but he's kind of embarrassing. And it holds on to an almost like 50s style family dynamic.
Speaker: that I'm sure existed in the 80s and all sorts of places, but it it doesn't lean into the difficulties. It doesn't lean into the parents being gone. It doesn't lean into the kind of like ways in which there's maybe a clash of generations between priorities, you know the kind of like... Boomers who've turned into fast-paced corporate folks who can't relate to their rebellious children. like None of that is present at all in the movie. It's very much like a happy domestic unit that is mildly disrupted by a wedding that leads to grandparents coming and to the fact that they forget the birthday. But that's it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think maybe there's a lag, right? You can actually see Home Alone as a kind of like comedic conceit on the latchkey idea, right? like What if we took the the idea of latchkey kids to the extreme?
Speaker: I think Kevin McCallus' parents in that film are slightly more sort of stressed out corporate types. yeah um The mum's a lawyer or something. And yeah, I think it's obviously clear that ah Samantha's parents are fairly affluent. Like we've not got to that point in the 80s yet where like affluence is kind of like the the deal of affluence is that you're constantly stressed you have no time. Like we're in the kind of pre-lapsarian Fordist reality maybe at this point in time still just about where the parents are inexplicably like fairly well off but they're not like tearing their hair out about like corporate annual corporate reports or anything.
Speaker: That's actually an interesting segue to the other kind of Fordist character in the movie, which is the guy getting married to Sam's sister, who is has some sort of like crazy Polish last name, very Chicago-coded.
Speaker: Rice-chick, isn't it? And the the running joke in the the film is that they keep mispronouncing it. and It's Riz-chick, but they keep saying Rice-chick. Yes, which is also, I have to say, as someone who has a ah complicated Slavic last name, still happening. That has not stopped one way or the other.
Speaker: But the kind of... It's played for laughs, but the strange little way that they handle this is that like his family is... The dad's clearly mobbed up. it cuts to them at dinner, and he's like, yeah, I'm in video game arcades. i ah i also do a little bit of ah you know a little bit of ah money management. you know like these These industries that are all clearly kind of mobbed up.
Speaker: And the the joke is kind of that they're really uncouth. Like they all take shots together. The mom of Sam's family can't take shots. The grandmother or the the mother rather of the fiance takes ice out of her water and puts it into her coffee, which is something my grandmother did. So I was like, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that that marked us as Slavic pigs, John Hughes. Like, you know, just this bizarre kind of like, yeah,
Speaker: The movie's racist against Slavs as well. That's what I'm saying. It's a strange like ah implicit encounter between sort of like mid-Western wasps and so white ethnics that is played for laughs but isn't like really articulated.
Speaker: No, but it's clearly there to establish, at least in part, like who they are as a family. like They're this sort of like proper, nice, maybe they've got some problems, domestic unit, but they're still, they're kind of like the suburbs with a capital S. like They are the suburban subject. you know like They live in a beautiful area. It's not like a new development. right It's like the bad version of the suburbs where everything looks the same. There are nice houses, big lots. um you know it's it's It's upper middle class.
Speaker: And they are not a part of the you know you You get the sense almost that like the dad ah actually works maybe in the city of Chicago or something, like a place that they would not deign to actually enter, filled as it is with like white ethnics and people of color and things like that. you know They don't know which fork to use at dinner, basically. And the funny part is the family would never say that. like There's no point in the movie where they come out and say it. It's just their reactions to the way that the other family acts are you know make it very clear And so there's this little circle that only contains people with like Anglo last names, basically. And if your name is Longduckdong or Reishek, you don't get to participate. Yeah, although the hunk, the love interest, has got an Irish last name. Although I don't know whether ah by this point in the 80s, that distinction is kind of not really a thing.
Speaker: And I think it's you also have to think like Chicago here. Like, you know what I mean Because the the classic kind of white ethnic group for the Chicago area is, yeah, Italians, but it's really like Slavs, like, you know, Polish people especially. So I think there's some of that going on. Like, even the fact that the Polish guy's job is to be like an Italian-coded mobster is very telling. It's quite confusing, yeah. But was thinking that the main hunk, the ah the love interest, Jake is Jake Ryan. is He's got an Irish last name.
Speaker: But that's not brought out as a kind of ethnic stereotype in any way. No, he's like an all American hunk. Like that's his job is to like, there's a point early in the movie and this is to the movie's like raunch point. You know, it it is a little raunchy.
Speaker: They're passing a note around. i didn't fully understand like how this was happening, but they passed a note around with a bunch of questions about just like sex And this is how we find out that she's into Jake Ryan because one of the questions on this kind of student questionnaire that at first I thought was being given out by the creep health teacher at the front of the room, but it turns out is not. That's not what's going on.
Speaker: And one of the questions is like, if you could do it, you know, in quotation marks with anyone, who would it be? And she's like, Oh, Jake Ryan. But he is quite a good looking... I mean, like, yeah, I think, like, ah even as a straight man, I can say he's he's he's a good looking chap.
Speaker: But it's it's very kind of like 50s, I guess is my point. Like, there's a residualness of the 50s high school movie here. Yes. Like, or the 50s high school ideal that is not present in something like Superbad. Like, we're still existing in that.
Speaker: Yeah, he's a very, like, all-American sort of physical guy. He's very, like, straight down the line. Yeah, he's a jock. He differs to, what's the 1980s film with Winona Ryder, where she's like, infatuated with the bad boys, whereas like ah a Burberry Mac the entire time turns out to be like a terrorist.
Speaker: It's Heathers, because that's the movie where he's a terrorist, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, the main guy, Heathers. So like that, to me, is kind of like actually the sort of who I think of, and that's what four years later, he's the kind of guy I think of as the Gen X heartthrob, right? horse is What's the character's name?
Speaker: Jason J.D. Dean, ah played by Christian Slater. Yeah, he's kind of in Mac. He's really Nietzsche. He's like, fuck off. He's like, fuck authority, man. He's like a Sigma male. He's kind of outside the hierarchy.
Speaker: You know, he's like mysterious. I like that. Yeah, I think my growing up, my sort of conception of 80s and ninety s what what what the The idea of what attainable desire of masculinity was was this kind of character, right?
Speaker: Yeah, the the greaser. Yeah, but he's kind of like... He's not exactly greasy. Lost Boys, I suppose, is maybe another film. he's um What's his face from Fast Times at Ridgemont High? um The scalper. The scalper, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, he's like... He's always got his hands his pocket. He's like, hey, man, how you doing? And yeah, Jake Ryan is very much not this kind of character, right? No, not in the least. Yeah.
Speaker: There's actually a really charming bit where it obviously precedes an awful, like very problematic scene. But like the bit where him and Ted are is at the end of the party and they're sort of like making cocktails and eating nuts out of a bowl.
Speaker: And like, hey, man, let's see we can figure this out. And they're like they're always like pretending to be adults in this this very odd way. like They're like two like bankers off-duty at a bar somewhere. Thank you for reminding me of this because I meant to bring this up. One of the weird things about the movie that I haven't really decided what it means for Gen X necessarily, but it clearly has some resonance, is this movie is very much about pretending to be an adult as a teenager, right? Like there's the scene where the the geek who's a freshman, Ted, he's making martinis and like non-martini glasses while Yes, this is the scene I'm talking about, yeah. And he's like talking like he's like doing an M&A deal. Yeah. Yes. No, exactly. One of the things that happens in the movie throughout is that Sam is mad that, well, I just did it to her. Sam is her childhood nickname, which her family uses, but she now wants to be Samantha, which has a sort of more adult quality.
Speaker: She wants to have like a like a full name, more or less. And I was sort of perplexed by this. i mean It's not that I think teenagers don't still want to be adults. Of course, teenagers think of themselves. like the The classic teenage thing is that every year is the most mature you're going to be. So when you're 17, you're like, oh, I finally hit maturity. When you're 18, you're like, oh my God, I'm so mature. like Every year brings this new kind of level or or self-conception of maturity.
Speaker: But in this movie, we get that distilled down to this essence of like a desire to act and be like an adult. I mean, we get this with um Ted where he uses Jake's dad's Rolls Royce and then makes his nerd friends, one of whom is played by John Cusack, come out and take pictures of him in the car with the passed out Caroline with like beers. And he's like, isn't this awesome? Like I'm i'm a cool, you know, like finance bro from the 80s. I got my Rolls Royce. I got my beautiful babe in the back, you know, this kind of thing.
Speaker: And i I didn't know exactly what to do with that because I feel like in a lot of the Gen X stuff we've watched, the conception is actually that being an adult is kind of bad. Not that like being old is bad per se, but that there's a kind of linking of adulthood to, yeah, being like a shitty corporate guy from the mid-80s who's engaged in M&A, or perhaps S&M.
Speaker: um But in this movie... They all kind of want to be that person. Not that person in the sense of like Gordon Gekko, but just that person who is a full adult, has the full autonomy associated with being an adult.
Speaker: Like the characters in Fast Times at Ridgemont High don't need that dream because they're already living it. They already live fully autonomous lives. Whereas in this, they don't. And they want to be there really badly. I was going to say Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a text in this way, right? Like it's why it's so compelling as a film. um And it it takes it further than 16 Candles is this kind of, you teenage escape from the Chicago suburbs into Chicago, the city where things happen. And it's like, they go to art galleries, they look at Pissaros and Picassos and like, su rats and they like go and join the parade and like, yeah, they like steal the car and they're bunking off school, but it's not really about bunking off school in a way that a normal teenager would where you bunk off school, you go play video games and nothing happens. It's, it's, you bunk off school and everything happens. are You like get, you play out adulthood.
Speaker: Yeah, that's an interesting point, actually. is This movie, the school is actually very unimportant. i mean, it's where the dance happens. There are a couple scenes set in the school. It's certainly more anchored in the school than Fast Times is.
Speaker: But the school... like It's not a movie like The Breakfast Club about like the evils of the educational system and like the penal nature of the educational system. The school is just where you go because you have to go because you're a teenager, but you're waiting to be an adult. And you become an adult through like date rape, basically. like That's the the fantasy of the movie, is it not? I mean, there's literally a scene where that character, Ted...
Speaker: basically convinces Molly Ringwald to give her panties to him so he can show it. And they charge a dollar a kid to see them in the bathroom. And you're like, hmm. Yes. And I thought the interesting, that was a very, ah but the interesting thing about that was the underlying tech thing about that. Like, because it's like, he's like, oh, if i if I don't get the knickers, i going have to have give my friends a bunch of floppy disks and floppy disks are really expensive. And they're all like computer nerds, which i we had neglected to mention that Ted and his friends are coded. They're always wearing headgear of various weird kinds.
Speaker: And in that sense, this does have a little bit of that revenge of the nerds quality that I like to say we are defined by at the end of history now, where like it really is this like extremely sexually licentious like nerd who just acts as a force for, bizarrely in this movie, social cohesion because he's what brings together...
Speaker: Jake and Samantha in the movie. But like he's just like a sex-crazed 14-year-old. That's what he actually is, and he's a nerd. you know Yeah, but he's an odd nerd in the sense that he's like the least nerdy of the nerds in the sense that he has like a sort of a charm to him in the sense that he's you know he has a good patter. like he He can like string together this salesman-like monologue to whoever he meets.
Speaker: You could see him being... Elon Musk. Like, you know, like not, you know, like becoming the tech billionaire, you know, because he has... Yeah, he's the guy who like corral the other nerds who have no social skills.
Speaker: Well, he says at one point, because he lives under a self-delusion that he's a ladies' man and part of the comedy of those parts of the movie is just his like utter self-confidence running up against like just the objective reality of him being like 47 pounds. And like, you know, and there's a moment when he's in the shop, the like auto shop at the school. this is when him and Molly Ringwald are sort of like becoming friendly and he's beginning to become this go-between character. And he says, let me tell you something about myself. It's a secret to make her feel better about her situation.
Speaker: He goes, I've never bagged a babe. And she just laughs. And he doesn't understand what's funny about it. and he goes, listen, I didn't ask for this reputation. I've just had the reputation of a ladies' man since sixth grade. And you're like, how?
Speaker: How is that possible? you're a worm. It's unbelievable. um But I think if I can just, if if I may draw us to a close, because I need to see a man about putting up an awning who's currently outside of my home.
Speaker: ah Shout out, John. I think the importance of this film to the season of the podcast is really, we've tried so hard to like, gather these movies that can be read so like symptomatically from the outskirts of Gen X. And this is one of the few we've done, maybe along with like House Party and a couple of others that really are like movies of the moment that did extremely well.
Speaker: And if nothing else, I take away from this that... A certain kind of median XR was really raised on a bunch of stuff that made them very ill-prepared to emerge into the 21st century in a cultural sense.
Speaker: And the insulation of the movie, the idea of like these beautiful, nice suburbs where everyone sort of just has these very generic problems— runs up against the like end of history that's going to come you know after the the Reagan years are over. And this movie leaves you very ill-prepared to deal with all of that. like If this is your imaginary, you are not going to do well in the 2008 financial crash. You are not going to do well in the movie Brother.
Speaker: You are not going to do well in the movie Kids. And it doesn't really lead me to sympathize with Gen X per se but it does lead me to understand the kind of shock and dismay that they seem to have met you know the 21st century with in many cases. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the only characters in this film who are in any way sort of prepared for the 21st century are the nerds, right?
Speaker: Yes, which is horrifying because they are the most like, quote unquote, problematic of anyone in the movie, probably in terms of like, they are driven exclusively by being technologically dominant and wanting to fuck, even if it includes rape.
Speaker: So like, yeah. And like envy, kind of like envy as well. Which we live in the revenge of the nerds. I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever tire of saying this. ah And it's an odd film in the sense that the jock isn't a bad guy, right? Like, no, i it's so many films of the 2000s and 2010s.
Speaker: The jock is like typecast as an awful person. And in this film, I mean, Jake's not, he's not like ah entirely good. But he's not all bad. Yeah, he's kind of framed as a fairly sympathetic, level-headed character, which I thought i found interesting.
Speaker: But he likes Sam. Like, that's the thing. you know, in the movie, he just is like, oh Like, there's even a moment early on where he's doing pull-ups with a sort of a truly, like, chud jock friend. And he's like...
Speaker: There's nothing there. It's a void. And I misheard it as void when I first was watching the movie. And I was like, oh, Jesus. um but And then he goes, well, did it ever occur to you that I'm not just about like physicality? And that's supposed to let us know that you know he's actually kind of a good guy and he like cares about her interiority. Which, of course, within the world the movie never happens. They never have like a conversation, actually. They just meet up at the end and that's it. There's no actual romantic connection of any kind beyond just like, I think they the other one's hot.
Speaker: which that superficiality is maybe he says something about the Hughes years in terms of what our high schoolers were looking for and how they conceived of love. But I think we should shut it down. My dog is barking.
Speaker: There's a man outside with ah a couple of two by fours that we need to get to work with. I will remind everyone. Well, first of all, no no no, no, no, Chase. Don't start with reminding. Start with gratitude, with thanks, because we are so thankful for our subscribers,
Speaker: who dot the globe. And we hope that you will consider subscribing if you are not already. Consider paid subscribing if you're not. though Listen, we don't hold it against you. It's hard out there.
Speaker: and we we need some diversification. We've been looking at the stats. There's far too many listeners in South Carolina and Portland, of all places. So we want to get some Midwesterners, some Appalachians, you know, some Rocky Mountains.
Speaker: If you're from the Midwest, leave us a comment about this movie because we this is basically a sort of an anthropological experience for us. In fact, I'm one of the groups that the movie is racist against. So, you know, it's hard for me to view it objectively. But I would ask everyone to consider shooting us an email, deathphotopodgmail.com or find us on Twitter at deathphotopod.
Speaker: Thank you for another episode. Bye-bye. Mission to God.
