‘Load up on guns and bring your friends, it’s
fun to lose and to pretend…’ - Smells
Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana.
‘Eat your cereal with a fork and do your
homework in the dark’ – Happy Harry Hard-On
Some things are
best left on the nostalgia shelf, next to Boots lavender & mint shampoo, petrol
blue Kickers, pink lemonade Snapple and wearing skirts over trousers. This is a
new series of posts where I’ll look back sometimes not so fondly on the books,
films and music of my youth. We’re starting with the 1990 Christian Slater
film, Pump Up the Volume.
Ah, Christian
Slater! With his Jack Nicholson eyebrows and his knowing chuckle, his bad boy
hair and the way he smoked cigarettes, what teenage girl from a small town in
England wouldn’t hope to bump into him outside McDonalds? He would take you for
rides in his vintage car, he’d have booze and cigarettes. Best of all, he could
even dispose of school bullies by making them drink drain un-blocker, or
shooting them in the head.
In Pump Up the Volume, he plays nerdy,
awkward Mark Hunter (you know he’s awkward and nerdy because he wears glasses
and short sleeved, button-down checked shirts) the new kid in school (Hubert
Humphrey High, Phoenix, Arizona) who can’t talk to girls but can talk filth
over pirate radio waves. Mark’s voice-disguised DJ alter-ego is Happy Harry
Hard-On, a priapic, chronic masturbator with an authority problem. He hates his
parents, his teachers, the guidance counsellors, any kind of authoritah.
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| Nerdgasm |
Mark/Harry soon sets about exposing his high school’s unfair expulsion
policies, which involve booting pupils out for things like getting pregnant, wearing
band badges on your denim jacket or playing sexually explicit rap in the break
rooms.
One night Harry
gets a letter from a depressed listener, fellow HHH pupil Malcolm, asking if he
should kill himself. Because Harry is a teenage boy and knows jack shit about
what you’d say to someone that asks you that, he doesn’t handle things well at
first and his later attempts to talk Malcolm out of suicide fail. Mark/Harry blames himself and Mark decides
he’s not going to be Harry anymore because being the representative voice of
the yoot is too much for him, especially if his audience are going to kill
themselves.
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| 'What if you're a normal reaction to a fucked-up situation?' |
Also listening to
his late night shows is Nora Dinero, (Samantha Mathis) the ‘Eat Me Beat Me
Lady’ who sends Harry her dirty (and terrible) poetry. Nora is the 1990s take
on the manic dream pixie girl. For those not familiar with the manic pixie dream girl trope, she is a female character that serves no other purpose other
than to help the male protagonist open up and embrace love / life/ laughter.
The manic pixie dream girl will run through puddles barefoot, decide to get a
train to Paris after a few beers in a London pub, she’ll be cray-zee and arty
and quirky, she’ll be gawky but pretty (not seen a fat manic pixie dream girl
yet) It may seem that she has agency, and a personality, but she doesn’t. We
only see her viewed through the eyes of the male character.
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| Mark and Nora meet for the first time |
Once Nora
discovers Harry’s true identity, she hassles him to ‘get his message out there’.
The youth are unhappy! Parents listen! You have forgotten what it was like to
be young and angry with the world! That kid what shot himself in the head! Posh
popular Paige putting all her stuff in the microwave!
Let me tell you,
putting your pearls and medals in the microwave isn’t rebellious or a two
fingers up to da man, it’s fucking stupid and dangerous. Paige escapes only with a broken nose instead
of say, third degree burns that require hours of extensive, painful surgery
despite the fact she sits IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING LOADED MICROWAVE AND WATCHES
IT BLOW UP AND SET FIRE TO HER KITCHEN.
Anyway that’s
the basic plot, the authoritahs try and get Harry off the air because he’s a
bad influence on the kids but it all turns out OK in the end, fuck you parents
of dead kid, it’s all your fault anyway for being mean to him when he said he
didn’t want to watch TV with you.
The End. The
ending is rushed and unsatisfying. Ambiguous endings to films don’t bother me –
one of my favourite film endings is Shutter
Island because it’s so open to having whatever resolution the viewer wants
it to have. I don’t expect things to be tied up neatly before the final credits
roll, but in PUtV it just feels like they didn’t know how to end the story, so
they just….end it.
While writing
this, I looked up some reviews of the film and comments on Youtube clips. It’s
a much loved movie, and a lot of people think its Christian Slater’s best. It’s
true that I really like Mark / Harry as a character, but then he’s designed for
teenage girls to fall in love with. In fact I fell slightly in love with him all
over again, especially during the scene where he’s burning letters from his
listeners. There’s something about the way that scene is played and lit that
makes you want to scoop Mark up and run, run away with him forever. Then
Samantha Mathis ruins it by taking her top off and pointing her perky boobs in
his face. Damn you, Mathis!
There are some
aspects of PUtV that are still relevant and will always be relevant. Most of us
know how it feels to think we don’t fit in anywhere. Most of us feel total,
bleak despair at some time in our lives.
Another credit
is that Nora and Mark are a good match – he’s not the geek getting the beauty
queen (initially he’s crushing on Julia Roberts lookalike, Paige) and Nora’s
not the awkward nerd who gets the most popular boy in school because she’s had
a makeover and taken off her specs. As an onscreen (and later on real life)
couple, they really work. There’s chemistry, even if most of it comes from
Mathis’ lustful glances and plump lip licking.
That said, I
don’t think this film would ever work outside of an early 1990s setting, and
that’s not down to changes with technology or the teenage mind-set. If Harry
was at high school now he’d just be podcasting, Instagramming or Snapchatting
instead.
Watching the film again, despite its message
of rebelling against authority, or the unfairness of a system that singles out
poor and troubled kids, it all seems pretty tame. These kids aren’t going to a
school where guns and knives are a constant presence and they don’t live on
sprawling, grim, hopeless housing estates. Sure, there’s a different kind of
hopelessness, one that’s probably hard to understand when you come from small
town England. A lot is made of the little hillside boxes PuTV’s character live
in and I don’t think it’s an accident the film is set in state with a desert
climate. Bleak council estates might be absent, but thousands of identical
houses are present, perhaps to show us the teenage character’s fight to remain
individual and distinct in a place where everything looks the same. (you see
shots of Mark walking past these houses being built on his way to school.)
The film’s story
belongs to the loners and outcasts, but it also belongs to the kids tired of
being forced into a mould of popularity and academic achievement.
In April, 1999,
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot and killed twelve fellow pupils and one
teacher at Columbine High School. In their video diaries (known as ‘The
Basement Tapes’) they outlined their plans for destruction. Their reason for
the massacre was that they were bullied, lonely outcasts. They were going to kill the jocks that made
their lives hell. As it happened, they killed indiscriminately and not one
‘jock’ was among the victims. They killed outcasts and loners. They killed kids
they professed to be like. Their youngest victim was only 14 years old.
Pump Up The Volume and the Columbine
massacre bookend the 1990s for me, apart from date-related obviousness. In 1991, I had started secondary school myself
and some of my own fears of going to ‘high’ school were realised. But I didn’t
take a gun into school and kill the kids I hated, the kids that picked on me.
The early 90’s were the age of Take That
rubbing jelly on their bare buttocks, salt and vinegar Disco crisps, Panda Pop
cola, Body Shop perfume oils, platform shoes, Smash Hits, Just Seventeen,
walking home from school with your friends, when everyone wanted a JD Sports
drawstring bag and a pair of Adidas Gazelles. By 1998, Britpop was dying (grunge was already
dead) to quote Blur:
We all say ‘don’t want to be alone’
We wear the same clothes, cause we feel the
same
We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight
End of a century Oh it’s nothing special
When I think of
PuTV, I think of 13 year old me, crushing on Christian Slater and taping the
Top 40 off Capital FM, dressing like Winona Ryder in Heathers, and smearing my mouth with Body Shop watermelon lip
gloss. 1999 might have been in the same decade but it was a whole lifetime
away.
So sure, watch Pump Up the Volume, whether you haven’t
seen it in twenty-seven years, (TWENTY-SEVEN!) or you haven’t seen it at all.
It’s not aged well, but it hasn’t aged badly either. I
don’t think things can have changed that
much for teenagers, but I feel that Mark, Nora and all us 90s school kids were
lucky we didn’t come of age in the internet era. (though I’d like to have seen Paige
live-streaming blowing up the microwave,
‘U OK hun?’)
Maybe I’ll dig
it out in another few years and laugh again at the bit where Nora is gagging
for a snog from Mark so much, she stands in front of him with her mouth hanging
open. That’s what I’d have done if he was standing in front of me.
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| KISS ME you hot nerdy piece of ass |
Scores on the doors:
For nostalgia
purposes: 9/10
For an accurate
representation of high school life: 4.5/10
The soundtrack actually rocks, so it gets
another point for that – 5.5/10
Another for repeatedly
using Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ 6.5 /10
Oh the dialogue
is excellent and pretty funny, another point… 7.5/10
Christian Slater
shirtless for what feels like 40% of the film gets another…… 8.5/10
Total: 17.5 /20
