Showgirls - A Masterclass of Crap and What it Can Teach Us (kind of)

Disclaimer: this is a fly by the seat of my pants type post, more a collection of wonderings than a coherent argument. So like many of my other posts then. Kill your darlings, as they say. (please also excuse the weird formatting, it seems there's nothing I can do about it.)

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good… It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”

Ira Glass

I’ve used this (edited) quote by radio producer Ira Glass before. I followed it by saying he’d obviously never read any of the fiction I wrote as a teenager. Now I think he might have done, but I am not sure I’ve ever closed that gap in my work over the last twenty or so years. The quality of my writing still depresses me, and the depression deepens when I read books by other writers. I recently finished the ‘Bill Hodges’ trilogy by Stephen King. It was the first time in for a while that I was excited to get to bed time and read a book. As is often pointed out by critics and fans, King may not be an exceptional writer but he is an exceptional storyteller. His skill lies in keeping you reading, page after page, even though it’s getting very late and your eyes are drooping.  Why can’t I write like this? I’d think to myself roughly every 5 pages or so.

A day writing looks like this:

Coffee.

BBC breakfast.

Read what you wrote last time.

Feel like crying, delete half of it.

Stand up and look out of the window, at the February drizzle. The neighbour opposite is taking the bins out, but he’s still in his PJs and barefoot, so he’s standing in the doorway, trying to throw stuff into the bin from there. He’s got a bad aim.

Think to self, I have been writing this book for a hundred years, and I’m not even halfway through.

Go to Costa to steal their wifi. Wonder to yourself what kind coffee your main character would drink. Probably the same kind as you, if you follow theory that all characters are merely extensions of the author’s ego.

YouTube.

YouTube.

Write 3 words.

Delete them.

YouTube.

Walk home in the rain, heart pounding from two costa cappuccinos,  notice that now the snow’s melted, there’s a lot of rubbish on the pavements and stuck in hedges.

Sit at home in the dark, having an existential crisis about how writing is really just a vanity project because you’re scared of death, especially your own, and you think one day everyone you love will die and you still won’t have finished your fucking stupid book and then you’ll die too and your whole life was for nothing. You were a blip on the ultrasound of the universe, a tiny speck in the entire expanse of time, and now you are just carbon, food for the planet, like everything else that dies – leaves, birds, bugs.  Only you won’t care about any of that because you’re dead. Dead-edy dead, dead. 

I find this both comforting and depressing in equal measure. I remember my A-Level Sociology teacher telling us how she made a student cry by repeatedly asking her how she knew her house was there when she wasn’t in it. Apply this to yourself and if like me you are of a sensitive, and over-thinking nature, you can scare yourself shitless. The thought occurred to me recently. Do I actually exist? You can extend it further. Does this room exist? Does this house exist, this street, this town? I know, I know, red pill blue pill blah blah blah. I am taking a long time getting to the point, and the point is in a moment of existential crisis, I turn to films. Shit films.

If you’re going through something, you don’t need to watch a film like Enemy (which is amazing, and thought provoking and generally marvellous in any other circumstance) or even something like Fight Club, which used to be my go-to get me out of a hole watch. Nope, you need shit. Some shit so bad it’s not even good shit, it’s just shit shit. And this is where ladies and gents, I introduce Showgirls, the 1995, soft-core erotica Paul ‘Basic Instinct’ Verhoeven masterpiece and my new old favourite shit shit film.

Showgirls begins with Nomi Malone, played by Saved by the Bell’s Elizabeth Berkley (‘No Me’ / Know Me, geddit?) hitching a ride to Vegas with an Elvis rip-off.  Nomi runs into trouble almost immediately, which is a weird thing to happen, given what we learn about her later on. Poundland Elvis nicks her suitcase, (because all thieves are after suitcases full of women’s clothing) and Nomi finds herself alone and penniless in Vegas.

Nomi is saved by Molly ‘deus ex machina’ Abrahams, even though Nomi is a total dick to her and throws the fries Molly just bought her in her face. This actually happens. Molly buys a random woman some dinner and is thanked for it by getting French fries thrown at her. There’s a weird sexual vibe between Molly and Nomi where they gaze at each other and rub faces, and I was thinking, ‘Did EL James write this shit? It seems like something she’d write. OH GOD JAMES IS GOING TO START WRITING LESBIAN PORN ISN’T SHE, SOMEONE FIND HER AND STOP HER FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.’

Nomi goes from dancing in a topless bar to being a showgirl in a top topless show (apparently there’s a difference) she pushes the lead dancer, Cristal, down the stairs, so she can steal her part, fucks Cristal’s boyfriend, kicks the shit out of a man who raped Molly, then heads ‘back East’, weirdly managing to hitch a ride with Discount Elvis again. There’s some weird subplots involving a guy that inexplicably likes Nomi (she’s a bit like Anastasia Steele, and has a lot of men lusting after her for no reason) and a rivalry between two unnamed, random dancers. We find out Nomi has a history of drug addition, theft and prostitution. Like most protagonist Hollywood hookers, Nomi isn’t toothless with terrible skin and track marks, but flawless and beautiful with a perfect body. Everyone knows that you end up looking like Julia Roberts when you sell your body to buy drugs. 

Everything Nomi does is ANGRY, especially her dancing (which is literally hands down the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life, I would highly recommend any of you that are in a blue funk to watch this: 

She eats angrily, she walks angrily, she does her makeup angrily.  She even has sex angrily. Even if you haven’t seen the whole film, you probably still would have seen the pool sex between Nomi and Kyle MacLachlan – a sex scene that makes no biological sense, a scene that’s a virgin teenager’s idea of what good sex is like. Dale Cooper’s penis seems to be located somewhere between his navel and nipples. With her thighs tucked under Coop’s armpits, Nomi thrashes around like a dying fish in the grip of a fever dream, jerking and arching her back like…like…Elizabeth Berkley hasn’t ever had sex before, either. I enjoyed this scene almost as much as the bit in Fifty Shades Freed where Christian almost paralyses Ana with the spreader bar. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that urban myth where the couple that have sex in the bath get stuck together by the magical vacuum powers of water and have to go to A & E to be separated.

Why would I find such a terrible film so comforting?

1)     It’s very, very unintentionally funny

2)     The soapy, wooden acting

3)     The go nowhere plot with random scenes that are there for no reason, like when  another dancer asks Nomi what she thinks of her breasts

4)     The bit where chimps break into the dressing room and put makeup on

5)     The private dance Nomi gives Kyle in front of Cristal. Something is happening….I’m just not sure exactly what it is, but it’s from the 50 Shades School of Sex with Your Trousers On

6)     Why does a mega Vegas dance show employ a girl who can’t dance?

7)     Why is Nomi always on her period? Is she me aged 14 trying to get out of PE lessons?

8)     Why are we privy to long conversations between minor, nameless characters?

9)     When Nomi’s not looking very angry, she’s looking very startled

10) Kyle MacLachlan isn’t Dale Cooper or Trey McDougall

11) The way Nomi uses her flick knife (third best bit of the film, after the pool sex and the nightclub dancing)

12) The bit where we find out Nomi knows martial arts and kicks the shit out of a man that’s raped Molly. While she’s karate chopping him Miss Piggy style, his bodyguards are right outside and don’t hear a thing

13) Former child actor attempts to shed goodie two shoes image by tweaking her own nipples, pretending to finger herself and air fucking damn fine cup of coffee Dale Cooper

14) Frosted lipstick

15) Hair glitter

16) Mum jeans (the first time round)

17) Molly’s clothes – she would not look out of place in a hipster coffee shop

18) I feel like this film was written by a couple of 13 year old boys.

A confession

I don’t think The Girl on the Train is a great book.  There, I said it. It hit the peak wave of ‘girl’ books where other, better authors had paved the way (for the record, I thought Gone Girl was pretty good until Amy went mental with the box cutter and wine bottle) and I thought it was good idea, but the three female voices were indistinguishable to me, and Rachel was not only unlikeable, she was also irritating and boring and it’s hard to root for a main character like that. I found myself skim reading it, and feeling bad that I didn’t want to finish it to find out what happened (because I had already guessed and it took so fucking long getting there) But most people, with the exception of two, seemed to really like it. All the people that liked it seemed offended when I said I didn’t, like they’d written it themselves.

Showgirls was panned when it was first released in 1995. I can even remember the Smash Hits magazine review of it, which is where I stole the ‘No Me / Know Me, geddit?’ bit from. It now has a cult following, like Tommy ‘oh hai Mark’ Wiseau’s what-the-fuck film The Room.

Where am I going with this? I think it’s this way: I am probably never going to write a bestseller that makes me famous like Hawkins, or a film that’s so terrible it achieves cult status. But the point is to carry on writing, through what Amy Young calls ‘February’ moments in your life, when it’s grey and soggy outside and winter feels like it’s going to last forever.

 I am not a fan of the never, ever give up following your dreams school of thought, but I can write for me, can’t I? I can write things for my ‘ideal readers’ and never have them see a word of it. There’s no nobility, or higher cause, or importance to it, or any attempt to leave a legacy. It’s just writing and it’s more often than not, it’s going to just a bit shit. Like Ira says, it’s going to take a while. You’ve just got to fight your way through.

So go forth my pretties, and be unafraid of being…a little bit shit. It might not be magnificent and world changing, but it’s probably going to be alright and that’s got to be worth trying for.

 

Fifty Shades Freed Review

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A Ghost Story Review (spoiler alert)

“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.” Virginia Woolf,  A Haunted House

A few minutes into David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, couple C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) are woken in the early hours by a loud crash coming from the living-room of their one-storey, middle-of-nowhere house. They go to investigate and find….. nothing. So begins a circular, peculiar story that moves back and forth through time.

C dies on what could be the next morning, or the next month, we don’t know, because time is weirdly elastic in this film. C, dressed in a child’s notion of a Halloween ghost, rises from his mortuary gurney and returns to the house he shares with M. He observes M grieve, meet a new man and eventually move out. He meets another bed-sheeted ghost, who’s haunting the house opposite while they wait for someone, but can’t remember who.

Long after M has left the house, C continues to haunt it and it’s could be previous or could be following tenants. Even after the house is demolished and replaced with a luxury office block, and is surrounded by a neon city-scape, he stays there.

 On the surface, the premise of this film is silly and a bit pretentious. Who wants to spend a couple of hours watching Casey Affleck wandering around draped in a bed-sheet?

To me this was a film about two things. 1) Our place in the world and the meaningless of our existence in the grand scheme of things and 2) The nature of what we perceive as endings.

While C can wander back and forth through time, he is perpetually stuck in the place he can’t explain his attachment to, even when he’s alive and M is asking him if they can move to the city. When M asks C why his pull to the house is so strong, he says, ‘I don’t know. History?’  We see some fragments of his home’s sometimes awful history as C time travels to the years before the house was built.

We can project our own feelings onto C – our fears that we’re going to die and be forgotten, that we’ll die without ever doing all the things we had planned to do, that we’re running out of time, that the time we have left seems to be moving forward at an alarmingly accelerated pace. M’s fear manifests itself in her habit of leaving little notes hidden in all the places she lives, explaining that if she ever goes back, she’ll find a piece of herself there waiting. The note she leaves in the house she shares with C is what keeps him stuck there, and is key to his eventual moving on.

 There’s strong chemistry between Affleck and Mara and they convince as an on-screen couple. There’s one scene where we watch them from above, as they lie in bed and kiss, which feels kind of  voyeuristic. This scene ties in well when we later learn that C has also been watching all the time, could have been there with us at that moment too. We are also allowed to observe the couple’s relationship as it starts to crumble under the weight of their different expectations.

Rooney Mara (M) and Casey Affleck (C)

There are moments where good old haunted house tropes are used – flickering lights, books flying off shelves, cupboard doors being flung open, doors being slammed shut. I think this was probably because C was doing what he thought a ghost should be doing when they’re haunting houses; these moments seemed to come when he was upset or distressed (like when he sees M kissing her new boyfriend.) But because time is so oddly fluid in this film, he can’t even make the poltergeist style activity happen when he wants it to – the books fly the shelves too late to scare off M’s new boyfriend.

I found the idea of M perpetually haunting a place he can’t escape from overwhelmingly sad, but it’s a theme that’s at the core of this film; our refusal to let go of things, people, places, meaningless stuff, and memories. It’s also about what happens after we die, to those that we leave behind. Everything else just goes on, without you, until they end, too.

I am not an aspect ratio / camera technique buff, so I am not going to use any technical terms here. The film is shot in a way that makes it look like an old home movie, or Polaroid photo – the kind of effect that we’d use filters on phones to achieve. Because the story is told from C’s point of view, we can only really see what he can see, or how he’d see it. It’s beautifully shot, though, with long distance tracking shots and loooong one-take static shots (there’s a pie-eating scene that feels a bit like one of those extended Family Guy jokes -  I’m pretty sure it’s going to divide audiences into ‘I get this’ and ‘what the fuck am I watching?’)

The music is just brilliant, and really fits the mood of the whole film – it’s atmospheric, creepy, sad and at times uplifting.  

A Ghost Story isn’t going to be everyone’s thing at all. If you’re expecting a straight up chilly ghost story, you’ll be disappointed. If you like your films a little bit weird and a little bit unsettling, but ultimately thought-provoking, it will be for you.

Kind of wish I hadn’t watched it on my birthday, though.

Score: 3.5/5 (I’ve moved off a /10 rating!)

Dishonourable mention: Casey Affleck’s legal troubles. Don’t think about that too much, or it will spoil this film for you. 

It 2017 review and comparison (contains spoilers)

THERE's TWO THINGS that I’m going to have to mention reviewing this film. The first is the 1986 Stephen King mega-novel and the second is the 1990 mini-series adaptation, both of the same name.

I read the book 15+ years ago, so there won’t be many comparisons to that here. After seeing the 2017 remake, I dug out my copy of the mini-series and it’s on as I write this. For the rest of the review, I’ll refer to the new film as It 2017 and the mini-series as It 1990.

There follows a brief plot synopsis:

All three versions are set in Derry, Maine. Stephen King fans will be very familiar with Derry (and the fictional town of Castle Rock) as these are two places that appear over and over again in his work.

A group of young teenage misfits, calling themselves ‘The Loser Club’ have to band together to defeat a fear-eating supernatural entity whose favourite visual representation in the real world is that of Pennywise the dancing clown, who has a mouthful of supernumerary razor sharp teeth. Here's the thing, though...the entity can manifest itself as anything at all, anything that you’re frightened of.

The Loser Club

The Losers Club: Eddie, Bill, Mike, Stan, Ben, Beverly and Richie

Bill : is struggling to get over his guilt over the death of his little brother Georgie. He let Georgie go out and play by himself when he was supposed to be looking after him. His obsession with finding out what happened to Georgie alienates him from his father, who cannot hide his anger and disappointment towards Bill. In the 1990 version, we meet his mother. She does not appear in the 2017 version.

Ben :  is new to town. He’s fat (though not really by 2017’s standards) he’s fascinated by local history and it’s him that’s worked out something really bad happens in the town every 27 years. We don’t know too much about his home life.

Richie: is the comedian of the group, and provides light relief. He also does a marvellous line in filthy jokes. Again, we don’t know too much about his home life and have to assume that his parents are often absent and/or neglectful.

Eddie: is an asthmatic germophobe with a controlling mother. He’s often very anxious and easily wound up. His mother is morbidly obese and spends the day watching television game shows.

Stan: is the voice of reason. We don’t actually see too much of Stan’s backstory, other than his bar mitzvah is coming up and he hasn’t studied for it. Oh, and he’s haunted by a painting of a faceless flute player.

Mike: is an orphan in this version (not in the 1990 one) He’s black, so that automatically outcasts him and makes him the focus of negative attention from Henry Bowers and his sidekicks. He works for the family meatpacking business, a job he struggles with because he can’t bear to slaughter the animals.

Beverly:  is the only girl in the group. She is  the victim off false rumours about her promiscuity. Her dad is sexually abusive, and this is made far more explicit here than it is in 1990 version.

The 1990 version begins with Mike realising that ‘It’ has returned to Derry after a young girl goes missing. Mike phones Bill, and we have a fade-out flashback flash-back to what happened to Georgie in the summer of 1960.

Each version handles Georgie’s death very differently, though what actually happens is identical. The paper boat Georgie and Bill make together is swept into a storm drain. Waiting in the drain is Pennywise. It 1990 gets this scene out of the way quickly – it’s there purely to introduce Pennywise to the audience. It’s also oddly accompanied with weirdly jolly plinky-plonky music. It 2017 spends much longer setting up, firstly in establishing the sweet, close relationship between the two brothers and secondly in holding tension for what’s to come next. We know what’s going to happen to Georgie, and when it does, it’s brutal. His interaction with Pennywise is much longer, and it feels much, much more uncomfortable; Pennywise has water running in and out of his mouth. And he just…lets it run. He doesn’t wipe his mouth or lick his lips. I found that more unsettling than his bright, bright blue eyes. This is an alpha predator on the hunt and his focus on getting Georgie is absolute.

'Hiya Georgie!'

Pennywise is played by Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård, and he’s pretty fucking scary. He has a child-like quality to him, but because he’s obviously very tall, his physicality, the sheer size of him over that of the kids alone, makes him frightening. The way he moves is freaky; his slightly off-kilter eyes are freaky; his sly little smile is freaky; even his grubby, Victorian vaudeville era costume is damned creepy.

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise

It 2017 dispenses with the adult sections of the narrative altogether, staying with the children first in  the autumn of 1988 when Georgie dies, and then in the summer 1989,  instead of time hopping back and forth like the novel and It 1990 does. This is actually a pretty good way to handle the bloated source material because it nicely lines up part two, and means that this part of the story can fully focus on the kids and their lives in 1989.

The child actors in It 2017 are all superb, and totally believable. There is not one dud performance (and it does feel mean to slate a kid’s acting) Richie, Eddie and Ben provide the comic relief from what would otherwise be a relentless misery fest. And they talk like kids really do; they swear, they take the piss, they tell sexually explicit jokes. Their friendship feels very real. The only girl in the group Beverly, seems older, taller, bigger and more mature than the boys and that’s because in real life, she would be. We first meet 2017 Beverly hiding (unsuccessfully) in the loos from the school bullies. Beverly is actually one of the most complex, and well-drawn characters in this film. She has an utterly miserable home life, but her ‘public’ face is one of sass and bravado.

Each child is facing their own personal fear (and this is what Pennywise manifests as) Beating demons is a reoccurring theme in King’s work. IT 2017 knows this, and puts this theme at the heart of the film. This actually ties in nicely with the coming of age feel that the film also has, and the idea that our childhood fears may always haunt us. I read, watched and listened to other reviews, and it didn’t surprise me to hear comparisons of It 2017 to films like The Goonies and that isn't a bad thing at all. There is an element of adventure to this film too, and it doesn't feel out of place. 

Like with a lot of King’s novels, there are plenty of Easter eggs to be found. Eddie wears a t-shirt that has a picture of a car with eyes and teeth on it (Christine), Beverly’s bathroom scene recalls both Carrie and The Shining. The actor playing vile bully Henry Bowers has more than a passing resemblance to the late River Phoenix, who starred in another Stephen King adaptation, Stand By Me. One of the boys calls Beverly ‘Molly Ringwald’ which is funny because she looks just like 80’s Molly Ringwald (though that joke went over ¾ of the audience’s heads in my showing.) When TVs are playing in the background in scenes, you can hear the audio talk about playing in sewers with clowns. A cinema is showing A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.

 The ‘deadlights’ from the novel don’t appear until the end of the film, but I was so pleased they did. In the car on the way home, I said to my friend, ‘they did the deadlights!! THE DEADLIGHTS!!!’

Eddie's Christine inspired t-shirt

With the exception of Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise, IT 2017 is superior to IT 1990 in pretty much every way. It’s unnecessary to compare Curry and Skarsgård, because they are both so different and frightening in their own ways. That said I do prefer Skarsgård’s interpretation.

 Not one scene is wasted and each one contributes to keeping the plot moving along nicely. You can’t root for characters you don’t care about, but we feel like we’re part of the Loser Club, so we root for them every step of the way. There are moments in this film that are heart-breaking – Bill’s confrontation with his dad in the garage feels so painfully real, it kind of hurts to watch. That said, the film is also actually very, very funny with a good few laugh out loud moments.

For those of us that came of age in the early 1990s, this film will feel especially nostalgic – we can remember the late 80’s elements of the film – the faulty Casio calculator watch that goes off at weird times, the huge unflattering NHS style glasses, shell suits, analogue TV, beat em’ up arcade games – and we can also remember the first time we watched It 1990.

My only issue with the film was the amount of CGI used. It’s all pretty seamless, so it’s not an issue with quality, but more that some of the scenes were scary enough without all the extra bows and there were some genuine ‘hide behind you hands’ frights.  I went for dinner after the film, and walking alone up two flights of stairs to the restaurant toilets spooked me. And that to me is when a scary film has done its job well. When I’m thinking about it the next day, and well into the next week. 

Scores on the doors:

9/10. 

Dishonourable mention:

That scene from the book is cut from both screen adaptations and thank fuck it is. It’s way too twisted, even for me. Don’t know what scene I mean? Read the book, friends. Read the book. 

Re:Watching - Pump Up The Volume

‘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. 

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.

'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.

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.

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