My Chuck Klosterman Piece, Part 2: Pump Up The Volume

My friend K2 is serving in Afghanistan right now and she is the person I think of whenever I need to put a face on the war. This isn’t so unusual except that if you had to sort through the pictures of all the people I know, I don’t think you would have chosen her as the one person who would be in a warzone. Of course, if you knew she was a reserve, you might have, but that would have been a different game, right?

Anyway, K2, this one’s for you. Sorry I haven’t written much lately.

K2 has a lot of wonderful qualities (among them the selflessness to go to war) but perhaps my favorite thing about K2 is that she thinks Pump Up The Volume is a great movie. What makes this even more wonderful is that she’s absolutely right. Why K2 thinks this late 80’s Christian Slater vehicle is a great movie is unknown to me, but I doubt she has a deep reason, which is fine. I think we both like the movie for a lot of the same reasons, one of which is that like all great 80’s movies it posits a suburban reality which little examination will reveal is insane, and which we can relate to. It was a prizewinning formula.

These are the next 5 80’s teen movies that pop into my head.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
The Breakfast Club
Pretty In Pink
Say Anything
Better Off Dead

I’m sure I could come up with a whole bunch of things that these movies have in common, but the two things I find most typical of the 80’s teen film are:

1. Adults are either absolutely clueless and mean no harm or absolutely clueless and obsessed with causing irrational harm. The only adult I can think of in any of these movies that is an exception to these rules is the janitor in The Breakfast Club and by the rules of these universes, he doesn’t qualify as an adult I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really qualify.

2. They all take place in the suburbia that 1950’s television suburbia’s would have become. Sure there’s sex and drugs and rock and roll, but this is largely based in love and deep emotional and intellectual issues, they are almost always somehow wholesome. Overall, good and evil are fairly well delineated, but that may just be teen movies for you.

Anyhow, by the time Pump Up The Volume hit the screens in 1989, this formula had been so well mined that most of the key players (John Hughes, Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, Anthony Michael Stewart, as well as Christian Slater) were soon to fade from nearly everything but cherished memory. However, the film got the formula right, had a kicking soundtrack (another valuable element), and added one important component, the internet.

Yes, in 1989 barely anyone had heard of the Internet. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that not a single person who saw Pump Up The Volume in the theaters had ever been on the Internet, though some had been online. I’d be even less shocked to find out that every person still alive who saw the movie in the theaters has since been on the internet. In 1989, nobody had heard about the internet except a handful of academics and military types, the Netscape browser was 6 years away. I agree it is kind of remarkable that a teen movie would have been made about it. Pump Up the Volume is that kind of prescient.

In Pump Up The Volume, the internet was actually played by two actors, the radio and the telephone and if you want to take the analogy a bit further, you can. A bored Mark, played by Christian Slater, moves to an Arizona Suburbia populated by three types of people; disaffected youth (the only product of these suburbia), clueless but well meaning adults (parents) and a couple of adults (the principal and vice principal) who vacillate between malicious and imperious when not being both.

Chafing, Mark, aka Happy Harry Hardon uses his radio as a pirate radio station to communicate and sets up a telephone line and mailbox so his audience can talk back. Harry shows grow more and more personal as him and his audience anonymously get to know each other better. Eventually this interplay has consequences and pisses off the adults. It also gets Mark a cute Goth girlfriend.

Ultimately Happy Harry Hardon’s message is to Seize The Airwaves and communicate with each other. It was just a few years later when people were realizing we could do the same with the internet and chat rooms, bulletin boards, and newsgroups proliferated. When all is said and done, Christian Slater was the first blogger, or at least the first to have a movie made about him.
* Upon further reflection, I wonder if perhaps there is one adult in all these films who does not fit the two roles I defined. It all depends on your definition of adult I suppose. Let’s just say everyone over 40, which brings to mind how adulthood is largely being delayed in even further by each generation.