PUMP UP THE VOLUME
It’s hard to talk seriously about the 60s today, because TV and a lot of assholes have almost ruined it. When I taught film courses in southern California in the mid-80s, I was appalled to discover that college students thought of the 60s as a traumatic, troubled period–a time characterized by young people losing their way, freaking out on bad acid trips, denouncing their parents, getting killed in Vietnam, and protesting the way American society was being run and abjectly failing at it. For students of the 80s, the golden age was the repressive, bland, stultifying 50s, when staunch family and property values were both firmly in place–the mythical past that Uncle Ronnie and all his furry friends comfortingly evoked.
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Besides, any contemporary teenager with brains and some concern for improving the world has good reason to be suspicious when any golden age is evoked. History never repeats itself very precisely, even if Marx had a point when he said that what occurs as tragedy sometimes repeats itself as farce. If you want to change things nowadays, you’re better off reinventing history and tradition–which amounts to reinventing the present–than trying to re-create phantom images out of history books. Last year’s rally in Tiananmen Square evoked the 60s in certain ways, but in more important ways it was radically different–not only because it was happening in China but also, at least in part, because many of the students had access to fax machines: starting with whatever happens to be available, along with new ideas about how to use it, is the prerequisite for radical change.
From the moment Christian Slater’s precredits, offscreen monologue is heard, over a sustained guitar chord while a slow pan sweeps across an aerial night view of a suburban tract-house subdivision, Pump Up the Volume promises to be something special, and it’s a promise that’s kept. Conceivably the first genuinely radical youth movie since Over the Edge (1979), it differs from that worthy predecessor by being exhilarating rather than disturbing–it’s an upper, not a downer, and a good deal closer to farce than to tragedy (although it has room enough for both). Without wanting to go overboard, I can testify that it has given me more pleasure than any other new movie I’ve seen this summer–providing the kind of energizing, sexy elation I used to go to American movies in the hopes of finding.
Gradually the divisions between Harry and most of these listeners starts to crumble. It takes a certain amount of work and dedication for this to happen, and this comes not from Mark/Harry–who’s usually pathetically helpless and inarticulate whenever he emerges from his basement–but from Nora/the Beat-Me Lady, who tries to convince Harry that the “voice” he says he’s waiting for happens to be his own. (The fact that her secret name sounds like masochistic code is a red herring; it actually alludes to Beat poetry.) Samantha Mathis–the daughter of Bibi Besch, who recently played the groom’s mother in Betsy’s Wedding–makes her theatrical movie debut here, and she embodies Nora’s courage with such conviction and verve that her character serves throughout as a bracing rebuke to Mark and his limitations. Literally as well as figuratively, she’s the one who makes Hard Harry’s broadcasts into something more than just masturbation.
What I like most about Pump Up the Volume is that whatever it may surreptitiously owe to the 60s, its central, passionate, joyous project is reinventing the present, working with what’s already at hand, and even giving us some hope about it. The fact that it does this simply and unabashedly gives the critic little to work with; it’s all there, right on the surface, with nothing to decode–just a dream, and a dream of an idea, that it asks us to share and celebrate. And better yet, emulate.
