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Note: This text was originally part
of a 1990 essay, “Some Kind of Wonderful: An Introduction to the Contemporary
Teen Movie”. For the surrounding discussion of the teen genre as a whole, a
74-page PDF of heretofore unpublished material written in 1989-1990 is now
available exclusively to supporters of my Patreon campaign for this website: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin
A Synthetic Teen Movie
All elements of the 1980s teen movie can be
synthesized in the space of a single film: this one.
The
Sure Thing is a
striking example of what is called the comedy of manners (Raymond Durgnat has written
several superb surveys of this form). Manners are those aspects of people’s behaviour that are completely
bound up with a specific social
position and a precise moment in cultural history. Just as the teenagers
of the 1950s cannot understand Marty McFly’s ‘80s music in Back to the Future (1985), many light comedies milk their laughs from the million and one ways in
which, culturally, people can find themselves at cross-purposes, or in a state
of mutual incomprehension.
Cop Nick (Arliss Howard) goes undercover in a high school in Plain Clothes (1989) and finds he cannot follow either
contemporary teen jargon or contemporary teen sexual mores (although he catches
on fast); Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) spouts earnest, ‘80s-style ego-psychology
to her teen girlfriends in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and receives bemused stares; Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Mark
(Brian Backer) in Fast Times at Ridgemont
High (1982) fumble on a bed in an uncomfortably
silent and temporarily unsuccessful search for the “love rules” (title
of a Don Henley song used on the soundtrack) of who is meant to do what first,
how and when.
Comedies of manners depend on
precise cultural references, which
sometimes date very quickly – and that is precisely what makes them interesting.
It is not enough to pit, in a vague way, one character stereotype against
another (say, a punk against a straight); we must be informed of their exact
cultural tastes, affiliations and experiences. When a character in St Elmo’s Fire (1985) says to his
girlfriend, “I want the Pretenders – the second album”, or one guy advises
another in Fast Times at Ridgemont High that “Side 2 of Led Zeppelin IV” is
the best sex music, the films count on us
appreciating the specific citation. (These are also the kind of laughs most
film reviewers seem rarely to notice or remember!)
Similarly with The Sure Thing: you need to be in
the know that the show-tune singing couple in the car, with the fluffy
toys, snug clothes, and “I Love E.T.” bumper sticker are an incarnation of the
ephemeral, early-to-mid ‘80s, pre-New Age fad of “babytimers” (people studiously affecting childlike behaviour)
in order to really get the joke. (Being pre-Internet, very little historic trace
of babytimer culture survives today!)
The Sure Thing could be said to combine a comedy
of manners sensibility with a romantic comedy syntax. Following the latter, we
have two teens of radically different character thrown together. Broadly, we
could describe Gib (John Cusack) as a bit
rough, vulgar, animalistic; and Alison (Daphne Zuniga) as prim,
overly-restrained, unspontaneous. Many classic romantic comedies from It Happened One Night (1934) to Teacher’s Pet (1960) begin from much the
same gender pattern. The invention of
Reiner and his scriptwriters shows in the numerous precise ways they are
able to flesh out, in cultural terms, this basic character distinction.
There is not a single personal attribute on
which the film does not make a humorous,
systematic comparison between the two teenagers. There are the obvious
differences in their respective clothing, body language and food preferences (his pizza, beer and cheeseballs versus her herbal tea). There is the
discussion about what they each want to name a son: she chooses Elliot,
he Nick (“The kinda guy that doesn’t mind
if you puke in his car”). There are the separate descriptions of what
they each consider a wild time:
for him, “Getting shitfaced, making a complete fool of yourself, and still having an excellent time”; for her, passing out in Elvis’ bedroom during a tour of Graceland.
Similar
to Footloose (1984), The Sure Thing eventually manœuvres the two main characters away
from their initially extreme positions.
These extremes, of animalism and gentility respectively, get taken up by
Gib’s friend Lance (whose level of gormless
cultural pretension, as played by Anthony Edwards, is caught in his phone
manner: “I’m talkin’ to you cordless”), and Alison’s boyfriend Jason
(whose lack of libido is indicated by his purchase of flannel sheets, because they are the most economic form
of bedding) played by Boyd Gaines. Meanwhile, Reiner and scriptwriters Steven
Bloom & Jonathan Roberts engineer all kinds of small or large reciprocities between Gib and Alison that lead
them to the true path of love: he begins to drop his permanent jokey spiel, and
talks with honest emotion; she takes enthusiastic lessons in how to
“shotgun” a can of beer.
The film is not a high energy
spectacle; it belongs in a less heated tradition, more akin to the 1970s road
movie ambience of American Graffiti (1973)
or Corvette Summer (1978) than Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). However, like John Hughes’
films, it is full of brilliant moments of narrative invention: surprising
transitions from one scene to the next, key set-ups that are briefly hidden
from us (as when Gib gets in the back of the pickup truck), sudden twists in
the situation of which character has the centrally knowing point-of-view (as
when Alison secretly hears, in the back of the truck, Gib’s tale of his “sure
thing”, the girl he intends to hook up
with).
An aspect of iconic teen movie
spectacle insistently parodied in the film (to hilarious effect) is Gib’s
sexual fantasising: tropical reveries over
his sure thing (incarnated by Nicollette Sheridan in an echo of Bo Derek in
Blake Edwards’ 10 [1979]) made incongruous by the mere fact
of Gib floating into frame still wearing his winter leather jacket!
For Gib and
Alison, the liminal experience so
common to teen movies comes in the form of a detour from their path that is both literal and
metaphorical, an encounter that makes them reconsider whether what they are
consciously heading for (Jason and the prospect of a stable marriage for her,
the one-nighter sure thing for him) is really what they want.
The concept of liminality was first
analysed in relation to fairy tales, and it is therefore not so surprising that
there’s a touch of the fairy tale in this lightly
fantastic teen movie – particularly one that starts and ends with the wise
oracle of a literature teacher (Viveca
Lindfors, immortalised in Fritz Lang’s oneiric Moonfleet [1955]) giving a speech that sums up the advice proffered
by so many teen movies.
Sleep when you feel like it, not when you think you
should. Eat food that’s
bad for you at least once in a while. Have conversations with people whose
clothes are not colour coordinated. Make love in a hammock! Life is the ultimate
experience.
MORE Reiner: The Story of Us, Stand by Me, Ghosts of Mississippi
© Adrian Martin
March 1990
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