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Weird Science
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There’s
a certain nostalgia which attends the viewing of such mid 1980s films as John
Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985), Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985) or even Woody Allen's
mellow-period Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – a nostalgia for that time when movies were in the literate and
dramatic business of saying or doing one
thing well. Because, like it or not, what defines the most contemporary
style of popular movie blockbuster is the fact that it scrambles to say at
least five things at once, often in a wildly contradictory way. Coherence,
clarity, nuance, sureness of thematic purpose – mainstream cinema lost them as
ideal goals somewhere around the late ‘70s.
Today,
movies are calculated messes – trying to say everything possible to every
imaginable audience member. Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (1983) was probably
the first film to perfect this method; but it has continued on through such
seemingly diverse items as Purple Rain (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), Rocky IV (1985) and Weird Science. And while nostalgic critics – some of whose
heads are still back in the Hollywood ‘50s – bemoan the fact that these movies
don’t seem to make much old-fashioned sense, history pile-drives on regardless.
This
is the popular cinema today: no longer classical narrative or realist, founded
on a weird science of contriving films like all-purpose machines with
interchangeable parts – a science that has its origins not in the fine
traditions of literary or theatrically inspired film, but in the dirtier,
freer, more dissociated spaces of the cheap, B grade movie genres going right
back to at least the 1930s.
John
Hughes’ Weird Science – a quantum leap beyond his already inventive but
more determinedly sweet and charming teenpic classics like Sixteen Candles (1984) and The
Breakfast Club (1985) – is a mindboggling, belief-defying film that gives
the impression of having done away altogether with the conventional need for a
script respecting the unities of time, space and character motivation. It comes
across as either microwave-heated (based on an all-in recipe of jokes, hooks,
clichés and previous filmic successes), or computer-generated.
In
fact, it’s a computer within the fiction that provides the magic carpet
allowing both the two principal adolescent characters (Anthony Michael Hall as
Gary and Ilan Mitchell Smith as Wyatt), and also the film itself, to leave
reality well and truly behind – approximately one minute after the opening credits.
A computer materialises the fantasy premise – an ideal woman, Kelly LeBrock as
Lisa, who wants to do nothing more than eternally party – and from that point,
Ms LeBrock herself can magically materialise anything else the movie feels it
needs for second-to-second pep-ups.
Weird Science launches itself anew
every few minutes. It’s the kind of contemporary film that has you shaking your
head wondering what’s going to pop out next, and whether you’re going to
survive it. Not only is Weird Science the ultimate teen movie – it’s got
the wildest party, the stuffiest parents (and grandparents), two main guys (not
just one) and hence two cute girlfriends, it outdoes all the classic scenes
such as the after-party clean-up a split-second before the folks return home –
but it also conjures up, at will, phantoms from various other youth genres as
well: a space missile (sci-fi); a few colourful characters from Mad Max 2 (futuristic action road movie) and The
Hills Have Eyes (cult gore horror film); not to mention dizzily surreal gags
involving character transformations and time-space manipulations, claiming
their inspiration somewhere between Saturday Night Live and Jerry Lewis.
The amazing things that happen to Chet (Bill Paxton) are particularly
memorable. It’s a garden-of-forking-paths movie with a cheeky trick ending and
a host of loose ends it hopes you didn’t notice. (But what about the father
with the bulk-erased brain, and the snap-frozen grandparents in the closet, and
… ?)
So
far, we might be watching a modern, youth-oriented, barf-out version of a
classic anti-social B movie by Roger Corman, Edgar Ulmer, Samuel Fuller or Russ
Meyer. Ah, but here’s where the balancing-act dexterity really shows itself,
when we get into the tricky area of what this film might actually want to say, message-wise. Weird Science promises to be – and, on one level, actually is – the
ultimate wish-fulfilment for teenage boys: the fantasy of an experienced woman
who is a sex slave to two horny virgins. But … there’s no sex in it! It milks
the fantasy and disavows it simultaneously (at the start, one guy falls asleep
just before the big sex scene can happen; by the end, both guys have cute,
normal and equally virginal girlfriends).
So
it’s a dirty movie and a clean movie all at once – no mean feat. It’s even got
a moral sense (the boys find themselves, grow up, learn responsibility),
presumably to satisfy that sector of the audience demanding it (or assumed to
exist, and assumed to be demanding it). At the end, we see this whole demented,
yet consummately skilful, dissociative operation in a nutshell, when Kelly says:
“I’m getting off just seeing you two guys straighten yourselves out!” – a
somewhat strange but perfectly functioning mixture of unbridled sex-drive and
civic-mindedness.
MORE Hughes: Home Alone 2, She's Having a Baby, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off © Adrian Martin January 1986 |