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One Crazy Summer
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There’s some kind of storyline, but we’ll skip it.
John Cusack, Demi Moore, Bobcat
Goldthwait – say no more. Savage Steve Holland’s One Crazy Summer bursts onto the cinema screen (where it performs for too few people, marking
time until it can find its target audience on VHS) with all the energy of a form
of cinema, and culture, long lost: those crazy summers of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons on TV, early Mad magazine, Friz Freleng’s 1957 Three Little Bops (“the Dew Drop Inn did drop down”), Frank
Tashlin’s movies of the ‘50s including Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and The
Girl Can’t Help It (1956), and supremely, Tex Avery’s animated visions of
frenzied libido and bodily mutilation (Red
Hot Riding Hood, 1948).
It’s not just the general level of excess, vulgarity
and madness – we get salutary doses of such coarseness from lesser films in the
teen/trash genre like Animal House (1978)
or the Police Academy (1984-1994)
series. Although it must be said that One
Crazy Summer achieves a sort of joyous paroxysm, a demented celebration of
everyday, daggy lunacy with its parade of fine characters – stuttering,
mentally retarded “twins” (who don’t look at all alike), nerds, murderous
little girls, innocent looking mothers who charge their family members for
meals, hippies, losers, even a proudly screwy dog among all these creatures letting their bodily parts/functions hang out – who triumph
over the hated “cute fuzzy bunnies”, the beautiful, land-owning, yuppie class.
And it’s more than the all-in, anything-goes filmic
style that freewheels, again and again, from animation to live action, parody
to sentimentality, naturalism to blatant artificiality, randomness to musicality;
that embraces all manner and intensities of acting style and physiognomy
regardless of how (conventionally) unblended into an ensemble they may appear
as they collide in the frame; and that dances wildly for the viewer, every twist and turn of its mad logic choreographed to
set the mind well and truly boggling.
After all, we were already given in the year of 1986
(and what a glorious gift it was!) that masterpiece of teen funkiness, John
Hughes’ Ferris Bueller's Day Off – a
film whose level of moment-to-moment inventiveness and formal complexity puts
most certified art movies (Ran [1985] or whatever)
to shame.
What is it? Some grim, inspired determination on
Savage Steve’s part to go all the way,
right past that point of Good Taste or measured rationality where life or mind
or flesh beg to be preserved intact on screen. All the apparently solid and
respectful properties of our world must be torn, bent, exploded, desecrated – for if laughter is not convulsive, if it
does not wield a convulsing action upon people and things, it may never be
beautiful.
One Crazy Summer’s philosophy is
summed up in the marvellous scene of revenge – revenge against the teasers and
bullies of the world, revenge against the very folklore of childhood itself –
where two kids are told that, if they make horrible faces and happen to be, at
that very moment, slapped on the back, their visages will stay that way forever.
It’s only a few moments later that the girl who is the victim of their cruel
jibes sets these guys in position and whacks them from behind … fixing their
faces eternally in grotesquely stupid, monster-movie make-up. (Remember that
Savage made his debut comedy, Better Off
Dead [1985], entirely on the running premise of a boy [Cusack again]
devising ever more elaborate and messy ways to commit suicide.)
Why this rapture? Steve is doubtless under the sway of
that ancient, superhuman principle which has previously taken possession of an
impish genius like Tex Avery: he has surrendered to the imperious logic of the
gag. A gag, once embarked upon, cannot be abandoned (although funny, it’s a
deadly serious business); it demands the total reorganisation of the spaces and
times of normality. A gag is a line leading away from reality and toward
something stranger, more obscure; it is a way of connecting things (objects,
people, ideas) previously unconnected.
One Crazy Summer is nothing but a
succession of gags. Pure, abstract gags. It teaches us what we are too often
reluctant to face: that craziness is the supreme form of logic (not its
opposite), that the gag is the most sublime (not the most trivial) way of
reorganising the world, that laughter is necessarily cruel, strange,
destructive, transgressive.
In short: gag comedy (with Jerry Lewis at its historic
helm, alongside Buster Keaton and Blake Edwards) is some kind of Utopia, a way
to think and to dream. Wouldn’t you agree that Utopias are rather too rare and
precious these days to be overlooked?
Once upon a time, I dreamt with the Utopia that is
Savage Steve Holland’s One Crazy Summer.
I live to tell.
2020 Postscript: Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, the charming (but
already a little less anarchic) How I Got
Into College (1989) scripted by Terrel Seltzer … For my cinephile
generation, Savage Steve was among the most promising gods of the ‘80s. Then
what? A move mainly into entertainment for kids, for Disney, throughout the
‘90s. The Legally Blondes spin-off in
2009. The Fairly Odd series of
telefilms in the 2010s. Santa Hunters (2014) for Nickelodeon. A Netflix series in 2019, Malibu Rescue. I can’t bring myself to check out any of it. Should
I? The thrill has gone, gone away …
© Adrian Martin December 1986 |
