MY MOVIE SHELF: Short Circuit

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 190  Days to go: 134

Movie #248:  Short Circuit

Sometimes my mom sends me movies for the kids to enjoy. It’s nice. She generally picks things we all enjoyed as a family when I was a kid, and for the most part they bring back a lot of nice memories for me. Nostalgia is a big business for a reason. Short Circuit, however, is problematic.

On the one hand, it’s still a pretty cute rom-com within the realm of hippie Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy) and Newton Crosby, “PhDork” (Steve Guttenberg) and the strictly robot-centric “Need Input” comedy still works for the most part. On the other, 1980s-based technology films have not aged well, and at least 70% of Short Circuit‘s jokes are centered around Fisher Stevens’s grossly ill-conceived performance of Ben — a programmer of Indian descent — that is one miniscule step up from brown face, complete with many outdated stereotypes of accent, mannerisms and broken English. It’s really, really bad. (Seriously, if I were Michelle Pfeiffer, I’d point to that exactly as the reason for our divorce.)

Short Circuit is about a robotics nerd (Guttenberg) who works for a military contract company called Nova. He invents the SAINT prototype robots and his boss Howard (Austin Pendleton) is attempting to sell them as advanced weapon technology. One of the robots is struck by lightning while charging on the generator (because why not do that outside) and it ends up wandering off the company grounds as it curiously inspects everything around. It’s a malfunction, see, so the Nova crew goes on the hunt to track the robot down, hopefully without the destroy-first, capture-later tactics of military officer Skroeder (G.W. Bailey). (It’s probably not a coincidence his name sounds like “scrotum.”)

The robot, meanwhile (Number 5, voiced by Tim Blaney), has stumbled upon the Snack Shack of one Stephanie Speck, a hipster so ahead of the curve she had a food truck twenty years before they were cool. She has a habit of taking in every stray or injured animal she comes across, and when she comes across Number 5, she assumes he’s an alien because I guess robots were too far-fetched a concept in 1986. When she discovers the truth, she calls Nova for them to come pick up their war machine, but by then Number 5 has soaked up all sorts of pop culture input and convinces Stephanie that he’s alive. It’s then a matter of convincing Newton before Skroeder and his trigger happy clan swarm in and blow Number 5 to smithereens. What’s a childlike robot to do?

Apparently, the trick to differentiating between a computerized machine and a living thing is whether or not it laughs at your jokes. Kind of diminishes the importance of the whole Turing Test, don’t you think? Best Picture my ass, Imitation Game.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Breakfast Club

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #39: The Breakfast Club

I don’t think I ever realized this when I was a teenager, but I really wished back then that something like The Breakfast Club would happen to me. I loved the movie, of course — who doesn’t? — and I connected with it, but it didn’t ever occur to me how much I longed for this type of connection with other people.

I’ve always been introverted, uncomfortable speaking up around people I didn’t know. And I’m pretty introspective too, so a lot of my observations remain internalized if there’s not someone around to draw them out of me. I’ve always known this about myself, but never really admitted how lonely it made me. I know everyone feels lonely in high school — or awkward or misunderstood or whatever — but nobody understands that at the time, do they? I didn’t. I had a few wonderful friends — girls who were my lifelines, truly — but I still always felt like I was separate somehow. I mean, maybe I was just too wrapped up in my self and my own problems in high school, or maybe everyone is — hell, maybe that’s how everyone is all the time — but I didn’t even realize how isolated my very good friends felt. Not then. It’s like we were all our own separate islands.

In high school, you find your niche and you stick with it, just trying to make it to the end when college and adulthood will come along and make everything different. (You don’t know at the time that in a lot of ways, nothing is ever really all that different.) You just try to make it to the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the quarter, the end of the semester, the end of the year, the end. You want to do well enough that your parents stay off your back, you don’t want to be too smart or too awkward or too different lest you be the object of ridicule (or you go the other way and you make a point to be wildly different and outrageous, as if that will make you better), and you just try to get through it. The Breakfast Club, set in a single room (mostly), on a single day — almost like a play, this way — captures all of those feelings of isolation and finding your niche and trying to stay in it and the pressure you feel from your parents and the pressure you feel from your friends and the pressure you feel from yourself, and just trying to survive til the end. It captures every single one. It’s like magic.

And the point of The Breakfast Club is to convey that we all feel this way, that all kids since the beginning of time have felt this way. And not just across the generations, but across the hallways, too. Every one of us feels like a delinquent at times. We all feel entitled or like we have all the answers. We all have our triumphs. We all go a little crazy. It speaks so much to your heart, this movie. But it never happened in real life. I never had a heart-to-heart with one of the jocks. I wasn’t a cool girl who went to parties, and they certainly didn’t have anything to do with me. I was in some honors classes, but I was never dedicated or ambitious enough to really be one of the high-performing brainy kids. I was a little bit wild, in my way, but I wasn’t anywhere near bad girl enough to really run with that crowd either. I was an outlier, friends with other outliers or those who were maybe on the fringes of their own status groups, generally drawn to the ones who were much more confident and outspoken than I was so I could drink in their energy and maybe learn by osmosis how to be more visible, how to make my voice heard.

There were certainly a lot of things I didn’t understand about this movie when I first saw it at probably 14 or 15 (a running theme in these posts), but there were also a lot of things that I got right away. Mostly I loved Judd Nelson as John Bender (my irrepressible attraction to bad boys at work at an early age), but not just because he was witty and defiant and a smart ass. I loved how it was all bravado, how he was so vulnerable underneath. (This is a typical symptom of women attracted to bad boys — they love their wounded hearts. I am not different.) He would never want you to pity him, of course, but he probably wouldn’t mind if you comforted him. In fact, I’m sure now he’d take advantage of it. But just like poor Daddy-issue Claire (Molly Ringwald), I would’ve run right to him, even though he infuriated and sometimes humiliated me.

I also loved Ally Sheedy’s Allison a lot (John and Allison being the two best ones to relate to, I think, when you’re a teenager), because even though she was always being outrageous just so people would pay attention to her (being ignored at home making attention seem both terrifying and vital), as a teenager it feels like she’s the one unafraid to do whatever it is she feels like doing. She doesn’t conform; she’s not a cog in the machine. I think people respect that, because so few people are brave enough to do it. Nobody realizes then that she’s just as scared as everyone else.

For me, the ones I least wanted to admit I related to where Andrew and Brian (Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall), because they were the scariest ones. They were the ones who broke under the pressure that parents can put on you, to succeed, to win, to be better than they were — whatever. I felt that pressure, the same as a lot of people did I’m sure, but I didn’t want to speak it for fear I would break under it as well. It’s always there under the surface when you’re in adolescence, maybe, the tenuous grasp you have on the entire bullshit difficult life you have to lead and how every single decision you make at 16 is going to impact the rest of your life. I kind of make a point now to tell my kids that’s not necessarily true, and that if they screw up occasionally, it probably won’t be the end of the world. Because I don’t think anyone told me back then, and I really wish they would’ve.

Of course, even as I learned quite a bit from the movie, I still didn’t understand back then that Claire had just as many problems and insecurities as the rest of them. I probably really thought that if I were beautiful and thin and popular and rich that I could deal with parents who used me as a pawn. And since my parents were already divorced I didn’t see what the big deal would be to her, or how much pressure and ridicule she felt about her virginity. It took me several more years to see her, and I kind of feel bad about that. Guilty, like I owe her an apology.

I watched this movie tonight with my stepdaughter, who has already seen it a bunch of times and who loves it just as much as I did — just as much as I do. She quoted at least half of it from memory, the same way I’ve done on more occasions that I can count. She’s a little younger than I was when I first saw it, probably, but she’s in the same head space, and I try every day to make her see how universal it really is, how much her feelings are shared by so many others — of her generation and of the dozens of generations before her, and how they will be for the dozens to come. She probably doesn’t really want to hear that yet, though, because she’s an Allison — wanting to stand out, wanting to be different, almost desperately pleading with the world to see her as unique. Which I guess makes her cooler and more confident than I was at that age, because all I ever wanted to do was fit in. Of course, we’re not all that different either. Her two favorite characters? John and Allison, just like mine back in the ’80s.