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 #44: Can’t Buy Me Love
This is going to sound silly, but Can’t Buy Me Love is one of the most authentic high school movies of the ’80s. Within a highly exaggerated framework, it really touches on both the allure and the vagaries of popularity. Ronald Miller (Patrick Dempsey) is such a geek, he wore witty nerd t-shirts before they were cool. He mows lawns, wears glasses, gets straight As, and is fascinated with astronomy, history and Cindy Mancini. Cindy Mancini (Amanda Peterson) is captain of the cheerleaders, the most beautiful and popular girl in school despite wearing high-waisted jean shorts, who dated the star quarterback last year but is feeling a little insecure since he went off to college. She knows how hard it is to be popular, so she’s always trying to act cool, act confident, say the right thing, and impress people. Ronald thinks getting Cindy to pretend to date him for a month will make him popular and solve all his problems. Cindy thinks being popular is a lot of work and can’t just be built on a lie. Turns out they’re both right, and both wrong.
The movie makes it clear that popularity is very shallow, very easy to obtain if you know the right people and act the right way, but it’s also very flimsy and very easily demolished. And most importantly, it makes it clear that popularity isn’t the answer. Completely abandoning who you are in the hopes of impressing a select, mercurial few is no road to happiness, and that is evident in both Ronald’s journey and Cindy’s.
From the beginning, Ronald sees Cindy as an object rather than a person. She’s an image of perfection and cool, but not a human being with fears and hopes and insecurities of her own. Instead of allowing his growing intimacy with her evolve naturally into an actual relationship, he focuses solely on the business arrangement they’ve made, never seeing her for who she is or how she feels, never noticing that she’s developed real feelings for him. To Ronald, Cindy is just a means to an end.
The plan “works,” sort of, in that Ronald — or “Ronnie,” as his new friends call him — hangs in the “cool” areas of the school, around the cool people, going to cool parties, and finally getting laid. But he betrays and destroys his other relationships in the process, and ultimately destroys himself.
For her part, Cindy grows quite a bit in the movie. She’s snotty and dismissive of her mom at the start, always trying to look hot or act cool in front of her friends, but in being with Ronald she finds the space to be herself, to share her feelings and her poetry, to let her guard down. So when their arrangement ends and she witnesses the behavior of her cool friends toward Ronald, keeping him in the fold as if he was always someone they’d accepted, Cindy is much better able to see how false it all is. And for maybe the first time, she sees herself as more than an object, and stands up for herself much more as well.
The scam is revealed, as all high school scams must be, eventually, and Ronald is sent so far back down the status ladder that he has to eat lunch alone on the school quad, under a tree, far removed from the other students. Even his younger brother Chuckie (a HILARIOUS performance by Seth Green, just before he hit puberty) feels sorry for the guy, and I’m pretty sure Chuckie is a sociopath. Unlike most high school movies, though, they really let Ronald bathe in his humiliation for a while. He has a few heartfelt moments post-outing, but he’s still rebuffed by Cindy and former best friend Kenneth (Courtney Gains). He doesn’t get a pass just for saying he’s sorry.
When he finally does stand up against the system, it’s for Kenneth, not himself. He makes a rousing speech about the bullshit of cliques and sides and popularity, walks off after a metaphorical mic drop, and is rewarded with a slow clap to end all slow claps. When crap like Not Another Teen Movie or whatever mocks the slow clap, they are making fun of Can’t Buy Me Love.
Patrick Dempsey had two major roles in the ’80s movies of my youth: Loverboy and Can’t Buy Me Love. Loverboy is admittedly ridiculous in every way (though I will still watch it any time it’s on, no question), but Can’t Buy Me Love spoke to my feelings of estrangement in high school. I bought into the fantasy at the time — and probably the hundreds of times I watched it between 1987 and 1996 or so — of having a relationship with a cool, beautiful fantasy person. I wanted parties and hangouts and a group of people who always asked me places. I never really got all that, but I think that’s okay.
At least, now I do. Sometimes it takes a while to gain perspective.
Viable Option 