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: 166 Days to go: 159
Movie #217: Pump Up the Volume
To my fifteen-year-old self, in the weeks before I started tenth grade, there was no teen heartthrob who made my heart throb harder than Christian Slater (that voice, those eyes, that irreverence, the very definition of cool), and there was no movie more essential, more profound, more knowledgeable about my thoughts and my fears than Pump Up the Volume. I wanted to live inside it and never come out, and oh how I wanted to be as brave and as bold (even if it was only on the inside) as Happy Harry Hard-On and the Eat Me-Beat Me Lady.
Slater plays Mark Hunter, a painfully shy student new to his high school in Arizona. He knows no one and doesn’t have the confidence to speak up, so he lives a pretty lonely, miserable existence. To vent his frustrations and speak his mind, he hides behind the anonymity of a pirate radio broadcast he performs from his basement (it was before there was an internet, much less forums and comment boards to troll), where he disguises his voice and calls himself Hard Harry and pantomimes (with sound effects, because radio) frequent masturbation on the air. Not that I really understood any of that at first.
I was a pretty goody-two-shoes kind of kid. I mean, I liked to pretend I wasn’t, and it’s not like I never got into some mischief, but I rarely ever did anything really all that shocking or inappropriate or over the line. So when the movie came out, to be perfectly blunt, I’d never seen an erection up close, and I sure as hell couldn’t tell you if it was bigger than a baby’s arm. It was probably a year before I even knew all the phalluses in the film actually were phalluses, much less think to question where they all came from. I was also incredibly naive about male masturbation (girls don’t grow up just knowing this happens the way boys do, I don’t think — I certainly didn’t), so I didn’t understand all those references either. I eventually connected all the dots, of course, but I distinctly remember Not Quite Getting It at first.
The beautiful thing, however, is that it’s not necessary to understand all the sex jokes in Pump Up the Volume to get the more critical, universal message of the pain and fear and confusion of adolescence. I definitely got that. I understood the pressure of Paige (Cheryl Pollak) to be perfect and live up to her parents’ expectations. I understood feeling all alone, like Malcolm (Anthony Lucero) — to the point where I was made incredibly uncomfortable by his suicide because it hit too close to home to thoughts I’d sometimes entertained (it’s not “acceptable” to say you’ve thought about suicide, but I always thought about everything, and being a highly empathetic person, I would often put myself in the shoes of someone else to understand their perspective, so I found myself feeling and comprehending that kind of pain even if it was far too much for me to ever consider it an option). I knew what it was like to be Mark, screaming on the inside but unable to voice any of it in person, and I had the heart of Nora (Samantha Mathis), our dear Eat Me-Beat Me Poetry Lady, who was wild but wasn’t, sexually piqued yet innocent and unsure, longing for that kindred spirit who speaks to her soul.
“Harry” also exposes corruption and shady dealings at the school, and things of course come to a head when teachers and parents and the school board and the FCC all start getting riled up over the existence of this incendiary show, but I always saw it as a beacon of justice: “The Truth is a Virus.” Because I was a teenager, and that’s exactly how I was supposed to see it. How we all were supposed to see it. The movie dealt with the uncertainty of fitting in socially and sexually and academically. It was about how all of us are weird, all of us are outcasts, all of us are misfits — the dropouts and the golden girls, alike. And if that’s the case, “So be it.”
Viable Option 