And yet apart from Spicoli's occasional venture into slang (gnarly, dude!) the film isn't packed with the kind of teen-speak period signifiers that would make it hard to watch without wincing. There's nothing really spectacular about Fast Times as a movie that makes it enduring, but it goes down easy compared to a lot of bygone of-the-moment comedies; apart from the clothes and hair (which today read more as comedy than anything else), it doesn't actually seem too dated. Maybe that's because it addresses its subjects with a broad, universal affection, instead of leaning on a bunch of jokes about events of the time.
(Okay, some datedness does still creep into the movie, particularly in the very early scene where two kids approach Romanus, looking for scalped Van Halen tickets. When they ask for something in the first 10 rows, he says he'll hook them up for $20 apiece. They protest that those tickets should only be $12.50. Ha ha ha! All that's missing is the follow-up scene where they drive to the concert, having gassed up their car for 50 cents a gallon.)
Anyway. What struck me about Fast Times At Ridgemont High is how remarkable it is these days to go back and watch a pre-Adam Sandler, pre-Farrelly brothers, pre-humiliation-comedy teen film. There are embarrassing moments in Fast Times, but they aren't drawn out at length; when Backer goes on a date and realizes in the restaurant that he forgot his wallet, he squirms a lot, but Romanus shows up to rescue him, and he gets away without exposing his error to his date. A car accident (leading to one of the film's classic exchanges, ending with the line "First he's gonna shit, then he's gonna kill us!") seems to put a couple of characters in an ugly situation, but they deal with the problem cleverly and quickly. When Phoebe Cates walks in on Judge Reinhold masturbating in the bathroom, they're both horrified, but the moment passes quickly.
Compare any of this to the grinding series of vicious gags from, say, pretty much any Ben Stiller movie post-Flirting With Disaster, and Fast Times starts looking like a tame jokefest even grandma can enjoy. There's no crotch damage, no humorously dead animals, no pie-fucking, and no menstrual-blood-on-the-pants jokes, either. At its most graphic, it's got a little good-natured pot humor.
'Course, Grandma might be kind of shocked at all the nudity. Leigh gets topless a couple of times when she gets her groove on with her non-groovy lovers, and Cates spends that lovingly shot poolside scene in a hot little red bikini, before peeling her top off in Reinhold's masturbation fantasy. (Keith claims that video-store owners in the '80s were complaining that their tapes of Fast Times would come back with that sequence almost unplayable, because it had been rewound and rewatched so many times that the videotape had been worn down to nothing. Heckerling, meanwhile, says that the film was considered so raunchy at the time that it originally got an X rating, and was considered all but unmarketable until some of Leigh's scenes were cut.)
But one of the many charming things about the film is that these scenes aren't really played for the exploitation factor. Leigh gets naked like it's natural, not naughty; she's clearly focusing on her character, on the moment, and on her sex partners, not on the audience. (She'd get plenty more practice in the years to come.) Cates, meanwhile, is clearly playing to the audience and handing them a big come-on, but it's funny and innocent rather than raunchy. The same could be said of the sex plots in general; considering when the film was made, it's downright charming to see female characters who want sex for its own sake, who aren't using it as a weapon, who aren't ashamed or hesitant or mercenary or portrayed as sluts, and who don't get punished for wanting pleasure. It all feels pretty enlightened. Leigh does briefly deal with the repercussions of unprotected sex, but that subplot is refreshingly brief and undamaging; it's mostly there to show what a selfish twit her last partner was.
In fact, all of Fast Times' twists are pretty benign. Penn feuds with mean ol' Walston, ordering pizza during class, walking in late with a bagel crammed into his pants, and engaging in other minor shenanigans, and Walston keeps trying to take him down a peg. But where most campus comedies would end with a decisive, triumphant victory for one side or the other, with Walston pushed into a pool or otherwise publicly deflated, or with Penn expelled and headed on to a crappy life, but maybe still getting laid in order to end the movie on an upbeat note, Fast Times eventually shows that they're both fairly reasonable people whose goals just don't happen to coincide. Neither one's a villain—the film entirely lacks any such thing. It's just pure, lighthearted, relatively respectful fun. With boobs.
So what next? Maybe having enjoyed this particular bit of '80s sextalgia, I should move on to the other "classic" sex comedies I haven't seen, like Porky's and Meatballs. Though honestly, watching Mr. Method play a slovenly cutup mostly made me want to revisit the Bill And Ted movies, and remember when Keanu Reeves was briefly a comedic actor too. Those were the days.
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