Fast Times At Ridgemont High
In the last two editions of Better Late Than Never, Scott beat himself up at length for having never seen Harold And Maude, and Kyle calmly shrugged off having never seen Alien. I fall somewhere between the two of them on the guilt scale over one of the most notable holes in my cinematic vocabulary. Okay, 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High is a generational signifier for people of my age. As a superior teen sex comedy, one whose characters actually vaguely resemble teenagers as seen in real life, it stood out amid other films of its type and its era. Its hellish quotability ensures that it still comes up often, more than 25 years after it was made. Thanks to the preponderance of beautiful naked breasts, it seems to have permanently embedded itself in the psyches of nearly all the men my age, who generally encountered it around the time that breasts became a fairly significant obsession.
And yet it’s just another teen-sex comedy. How could I feel too guilty for having missed out for so long?
My big fear with Fast Times was that all the people telling me it was a great little film (which is what veterans tend to call it, rather than “a stunning masterpiece”) were mostly remembering the boobs, and how they felt about watching the movie as horny teenagers. Sometimes, watching a film at the exact right time in your life makes you love it because it caters to your needs so well that you feel like the filmmakers understand you and those like you in an insightful, personal way. You know, the way I felt about the John Hughes oeuvre when I saw his films as a lonely teenager. Which doesn’t necessarily mean they actually hold up today worth a damn.
Fortunately, Fast Times At Ridgemont High operates on more than one level; it wasn’t just around to satisfy the reflexive egos (and teen lust) of teenagers circa 1982. On a wandering, satisfyingly personal commentary track that continues a full eight minutes past the end of the movie, director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe
seemed to be addressing me personally as they talked about why their film might appeal to people who’ve actually moved past the awkward-virgin stage of life. As Heckerling points out, the kids in the film think they’re adults. They’re trying to behave like it, with some limited success. Kids of the same age (in the 14 to 18 range) can watch the film and appreciate characters who are just like them, ready to be grown up, and therefore not acting like the spastic idiots of so many teen comedies. Whereas older viewers can chuckle over those characters, and their sweet but clumsy pretensions to adulthood.
That’s a pretty accurate summation of why Fast Times is still a lot of fun, even to someone like me, who doesn’t associate Phoebe Cates’ bikini-removal scene with her first sexual awakening. But Heckerling leaves out another factor: The huge wave of nostalgia and recognition the film raises for people who were around and aware during the ’80s.
Fast Times At Ridgemont High is a fairly shapeless film. As a young Rolling Stone reporter, Crowe (who went on to write and direct Say Anything…, Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky, and—ugh—Elizabethtown) went undercover as a high-school student in California, and wrote his book Fast Times At Ridgemont High as reportage on his experiences. (I’m reading the book as soon as I can get my hands on it, possibly for a future edition of Book Vs. Film.) So the film is pretty light on plot; it’s mostly a year-in-the-life collection
of scenes informed by Crowe’s repeat high-school experience. To the degree that there’s a story, it’s about Jennifer Jason Leigh as a 20-year-old playing a 15-year-old lying to older guys about being a 19-year-old:
Leigh is a virgin, but she wants to drop that label—not with the needy, squeamish franticness of her peers in American Pie or Superbad, but in a fairly practical, goal-focused way. She blushingly practices oral-sex techniques on a carrot with her friend Phoebe Cates in the cafeteria at school (earning applause from a nearby table of guys), and worries about whether she’ll be any good in the sack once she gets started. Then she has sex, and decides that it hurts, but things will get better. She has a similarly pained but philosophical reaction when her deflowerer doesn’t call her again: She gripes about it, then moves on. The film isn’t about great loves and corny romantic wish-fulfillment, it’s about early sexual experiences, and how they tend to be awkward and unsatisfying, yet significant. Rather than pining over the guy who got away, she moves on to pursing other dudes, including nerdy nice-guy Brian Backer and his ticket-scalping slickster buddy Robert Romanus. (At least, he appears to be a slickster by high-school standards, which is to say, he’s marginally less awkward than everyone else.) And all this happens very early in the film, with minimal muss and fuss.
But Leigh doesn’t get much more screen time than the rest of the ensemble cast. Judge Reinhold, as her older brother, anchors a plot about how early jobs suck just as much as early sex. After getting fired from his sweet burger-flipping gig for threatening to kick the ass of an obnoxious customer (swearing and threats of physical violence, the customer tells the manager), he goes through a series of increasingly demoralizing jobs. Meanwhile, Super-Serious Oscar-Winning Method Actor Sean Penn buzzes through the film as its iconic character, surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli:
On top of that, Forest Whitaker shows up as the school’s football star, a grouchy, threatening figure with a sweet car. And Nicolas Cage—under his sole credit as Nicolas Coppola—shows up briefly among the generic faces in the crowd. (The IMDB says he was originally cast in the Judge Reinhold role, but was bumped because he played it too dark; Heckerling, in the commentary, adds that he lied about his age to get into the movie, claiming he was 18 when he was actually 17.) Watching Fast Times today is a lot like flipping through Hollywood’s junior-high yearbook, giggling at all the geeky photos showing younger versions of familiar faces like Leigh, Penn, Whitaker, and Cage: Even the adult cast members, including Vincent Schiavelli as the spacey biology teacher and Ray Walston in a great role as a hard-ass history teacher, are fun to watch just because they look so relatively young and fresh.