Tenth in the series:
Morning Becomes Reagan: A
revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture
[This entry—on the film alone—is not meant to refer to any real-life situation I am in or was in, as
some of my blog readers may want to impute to it. Also, a fuller or improved
version of this entry may appear in the possible November edition of the item-collecting
booklet, “Jersey Combo Plate.” Edits 6/6/14.]
Subsections below:
Cruise’s career and star
persona
Technical facets of
the film: a breakthrough for director Brickman
[bullet points:]
The central prostitute role: a variation on the “hooker with a heart of
gold”
Lana’s part as pivotal to the Reagan-ethos critique of the film;
M.B.A.s a big goal in those days
Lana’s role aims to have her be a business exemplar, but she’s also got
her seedy-hustler side
Joel’s friends are rather street-smart wiseasses for “high-achieving
peers”
Puzzling over some school-culture facets
Other bits of “flavors of the time”
A few final notes:
Brickman’s original ending; and sex in weird places
There are a number of ways to come at
this film, from my
angle. I first saw it when it came out, and liked it. It was very “hip” in
terms of its lulling style and how its humor struck people (I will give an
example or two below of what got laughs). Today, it looks surprisingly “of
another time,” and it rather saddens me a bit in reminding me how times have
changed. Its sly humor seemed to cohere with what now seems faded—a time (in
the 1980s) of promise and intuition-and-artistic-aim within popular culture
that now seems to be lost among today’s hackneyed ideas and erratic delivery of
product, and a general sense today of lost confidence in major infrastructure.
Another observation is that, while this is ostensibly a teen
film, I think it was pretty safely considered risque stuff for teens in 1983,
but in fact college-age people got a kick out of it. Today, I think those high
school kids who would go along with its edgy or “dark” humor—as some, I’m sure,
have already for years—would be fine with it, while today’s college kids may
find it a bit tame.
Also, I think it was the first film in which
Tom Cruise showed himself to be a promising young star (he
was also in Coppola’s
The Outsiders
[1983], the adaptation of the S. E. Hinton novel, but I don’t think that film
has its renown at all from Cruise’s presence in it). In 1983, Cruise was new
(unknown) to me (and other average filmgoers), yet he seemed to fill out quite
well the part of the upper-middle-class “straight arrow,” Joel Goodson, in
Risky Business (hereafter,
RB)—of an earnest, winning young man
anguishing over getting into a good college, even while he deals with his
sexual maturation and hankerings.
Cruise’s career and star
persona
As Cruise’s career took off in the 1980s—Top Gun (1986), The Color of Money (1986), Rain
Man (1988)—he seemed as if he was a young, striving actor who in part got
lucky. Today, having proven himself far more, he is a major force, like him or
not (and I rather admire him without 100 percent liking him; I’ll look later at
what seem to be his traits as a major star). This film shows him to be quite
the young-boy form of “Tom Cruise” (mind you, he’s also about my age, and he had
lived in New Jersey, as I have and do). But also, I am struck today by how many
of his traits—his expressions, typical bodily movements, playful little “craft accents,”
etc.—were present in 1983 as you can still see today. As a big star, he seems
to do quite a lot with an arguable little—or rather, his characters revolve around the same durable Tom Cruise persona.
Another thing to note in this connection is that in
RB, most of the main
characters—especially the more flavorful ones of Lana (played by
Rebecca De Mornay) and Miles (played by
Curtis Armstrong)—seem quite of the late ’70s and
early ’80s style, while Cruise seems not really from that time at all (except
for the part through the middle of his hair—recall the
Dilbert cartoon of several years ago of the coworker, “Gary
Middlepart,” who was remarked on as having come from the 1970s). He seems,
today (not that this was the impression then) to have stepped in from “the Age
of Tom Cruise, and From Whence He Came”—like a handsome, capable, amiable sort
also capable of indignation (spoken in a voice that sometimes seems not quite
up to the task of delivering an animal blast of ragged-edged, raw fury), so
that today’s viewers might say this film shows a young Tom Cruise stuck in the
early 1980s, and—we know in retrospect—it just took the fullness of time and a
string of good parts in noted films to bring him into the ranks of the grand
American causes for celebration and coverage in the star tabloids, and among
the pillars of admired society, among the ranks of “glasses [mirrors] of
fashion and molds of form” (to adapt a line in
Hamlet), seeming never to age (or at least not age much), and only
risking our boredom insofar as his characters seem not too terribly different
from each other.
In fact, it’s not much more ridiculous than some other glib
assessments you might hear in the media that of all the relics from 1980s
movies that I have dredged up, admiringly or not, the one that may evoke for
certain people today the “virtues of Reaganism, so much a soul-restoring succor
for our parched political world,” is—maybe a bit ironically—Tom Cruise. He
looked “right as rain” in 1983 (not “right” in the political sense), and he
still does (for some) today. He might be for some like what might symbolize the
best of the 1960s, a young-looking JFK or The Beatles in their touring days, or
Sean Connery as 007.
From another angle: If Simon and Garfunkel sang “Where have
you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” in 1968 to regret the loss of an apparently more genuine
time, today we can ask, “Where is the Tom Cruise of the 1980s?,” and then we
can answer ourselves, “He hasn’t really left.”
I wondered how to summarily characterize Cruise as the star
he’s now long been. He’s not a character
actor, as many have been. He’s not been a standard for his field like Jack
Nicholson or Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. He seems to combine a certain
ordinariness with some kind of undeniable charisma. Maybe it’s not too awkward
to say he’s like a cross between Gary Cooper and Cary Grant (but without the
debonair manner). This though it’s easier just to say that all stars are
unique, and to compare them in this crude way is as awkward as, I don’t know,
doing a crossword puzzle you don’t really want to do. (End note 1)
Anyway….
Technical facets of
the film: a breakthrough for director Brickman
Paul Brickman was noted
as director and writer of this film.
RB
seemed to represent a grand debut of a new film auteur of sorts (Brickman had
worked on previous films, but this was his first as director); but oddly,
Brickman has not done much notable work, or at least not much in volume, since
RB. Morrie Brickman, Paul Brickman’s
father (as the director’s Wikipedia page says), created and worked in print cartoons;
whether or not a coincidence, this film shows a definite consciousness of
shots, balance of color, and a general tone conveyed by the photography. The level
of craft is obvious; very little is left to chance. Minor connecting shots and
more stagy-type shots all seem to reflect a gifted director wanting to assemble
a solid film experience.
Brickman is from Chicago, and the film is shot there. I was
only in Chicago once, in fall 1987, and I was in Evanston, Illinois, in spring
1985, and I don’t recall the area much in detail from those times; I seem to
know it more from movies. But it seems to me there is so much in RB that seems to take advantage of the
“lay of Chicago” that this fact, and such features as the earthy humor (aligned
with less-than-legal doings) and a rollicking car chase, seems to place RB arguably in a league with The Blues Brothers (1980) as both a
story about a certain “moral phase of life or community” and a valentine to
“the sheer personality of a unique American place.”
Watching this film today, I am reminded of my college time,
not just because I don’t think I’ve seen it since then, but its representations
of social mores, manners, etc., all are redolent of then. The music, by
Tangerine Dream (I don’t know much about them), which features synthesizer
(typical of 1980s pop music and films) and repeated figures for conveying
atmosphere, gives this film its flavor as being dreamlike at times, and helps
place it as a 1980s work (for better or worse).
Let’s go to some bullet points:
*
The central prostitute role: a variation on
the “hooker with a heart of gold.” Rebecca De Mornay as Lana, the street-smart prostitute, was a
newcomer to film in 1983. I remember her as seeming a bit unusual-looking but
cute nonetheless. In the film she has a sort of cat-like face, and those so
inclined will notice that her shoulders seem a bit wide relative to other
proportions of her body. She seems fine for the part. Seeing the film today, I
am struck by how De Mornay seems a bit more “dead-eyed” than she might have
seemed at the time; in part this may reflect for today what may be a not-great
digital form of the film—I watched on a relatively old, pre–Blu-ray DVD (
RB was shot in a sort of softish way
that I think might look better on VHS).
This dead-eyed look might suit her character—prostitutes
could readily be expected to be a little emotionally “dysphoric” when in more
casual (non-working) mode (not that I have any direct experience to back this
up), given their life circumstances (and drug abuse would often be the reason,
though Lana doesn’t seem to use drugs other than pot, as the film shows). But
De Mornay has a balancing act of being “primarily a tough cookie” who ends up having
a warm spot in her heart for Joel, both being kind to him and giving him a
chance to run a smart business. She is a variation on the cliché of the “hooker
with a heart of gold,” but she’s more like an experienced call girl who
sometimes is willing to engage in a “teleological suspension of the ethical”
relative to her field, and help the growth of a naïve young man out of her own aptly-occasioned
welling of the milk of human kindness.
* Lana’s part as pivotal to the Reagan-ethos critique
of the film; M.B.A.s a big goal in those days. Lana’s role, actually,
is at the heart of this film’s solid satiric side, which I think looks all the clearer
than it did then. People may forget something today in rhapsodizing Reagan, as
if he was the right wing’s saint rather the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt is
for liberals. In those years, there wasn’t just a political slide-to-the-right
among the American voting populace, but a cultural shift to the more
materialistic, especially among aspiring youth. The value of the degree of the M.B.A.—“master’s
in business administration”—was something both embraced without a second
thought by numerous students and remarked on widely enough in the media,
whether ironically or not. I remember being very conscious of how I was
choosing, in all good conscience and with due awareness of the risks involved
(and while looking like an odd duck), to major in a humanities field and a
social science field while so many fellow students marched toward M.B.A.s, if
not off to law school.
When Joel is part of a business club, and ends up exercising
the chance to run a short-term business—the ad hoc prostitution affair in his
parents’ house—in line with his school expectations, this reflects to an extent
that Joel was something of an “everykid” in the script, of the type that went
right along with the new Reagan philosophy, where not only was “trickle-down
economics” the new economic rallying point, but getting away from 1960s liberal
arts, with its following the likes of
Joseph Campbell,
Ram Dass, and Lionel Trilling, and heading
toward biz school and fancy cars and 401-K plans helped define the aspiring post-Vietnam
middle class.
* Lana’s role aims to have her be a business
exemplar, but she’s also got her seedy-hustler side. Brickman, I would
imagine, was basing the satiric bent of his story on the fact that Joel
Goodson, in heading up a wildly successful small business, not only “realizes
some personal potential” this way, but does so with the key aid of a call girl
who also provides him with some sexual coming-of-age. And not only that, but
she has business smarts (“My mind keeps working all the time,” she says at one
point, by way of explaining why she is developing an idea for the prostitution
production at his house that, at first, would turn Joel off, but which later he
goes along with in order to pay for expensive repairs to his father’s Porsche).
Of course, part of her business smarts includes checking out
his spoiled new friend’s furniture (e.g., inspecting a carpet’s label) and such
for its apparent worth, so that maybe some of her line of work—in the past or
as a possible new venture—entails dealing in stolen goods, or taking stuff to
pawn shops, and so on. (Today, we would say this wouldn’t merely define a
prostitute paying a visit to an upscale neighborhood, but our unfortunately
burgeoning number of young heroin addicts scrounging desperately for money to
buy drugs, or those among us who lost cushy jobs at Bullshit Incorporated who
then have to sadly take old possessions to collectors’ shows and the like the
squeeze out a little cash to pay bills.)
As I write on this side of Lana, I’m struck by how seamy are
a fair amount of what is shown of Lana’s shows of character and related plot
aspects, while the film is so insinuating in allowing us to embrace her
involvement with Joel as part of a warm comedy—which, I think, in general,
works well enough, even for those of us who usually are more hungering for
virtue in our fictional characters. And of course, the real focus of indubitable
“evil” in this film is Guido, Lana’s hotheaded pimp boss, who is played with
maximum Mafia-style moxie by
Joe Pantoliano.
Guido, by the way, tells Joel rather menacingly on Joel’s front lawn, ‘In tough
economic times, don’t mess with another man’s livelihood’—a maxim we could
readily agree to, today.
*
Joel’s friends are rather street-smart wiseasses
for “high-achieving peers.” Another interesting thing about Joel’s life
is his colorful friends.
Curtis Armstrong provides the spiciest sidekick, Miles; Armstrong later made a bigger name for
himself, apparently, as “Booger” in
The
Revenge of the Nerds (1984) (and he even turned up in the 2004 film
Ray, about Ray Charles, as the famed
record producer Ahmet Ertegun). Armstrong, with his big mop of curly hair
making him look so 1979, may seem “wiser than his years” here, and in part this
may be because the actor Armstrong was actually about 29 when he did this film,
about 10 years older than Cruise, while Joel and Miles
are
classmates. (Miles is even remarked on by Joel as having probably gotten into
Harvard already—but, funny, I recall that kids that looked like him with his
frumpy “fro” [at least whom I was directly aware of] weren’t usually thought of
as apt to get into
Harvard—as an
obvious enough fact, not just a bias of the benighted.)
Interestingly, Miles pronounces
one of the more memorable lines of the film, really encapsulating his sly
character [this may paraphrase a bit]: “[embracing
the notion/maxim] ‘What the f**k’ gives you freedom; freedom brings you
opportunity; opportunity makes your future.” In a way, this is like a
street punk’s version of pro-business, even entrepreneurial political
philosophy that critics of Reagan would have boiled him down to, and which
today seems again to be rearing its smarmy, cigar-chomping head among those gathering
ideas and dollars for backing a “winning horse” that aims to get into the White
House.
Joel’s other regular friend, Barry, played by
Bronson Pinchot, strikes me as really looking like
an early-1980s sort, semi-nerd subtype. He turns up in a number of scenes as a
memorable enough presence.
* Puzzling over some school-culture facets.
Some of this is nitpicking on my part, but Joel’s SAT scores are noted as 579
math, 560 verbal (this follows the old style of scoring, which I understand
we’re going back to, right?). Later we hear Joel is in the 84th
percentile of his class. This while his grade point average is 3.14, and his
class rank is 52. Mathematically, without my having done the figuring, this
would suggest his high school class is several-hundred big, and it would seem
to feature a lot of high achievers. Does this sound right to those of you fresh
from all the tests and college entrance hurdles, etc.?
(And even though he has spoken at the café—we’ll review this
scene below—of his interest in wanting to help his fellow man, he declares he
wants to major in business. When I was in college, this would have made me—and not a tiny amount of others—groan.)
Also, some more problematic facts: Joel is still subject to
an interview for school, in the form of
Richard Masur playing a Mr. Bill Rutherford who comes to Joel’s house, good grief,
right when the prostitution production is in
full swing. As we earlier have seen, one or more of Joel’s friends has
gotten into a college already. Also, there is talk—including by his parents—of
Joel possibly taking the SAT again for a chance to up his scores. Yet, as we
can see from numerous shots, including Joel’s raking leaves in his backyard—and
a shot of the fall flowers of chrysanthemums, and the fact that someone is cold
outdoors at one point—that it seems to be autumn. Does this all square? Can
kids be being accepted to colleges, yet still jockeying to up their chances (as
with retaking the SAT), and even having college-rep interviews, in fall?
I remember I was accepted to GWU in October 1980, in what
was called an “early admissions” program; and I heard that something like this
still goes on, in a conversation with my sister not long ago. But the main time
to get all the acceptances, today as 30 years ago, seems to be about
March-April. So is the timing of all the bits of getting-into-college stuff
Joel is swamped in right? But this isn’t a big deal as far as enjoying the film
is concerned.
Other bits of “flavors of the time.” There is a joke with Joel
and Barry in the former’s dad’s car about the word “boff.” (You can see from
the film what this slang term meant.) I had never heard this term till I got to
GWU, and I haven’t heard it since.
The song “Mannish Boy,” the old blues standard by Muddy
Waters, is playing at one point under the big prostitution-party scene. This
was a song I learned to love in an entirely different context, in playing
guitar with some friends (at home in New Jersey) in the early 1980s, where (the
others were young than I) the song was referred to (incorrectly) as “I’m a Man.”
Our embrace of the song was entirely independent of this film, I think, and it
was part of a period where I got “into” blues (and associated rock) music quite
a bit.
Joel’s parents, you’ll note, seem insufferably shallow and
materialistic. This, for one thing, coheres with the typical premises of
teenage-aimed films, as examples from John Hughes and others show. But the
parents seem especially thin here. There is also a vibe from them similar to
that of Benjamin Braddock’s parents in The
Graduate (1967).
When the mother goes on about her “egg,” the cut-glass
sculpture or whatever the hell it is that sits on her mantelpiece, which is a
key “Macguffin” of sorts in the film, you kind of cringe at her shallowness from
the start and never stop, no matter how many times you view this film. You
rather wish, if you could write your own scene into this film, you could have—after
the parents have come back from vacation—Joel answer his mother’s scolding
disapproval over there being a crack in her egg, by his taking the egg,
pretending to look it over carefully, and then flinging it harshly to the floor
so it breaks into a thousand pieces. Then, choose your follow-up:
Mother: “That’s a
thousand-dollar egg!”
Joel, with comic
swagger, “Not anymore!”
or
Mother: “That’s an
invaluable egg!”
Joel (Odd Couple [1968] style): “Now it’s garbage!”
A few final notes:
Brickman’s original ending; and sex in weird places
The Wikipedia article on the film says the DVD version
restores what was Brickman’s originally intended ending, which includes Joel
and Lana in a restaurant chatting, including Joel’s wondering if their date on
the train (is that right?) was a “setup” (and that by Guido). When I first
watched the film this season, I didn’t remember that restaurant scene from when
I last saw the film…and then, when I watched the film all the way through a
second time, I remembered, yes, what (I think) was at the end was Cruise close-up
in the Ray-Bans, ruminating about his ad hoc business—that he had helped people
regarding their “human fulfillment,” I believe is the term used—a “light”
satiric ending note.
Now, on the DVD, the film ends with a more ambiguous, rueful
note, but this is where Joel’s and Lana’s relationship is given a fond tipping
of the hat, while Joel’s having flirted with danger is reflected in a way in a
voice-over comment of his, echoing one of Guido’s previous remarks to him. When
I first watched this, this seemed so seamless following the film as it ran
beforehand, that I didn’t notice it as sticking out. Only after reading the
Wikipedia comment on the ending did I realize the change in the film’s ending.
Overall, this is a satisfying film. If you watch it only
once, you will find that it offers solid, and not-mean, laughs at various
points throughout. It may wear thin in places quickly on re-viewing (including
with some of the sexual jokes), but I like rewatching it in part because of its
reminding me of the “old days.” Also, it shows that in a smooth, hip, winking
comedy, RB can be deceptive in the
sense that it was catering to the youth market at its most streetwise (one line
that got a good laugh in 1983 was when, in the café, when Joel asks his friends
if they want to help mankind or make money, several are unanimous—“Make money” [End note 2]), and yet it was making a sharp satirical critique of the
pro-business mentality that was spreading around young America’s culture like
wild grapevine in an untended garden.
The film’s gently subversive agenda was rather like Curtis
Armstrong’s character, if he sidled up with pluck to the real Ronald Reagan in
1983, with poker-game cigar in hand, saying with subtle irony, “So, Mr.
President, F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life;
but as many of us know, there are third and fourth acts. So,” tapping the ash
off his cigar, “how does it feel to be in your third act, proud in the saddle again, but doing hack work and
dogmatically extolling the virtues of making a good dollar?”
Incidentally, on the
issue of sex in weird places: When Joel and Lana are first together, before
they are becoming friends, among a sequence of shots, they have sex on the
stairs. I guess I needn’t belabor that that’s not the most comfortable place to
have it, right? Well, about 25 years ago, I worked as a security guard for a
famous contract-guard company, and one of the sites I worked for a few months was
Lake Mohawk, in Sparta Township, N.J. It was (and is) a gated community, one of
whose vaunted amenities was guards keeping a watch on things. So it was up to
us low-paid contract-service guards to drive around the community at night
(which surrounded the big lake), checking in at stations where we had to do a
key-in-a-hand-carried-device thing (maybe I’ll explain some other time) to
prove we’d been at all the stations. This was done about three or four rounds
around the lake overnight. So, did we keep away burglars and gangsters?
Hardly. There were none to catch (and if we did encounter
any, we had to call the police; our job decisively did not entail us being police). Instead, we had a sort of
babysitter role. The most notable sights (among humans) that I saw, and had discretion to respond to as a security guard, in the summer of 1990 (aside from a
gathering beer party at one beach that I, somewhat clumsily, used an effective
ruse to shoo away) was couples having sex—on
the sloped lawn of a park near the boardwalk, and on a couple of the several beaches, one of the latter cases of which
showed up with presumed sudden embarrassment in the headlights of the vehicle
I was driving.
I used to think that the idea of having sex on a sandy
beach—no comfy mattress, of course—could only have appealed to those too young
to know better, with goofily romantic ideas of having sex under the stars, and
(most essential ingredient) who had had too much to drink that night.
End note 1.
Another obvious difference between Cary Grant and Cruise is that Grant's characters, typified by Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest (1959), would be quite uncomfortable with action like being chased in a remote field by a crop duster, while Cruise is noted for characters who are open to, e.g., climbing the face of a skyscraper.
End note 2.
I seem to recall the situation of Joel’s fantasy of his
sexual encounter, where (as if in indication of Joel’s sense of guilt-cum-fear)
the police and assorted community figures turn up outdoors as if in a calamitous
standoff—with the bullhorn-delivered “Get
off the babysitter!”—got a laugh. Also laugh-inducing was the situation
where Joel, idly strolling on a dock near a body of water, and stoned (as the film
has clearly spelled out), suddenly gazes up directly into a lamp.
