Hi:
Greetings from what feels like a quintessentially neo-noir situation. Having been evicted from my apartment for a few days thanks to some water damage, I’m lounging poolside in a Midcentury house up one of this city’s canyons, having borrowed this place from a traveling friend. I’m not complaining (and, ahem, friend, if you’re reading this, I’m keeping the place immaculate), but the whole set up has a Michael Mann vibe, a sense that someone might come crashing through these glass walls in search of revenge.
Like I said, I ain’t complaining. It’s been a hectic week, and household wreckage aside, hectic for gratifying reasons. ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR is out, finally, and has received some warm responses from quarters both private and public. You can read a little dessert-sliver of it here, on the screenwriter Eleanor Perry; another one, on Tuesday Weld, here; and a third, on Warren Zevon, here. The book itself is far more extensive—I hope, rewardingly so—on those people and others. The Los Angeles Times had some lovely things to say about the book last week, and I had a great time talking with Brad Listi on the excellent OtherPpl podcast. There’s more coming in the next week or two, but for now I’ll just note that I’m grateful as can be for all of it, and if you haven’t had a chance to pick the book up yet, well, it isn’t too late to support your local independent bookseller and do exactly that.
That’s enough self-promotion for now. But as the book takes a deep dive into certain vulnerable strains of my own adolescent experience—the strange funk of being an LA teenager at the dawn of the 1980s—I’ve found myself drawn back toward certain texts that kept me company at that age. Most of the movies that depicted being a teenager in that era—most of the ones that are widely beloved, at least—are kinda corny. Even when they’re sweet, or flat irresistible, they still feel . . . untrue to the grimier corners of teenage experience. Part of that is the bubblegum aspect of the decade itself. Nicholas Ray came closer to capturing these corners—the emotional desperation that teenage life is heir to—in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause than John Hughes ever did. The same can be said of Frank Perry, in 1969’s Last Summer, and (of course) of Larry Clark, in 1995’s Kids. So what was it about nineteen-eighties teen dramas that made them feel so clean? Even when they’re reaching for grit they wind up feeling unpersuasive, tempered by a prettiness that gets in the way . . .
I’d been thinking lately of Adrian Lyne’s 1980 drama Foxes, though. Foxes, at least as I’d remembered it, did get a little closer to those sharp corners: four teenage girls (one of them Jodie Foster, another Cherie Currie of the Runaways) basically living as a surrogate family in Hollywood. Their parents are present but peripheral—one is an abusive cop who shows up only to terrorize Currie whenever he’s able to locate her; another is a drowsy divorcee who seems minimally concerned at most with Foster’s comings and goings—and the kids’ vague driftings (scoring and taking drugs; taunting nerdy men at the supermarket; going to see a fairly lame arena rock/disco outfit called Angel) have the texture of authenticity even when the dialogue doesn’t. (“My parole officer says Hollywood Boulevard is a Bozo No-No,” one of the girls says at one point, and, uh, surely no teenager ever actually said that.) The movie aims to shock, or maybe just to titillate—you can certainly see it in the film’s trailer, which IS corny as hell, and yet . . .
And yet there’s something to it. Beyond the focus on the girls’ ass-shaking (which doesn’t play so well in 2021, irrespective of whether it did even then), beyond the corniness of Scott Baio on his skateboard, the film does have a loneliness and a sadness that feels persuasive. When I was a teenager, my friends and I felt moderately endangered—often, quite a bit more than ‘moderately’—all the time. The best thing about it, and the worst, was the feeling of freedom that went with it: the sense that we could disappear sometimes for days on end and our parents barely noticed. There were drugs, of course, but mostly there was a sense of solidarity that being allied against our elders created between us. The movie gets at that, I think, better than most. There are other eighties dramas with comparable grit or greater—River’s Edge, for example—but Lyne’s film has a vulnerability that gets under the skin and (what’s certainly a theme within this newsletter) a satisfyingly grubby sense of period location:
I’m pretty sure Thom Anderson missed this movie in Los Angeles Plays Itself (or more likely couldn’t license the clips from it), which is a shame. As is the fact the movie is absent from all the streaming platforms. Short of ponying up for an expensive DVD (or, uh, a less expensive VHS tape) on Amazon, your best bet is this version on YouTube (which claims to be subtitled in Spanish, but is not, and in fact is a decent transfer, as YouTube rips go).
Adrian Lyne, of course, would go on to do other things, but aside from Jacob’s Ladder, an excellent 1990 psychological horror drama that you would do well to see at the nearest possible opportunity—I’ll tease you here with a thoroughly fucked-up party sequence that will likely convince you—I’d say his canon is a little slick for my taste. And since Foxes seems to be largely unremembered, or at least undiscussed—though Bruce LaBruce has a sharp appreciation of it here—I figured I’d raise it to your attention.
I’ll leave you with a little playlist of songs I’ve constructed that evoke my own teenage wilderness years, mostly LA-centric bangers from the period, with a few outliers woven in. I’ll be back a little sooner next time, I promise, as I’ve already got my next subject in mind. In the meantime I’ll be shoveling ahead with my next book, about which I remain tremendously excited.
Until soon,
Matthew
This, from Gerry Ayres, will make you pine for what else might have been:
"My major problem with the director, Lyne, is he was English and had this hankering to make his first film look like old Hollywood. Thus he chose every locale to look like a 40s movie, train tracks the girls walk home on, I could go on. Their lives in Tower records and Sambos was ignored.
He also left out the documentary aspect: for instance, the concert was written for Santa Monica auditorium and the act was Iggy Pop. A black dude in snake skin hip boots is carted out the door by security and slugged around a bit. Through the glass doors of that camera friendly locale, our teens look on without response.
Lyne decided instead to shoot at the Shrine Auditorium because he was told it was major hip. It was also boring visually: all blank walls in a confined space. And the extras he cast weren't upperclass bourgeois kids but what looked like a traveling company of the Pirates of Penzance."