Vandal in the Wind: OVER THE EDGE (1979)

"I'm sorry about your son - sorry he was on drugs!"  -- Doberman

Walking home from work, fall day, Cheap Trick's "Surrender" came on my iPod and whisked me back to New Grenada, 1979... walking home from Knapp Elementary; "Let's Blow Up the School" was the movie I filmed in my mind; I didn't even need a camera. My own imagining of the carnage ignited a tingle up and down the spine. Eventually, I forgot it, grew out of it, focused my rage on playing war games in the back yard with the kind of realistic (black or grey, not orange) cap guns that are all but illegal now. But the inchoate pyromaniac manic fury of my elementary school years roared up from the depths on that walk home from work: "Surrender." Maybe surrender to the system, maybe to the urge to destroy it. Sure they had conformity then too, but it was out of fashion. Desire for destruction was healthy in the  70s; we kids were allowed freedom enough to see the full extent of our prison. And if we wanted to smash our heads against the bars, mom didn't even make us wear a helmet.

That raw, powerful, dangerous, sexy thrill of running 'loose' seems absent in the kids of today, as gone as the analog hiss of old eight tracks. My hiss is gone too. I'm old, man. So why do the kids today seem even older? Is it the cell phone addiction? Has the virtual so taken over their lives they have no time for actual destruction?

Blowing up the school is not a new idea, of course, and nowadays it gets muddied in terrorism and Columbine. Now it's no longer permissible to even blow up the school in one's mind, let alone in cinema. Only a handful of films have ever acted on this basic childhood fantasy: ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (see: Columbine Queen) and OVER THE EDGE. Both came out in 1979. Coincidence? I was twelve, in 6th grade, wild in the streets... as long as we kept within range of mom's shout for dinner, we could do damn near anything.

None of us knew about either film in 1979 of course, nor did we know that the arrival of the 1980s would signify the end of all our freedom, the arrival of AIDs and paranoia, etc. All references to explosives in schools would become verboten (unless portrayed as odious villainy rather than anarchic rock heroism). HIGH made some drive-ins but we were too young to go to them; EDGE was quietly shelved for being too dangerous. It found its audience later, on VHS and cable. I myself stumbled on it via a TBS afternoon screening while loafing around at my parent's house after college. It was 1991 by then; I was unemployed, alcoholic, bitterly single. At first I thought it was some dumb typical after-school special of the era. By the time it was over I was drunk, crying with joy and triumph --the real me was back!

The kids in OVER THE EDGE are somewhat older than me in the same time frame, but not by much. I remember the Farrah feathery style of the girls' hair, I knew the long haired blonde boys, the badasses in their red bandannas--both the bullies and the kids who would protect you from the bullies--and how to maneuver--all without paralyzing fear or insecurity. I knew air rifles and 'punks' and firecrackers, and catching fireflies and pillbugs and crayfish and all the other animals now dead from the DDT used to stop the Japanese beetle infestation. I loved Ms. Zackon, my 4th-5th grade teacher with her hand-knit shawl teaching my 4th-5th grade combined class (the 'artsy' kids --as opposed to the 'gifted' kids who had their own combined class). Zackon had Kate Jackson hair and had us sit in circles and listen to 'Free to Be You and Me' and watch 16mm projected science fiction shorts about the collapse of the environment and the dangers of conformity and overpopulation. We knew about strangers and not to accept candy or get close to their cars, otherwise, play ball!

If we ruined freedom for the kids of today by wasting that freedom on petty vandalism and games of doctor, well, sorry about that, boppers.

Or at any rate, the older Vincent Spano types ruined it, not me and mine. EDGE opens with him shooting out a cop car windshield, setting a whole string of escalating events in motion: first Sgt. Doberman's routine harassment of the first two kids he stumbles across: Carl (Michael Kramer) and Richie (Matt Dillon). Richie's mom's cool and takes his side but Carl's dad instantly presumes it's all his son's fault and then has the rec center closed the next day when some big Texas investors visit the town, leading to a near-riot.

The escalation of kid resistance in retaliation to the mindless parental authority crackdown is truly galvanizing. When the lost poetic soul of the film, Claude (Tom Fergus), is busted by Doberman after the kid who sold him the hash rats him out, the reprisal against the rat is the first real shot across the bow, but it leads to Doberman's killing Richie, and from there onward in escalating disaster until even catharsis is pushed too far.

In EDGE we see it all, and we see it all slowly being taken away: cigarette smoking privileges being revoked as a reprisal against school vandalism; Claude thinking he's taking speed to help him with a test but realizing it's actually acid and we in the audience being trusted to know the difference and to be knowingly bemused and sympathetic rather than clueless and appalled (presuming we've all been there, in that Bosch moment); Vincent Spano with his mook sidekick delivering a pre-emptive squealer beat-down; Matt Dillon with his real pistol and preteen rebel smirk.

Free from the urge to bow to parental rule-making hysterics, the kids in this film know the thrill of breaking and entering, the sting of unjust police harassment, the frustration of only sporadically open rec centers; promises of bowling alleys and theaters all yanked away at the first sign of economic instability; first feints at sex that are the result of affection rather than hormonal lust, an affection about to be steamrolled into cookie-cutter post-Porky's exploitation; great rock on the bedroom hi-fi  giving way to crisp but strangely soulless synth pop.

The parents in this film never bother to think about whether or not the 'trouble' some of these kids are in has any basis in fact, or what defines 'trouble' -- they're still getting over the fear of being 'in trouble' themselves. "I don't have to tell you how deep... in trouble... some of these children are," Jerry says as if lecturing a bunch of kids caught shoplifting while addressing the concerned parents in the emergency PTA meeting.

Any kid who's ever been hassled by petty cops like Doberman (above) knows the deal. He considers you dangerously strung out on 'narcotics' if he catches you with a sliver of hash. He chases you on a high speed pursuit if you throw a narc-rat-fink kid into the pond ("a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"). He doesn't understand the difference between keeping a community safe and declaring war on children. He mistakes protecting citizens with insisting free souls surrender to the same illogical boot heel of anxiety and voter-appeasing restrictions of liberty that have him so cowed and surly, so eager to flex the only power over others he has.

Most of us who grew up harassed by these types of LEOs just get over it and move on. We understand and forgive the hopelessly entangled process by which genuine democracy lurches blindly around the seesaw of freedom /experimentation and remorse/ repression. Kids shouldn't have to understand, or forgive, this surrender. Parents may just seem a little weird, as Cheap Trick sings on the soundtrack, but if they give themselves away, it's just because they know there's no real escape, only symbolic evasion, what the 12-steppers call 'a demographic.'

These kids may be fucked up and angry but they're mainly bored, and who wouldn't be? They aren't archetype cliches cobbled together for an after school lesson about drug abuse, vandalism, guns, and curfew-breaking. They're real.  Stuck in the isolated hypocrisy of New Grenada, trapped by the world, by parents and cops and teachers all of whom push and prod in directions handed down by rote, they are awake in a town that's asleep, and the best the town can do is try to control them by making waking up illegal.

This is my generation up there: captured right at the point where the 70s turned to the 80s, the William Macy suicide center of BOOGIE NIGHTS, the dawn of the crackdown on our freedom to live in the moment and create our own tribes, our own interlocking separate society.

But.... we didn't need freedom anymore once had cable and VHS. We stopped talking about movies we had seen or heard about as if fireside gossip, and just rented them. When those abstract shapes on the music cable channel on Claude's bedroom TV are replaced by the 24-hour music video channel MTV (in 1981, two years after this film was made), we no longer needed to sneak out the window and seek a party. Video killed the radio star... and in the process snuffed out any motivation for genuine 'real time' anarchy.

OVER THE EDGE changes the usual math of the parent-kid divide by siding itself with the kids... all the way, and allowing us to exult in the little moments of true rebellion, even if they are ultimately pointless, which is a total reversal of most after school specials: Richie standing on the hood of Doberman's car as he tries to haul off Claude; the retribution against the Leif-y narc; the kids locking the parents in the PTA meeting, etc. --it's all cathartic as hell, but then as the cars in the parking lot erupt in flames and the kids rage Lord of the Flies-like we start to become afraid of ourselves for the primal inner wild child joy of seeing the school--the kid equivalent of a soul-deadening prison-- destroyed. We fantasize about blowing up the school, but when we actually blow it up, we see the ugly core that drives that fantasy. We devolve along the Hawksian axis all the way out of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and find we've been running amok in the climax of MONKEY BUSINESS with the drugged Cary Grant as the painted savage preparing to roast his rival. By then it's too late to save the baby in the boiling bathwater; the wild chaos of death and anarchy tails childhood idealism like a dogged detective and the reactionary rabble roll over everything like a tide, shedding the old skin of the country as they come ripping through the amber waves like a sloppy surfboard Erica Jong zipper.

Today the juggernaut of parental outrage has slowly been gaining steam anew as it roars forward into the new world of cyber-bullying, teen online suicides, and a million forms of new veiled draconian rubrics, from being ignored to micro-managed with nothing in between. We all knew the catch-22 as kids in the earlier eras-- in order to convince your parents you were really depressed and needed to see a shrink you had to commit suicide successfully.` Similarly coming home traumatized from bullying was just 'adjustment' and ultimately a lesson in learning to stick up for oneself. Now--only now--after this string of suicides--are parents admitting maybe there might be a problem with the way inter-child harassment---extortion (for lunch money), assault, sexual harassment, stalking--is tolerated, or was. So now, metal detectors and routine searches, kids expelled for just pointing a finger and making a gun sound.

Too late. When the cat's out of the bag, only then, do parents outlaw cat-bagging, and by the time the justifiably furious are done smashing things, and the crazed parents done erecting new 'freedom-enhancing' restrictions, it won't even matter which side was wronger. The repressed will be off to erupt in a new dimension, a new location, and the restrictive laws will just hang there like a coastline of empty straitjackets, waiting for the next wave of kids, who shouldn't have to wear them --they didn't do nothing---but you'll make these kids put them on anyway won't you, mom? Just in case. And so good for their posture!

Looking back over THE EDGE now, sober and "serene," it seems that the ultimate factor that destroys New Grenada is the refusal of the parents to admit that the base of their pyramid will probably not widen, and that their kids can't slow their own maturation to suit their parent's stunted growth rate. Nowadays kids grow up big in tiny domes, cracking the roofs on their backs. Maybe I'm jaundiced from growing up free with no roof to worry about. Now I can only watch the film, hear the song, and know that one day, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun, Matt Dillon shall move on and create modern indie junkie cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford Coppola. Motorcycle Boy will live! But we, Mr. Claude, and Mr. Richie, we belong dead. We who have burned so very brightly, but not to last. 

So long, Earl. Good luck. 

Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: Summerisle (Neil LaBute's WICKER MAN)

Having finally shrunk my balls enough to reach the end of Neil LaBute's WICKER MAN remake, I see what a fool I was to give up so many times before, and what a genius Nic Cage is to risk coming across as such a terrible actor. I was so used to the central figure of manly authority in a horror film being the 'good guy' I kept pressing stop against my will. But it finally dawned on me that here he's the villain, and doesn't even know it. And yet his Nic Cage-iness is the exact same as it would be if he was trying to rescue the Declaration of Independence! Genius.

It helped me, I guess, to have seen ANTICHRIST and BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS in the interim between attempts. All I needed was to wait for those two movies to finally be made, and Boom! La Bute's WICKER comes into clear perspective. On that note, may I recommend the three as a triple feature?

So, there. See? There's no need to sacrifice me, now, to your bee gods now, gentle ladies, fair ladies of Fårö...

Let me clarify, I don't think LaBute's a misogynist, anymore than Von Trier or Herzog. They all merely believe as I do that if women ever truly shucker free--all the way and completely--from patriarchy's handcuffs, then as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz once put it: "Say goodbye to your nuts!" That's not misogyny, any more than INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is anti-Semitic. These sorts of hatreds generally come from a place of unconsciousness, once brought to light from the muck through art, yadda yadda, they're often dispelled (or at least temporarily exorcised). And LaBute packs this MAN with plenty of very powerful, frightening, intelligent women, all going up against one lone, coarse, ineffectual male cop --and I bet that's pretty far from a misogynist's idea of a good time. Even for us sensitive males, a truly liberated, sexually aggressive female is one of the most terrifying creatures on this or any earth, and here on Summerisle one can't even trust in God all of a sudden, because God is suddenly not even a "He" and everything gets dark and scary and one's balls shrink and release hormones of queasy dread that hit like an extra dose of blood-chilling gravity.

And the same goes for Nic Cage --that national treasure. Whenever we think our man Cage is totally sucking, it's probably that he's just so far ahead of the curve we're afraid to follow lest we get hit by a truck careening around the bend. Not unlike the character he plays in the BAD LIEUTENANT 2, Cage's cop in WICKER doesn't care if we root for him or not, he's got his own road to ho, an arc that transcends words like "reckless," "brave," "idiotic" or "inspired."

Perhaps this WICKER has acquired such a dismal rep because it is neither a CHILDREN OF THE CORN GONE WILD as its targeted demographic likely hoped (based on the generic 'scary pastoral kid' poster, nor a "noir antihero loses his marbles" art movie, but rather something much more difficult to handle: a damning critique of patriarchy wrapped up in teen remake horror trimmings, with just enough polish that we believe in its structure as a "Where the *)@^&# is my daughter, you monster?!" movie, the kind with frantic cop fathers throwing away their rule books and/or drinking alone while staring at half-burnt family photos or yelling into the faces of apathetic mayors. WICKER even pretends to be such a film until it suddenly springs shut with a mouse trap-snap square on the sac of our manly American values. "How'd it get burned how'd it get burned how'd it GET BURNED???!" Cage screams in progressive loops to the one girl who doesn't hate him, and we realize it's already too late, for us, for him, for everything except another season's apple or honey haul. Pointing a gun at an unarmed woman in order to steal her bike, Cage is, as one sister puts it, "quixotic." The missing child has become the new windmill.

Just as the fun of the original was in feeling the last two thousand years of Christian stigmata stains burnt from our eyes via a single dose of Pagan Lasik, so too the fun here is seeing how--without the people of Summerisle kowtowing to his manly whims--Cage's patriarchal righteousness is revealed as immature bullying and violent hysteria.  Cage here is like the sister's boorish boyfriend in REPULSION or the sleazy neighbor in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, only we're conditioned by his star wattage to think he's the hero, because he thinks he's the hero, and the film posits him in just that framework (the 'child is missing' scenario being the 'cheap shot' way to get a viewer involved, outraged, concerned, glued to the screen - as he in turn is glued). Like the hero of an action film, too, Cage is outnumbered, and we're conditioned to always consider the outnumbered lone male worrying about a missing child to be the good guy.

Alas, LaBute's subtle tweaking of this expectation all but dooms his message for anyone but those of us who love to see this type of safety-first Clyde crushed to death under Tura Satana's headlights.

I guess more than any other film, the original included, LeBute's remake is more like Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS (1974), in the sense, and it offers a similar story arc and intentional confusion over whether the lead actor is a hero or villain: Dustin Hoffman in that film is a representative of the "civilized world" entering a strange, cut-off remote society and expecting viewers to laugh along with him as he jibes the locals for the first 1/3 of the film. Critics in general were unkind to the movie, many failing to pick up on the idea that Hoffman's outsider was the real villain and even calling the film sexist thanks to a morally ambivalent rape scene. You can imagine LaBute suffering the same misunderstood confusion over WICKER MAN. In a critique of the patriarchy, one must apparently never be ambiguous or stir up unresolved social anxiety if you want to win over a crowd.

Finally, now that there's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS and ANTICHRIST to situate it, however, even WICKER MAN makes gonzo sense. In the first, director Herzog is terrified/ambivalent/enthralled by the forces of chthonic nature, forces reflected in BAD's flood-faded colors and Post-Katrina New Orleans water lines; in WM, LaBute is terrified/ambivalent/enthralled by a strong cabal of women, reflected in the patronizing warmth of Ellen Burstyn and the sudden mood swings of Lee Sobieski; for ANTICHRIST, Von Trier just cuts, literally, figuratively and otherwise, right to the chase, right to the chthonic meat of things, where nature and the feminine entwine into one massive castrating green wooded Medusa, and then Von Trier does some pruning. Taken together the three films perhaps indicate that patriarchy has to repress and belittle the feminine, for the very simple reason that otherwise women will realize it's much better to kill men off once they've served their reproductive purpose, or send them off to work in the fields as castrated slave labor. Hasn't anyone seen CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)? What's the matter with you people? You think this is a joke? A child is missing!

The 1973 original was (perhaps) more bearable for American audiences because of the British accents which made the colloquial strangeness even stranger (not close to home enough to stick in the proverbial craw, as LaBute's version does) and it should be noted that the original was similarly box office-stricken in its own home country of Great Britain (due largely to bad marketing and brutal editing).

In the Americanized rendition, Nic Cage goes deep Yankee tourist: unconscious of the world around him, condescending, arrogant, even boorish, expecting that wherever he goes people will "get" his outmoded hipster posturing and that all women will bow and scrape before him when he flashes his badge and waves his gun around, jurisdiction be damned.  When they don't, his only option is a roundhouse kick to Lee Sobieski's heaving bosom. But that still doesn't work.

In the end the movie resonates for the same reason it annoys: we hate that which reminds us of our own unconscious Ugly American-in-a-china-shop deformities. In BAD LIEUTENANT, Cage made us feel the chronic pain of his character and revel in chemical relief and the joy of dancing ever on the edge. In WICKER MAN, it's not his pain that's alleviated, but the pain of any woman, minority or child who ever endured an unwarranted and inappropriate "pat-down" or otherwise had to suffer the preachy condescension of an arrogant male official. It's always amusing to see these patriarchal bullies squirm when the shoe is on the other foot, until of course we realize that we the audience are the ones squirming... in embarrassment. Ask not for whom the man burns, he burns for bees... until there's no other foot left.

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Read also Kim Morgan's"The Bitch is Back" on her Sunset Gun, which originally, back in 07, gave me the courage to keep trying to make it through. And remember, just because you wear a bear suit doesn't mean you can punch out pagan women! You need a pope hat do the that. Or to paraphrase Lauren Bacall: Be careful of those double standards, Steve. You're liable to trip over your cross and break your neck!