Eighties Post: Negative One -- "The Truth is a Virus"

(I’m about to start a celebration of somewhat-forgotten media crap from the 1980s. The true introduction will follow in the next forty-eight hours, but for now enjoy this piece I wrote in June 2004 for the earlier version of this blog.)

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So, I recently picked up a copy of Alan Moyle's Pump Up the Volume on the cheap at Best Buy. I hadn't seen the film since I had caught it on late-night television when I was in middle school, but I remember liking it quite a bit, and I figured that I couldn't go wrong at five bucks. So, on a whim, I grabbed it off the shelf and took it home to watch.

Honestly, it surprised me quite a lot.

The plot is pretty basic; the idea of a teen running a pirate radio station had been covered before in teen-exploitation films before (e.g. On the Air Live with Captain Midnight). There's the standard romance subplot between reclusive Mark (Christian Slater) and Nora (Samantha Mathis). The school officials are evil and bullying, just as in The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Class and countless other comedies of this ilk. While the film carries these traits admirably, they still carry the stigma of the "80s Teen Film."

However, Alan Moyle is too quick-witted a writer to fall into the traps which these conventions usually present. He manages to differentiate himself through two major factors: his keen ear for teenage dialogue, and his extreme revolutionist bent. The first is particularly interesting, especially in the way it separates the two halves of the film. The adults speak in tried maxims and decantings, making the same "you're in trouble young man" and "kids today need to learn respect" posturings that we're used to. The teens, though, shy away from any of these trappings. The characters, especially Mark when he slips into his radio persona of Happy Harry Hard-On, address true concerns of the modern teenager, but never in unbelievable or cornball fashion.

Take, for example, Billy Morrisette's turn as the expelled punker rebel. Roughly halfway through the film, he is interviewed by a local news crew outside his former high school. As he gives the interview, decrying the injustice of his expulsion, he lights road flares and tosses them onto school grounds. A few minutes later, he wordlessly enters the campus, carrying a placard which states simply, "I Got a Right to an Education." Slater's Mark/Hard Harry character shows a similar contradiction. Uprooted from his Manhattan home and placed in a school in Arizona, he acts the part of bookish recluse during the day while rallying against the system on the airwaves at night. This on-air persona has dual sides as well: while he initially preaches a doctrine of sex and nihilism, he shows a true concern for his peers when one of the students commits suicide after annoucing his intentions on the Hard Harry program.

It was this teen contradiction-slash-dichotomy that really drew me into the film, because it felt more real than any other teenage-aimed film I had seen. Sure, we all love The Donger, but is he real? The teens of The Breakfast Club are little more than stereotypes. However, through Pump Up the Volume and Slater's brilliant performance, Moyle has come closer than any other filmmaker to actually capturing the confusion that comes with being a teen. Does it make sense that this punk kid would actually want to learn, or that a symbol of youthful rebellion would take time out of his sermons on destruction to eulogize a boy from an opposite social circle? No, not under the conventional terms of engagement of the teen film. Moyle's film doesn't wish to touch on the same points as other films in its genre, though. It's much more concerned with showing the unconcentrated anger of teens become harnessed and directed through adolescence and the gauntlet of high school. As Hard Harry says late in the film: "parents [and] teachers are always telling you what to do. But you know what you have to do."

The film, ultimately, is concerned less with the downfall of the crooked school administrators or Harry's radio show, and more with a generation coming into its own. By the end of the film, the teens have control of the local social structure, and are beginning to spread their influence nationwide. They have harnessed their anger, and have directed it towards those who they feel have oppressed them the most: the adults in charge. While most teen films would have shown this with the law-breaking Mark/Harry triumphant, and with the adults soundly humiliated, Moyle goes for a different approach. Actually, by having Mark ultimately fail in his ordeal, he becomes an even stronger symbol of teen life. He may have failed, but he has inspired others to harness their anger and confused states to rise up against their oppressors. They begin to strike out not with the arms of Red Dawn or the universe manipulation of Donnie Darko, but by the only way the teen audience can: with their words and ideas. The film identifies with the teen audience, and ultimately shows them a way to actually express their ideas and join together to make their lives better, instead of wasting their anger aimlessly.

A sign appears about midway through the film, posted on the wall of the high school: "The Truth is a Virus." That basically sums up my ideas about the film. It presents teenage life for the dormant volcano that it actually is; it takes one rebel rouser to get a group going, but once they get going they can accomplish something truly groundbreaking. The film is impressive in its depiction of realistic teenage life and rebellion, and Christian Slater gives one of the greatest screen performances of his generation.

So, if you happen to see a copy of this in the five-buck bin at Best Buy or Virgin or HMV or Tower or wherever, I'd highly suggest making a home for it. This film should be required viewing for every high-school-age student in America.