This week's Album/Film of the week focuses on two masterclasses in wit and subversion from the 80s, both concerned with adolescent girls: David Leland's dramedy Wish You Were Here (1987) and Morrissey & Marr's The Smiths (1984).
Not even Ellen Page's Juno can quite prepare you for Lynda Mansell (Emily Lloyd), the heroine (or anti-heroine) of Wish You Were Here. David Leland's film about a witty, rebellious 16 year old girl growing up in an English seaside town in the 1950s is of a kind rarely made anymore: a character study serving as a period piece that isn't about a significant historical figure, or what we call a biopic. It's a memoir of sorts, but it's told in the third-person, where no narrator is available to tell you that what's unfolding onscreen has some sort of significance to the wise person telling the story. Lynda is just a teenage girl with a series of tedious summer jobs she can't be bothered to keep, escalating sexual encounters, and a father who doesn't understand her.
A big part of Lynda's problem is boredom. There just isn't much to do where she's from except go to movies with awkward boys, work at the hair salon or the food cart or whichever job it is that week, and ride up and down the boardwalk. The other part of the problem is that her mother -- her only ally in the world -- is dead. Her father, a civilian navy man and general prude, is concerned for her reputation, or more pressingly, his own, as she goes around town hiking up her skirt and cursing people out. The primary source of humor in the film is her fondness for vulgarity, but even then it's tempered with irony, as vulgarity in the '50s wasn't likely to constitute vulgarity in the 80s, and it certainly wouldn't now. Consider Lynda's trademark yet fairly innocent insult, specially reserved for her father on most occasions: "Up your bum!"
Herein lies the paradox of rebellion, for while Lynda's crudeness is certainly a cry for attention, it is also the heroic nature of an iconoclast. In addition to her father, Leland pits his heroine against another crucial signpost of patriarchal order trying to reign in the "wild" female psyche -- that of the psychiatrist. In one of the funniest yet disturbing scenes of the film, Lynda has to attend a session with Dr. Holroyd. At his insistence, they begin to alphabetically chart all the curse words in the English language, until they arrive at a word that even Lynda refuses to say. Not because she's embarrassed to say it. But because Dr. Holroyd implores her to say it, and it seems his motivations aren't entirely professional.
The scene serves to show the ways in which the patriarchy fetishizes taboo even in its insistence on repressing it. That is, behaviors such as Lynda's can be labelled "taboo" or "other" the better to manipulate and contro'. This is precisely the definition of "perversion," and Lynda isn't having it. At least not that form of perversion.
Which brings us to Eric (Tom Bell). He is a friend of Lynda's father, meaning he's far too old for Lynda. The rebellious side of Lynda finds him alluring for this reason, while perhaps the vulnerable side of her wants to find an intimacy that is wholly absent from her relationship with her father (another case of perversion). Needless to say, this is where the "drama" in the "dramedy" enters to the story. Lynda becomes a tragic figure as she bears the consequences of her relationship with Eric, but, to Leland's immense credit as a screenwriter and Lloyd's performance, at no point does she come across as a victim. Even if she is one.
If Lynda Mansell is the girl next door smoking cigarettes in the backyard by the pool, Morrissey is the sickly boy in the window upstairs who's allergic to the sun. The Smiths, more than any other Smiths album, could've soundtracked Wish You Were Here, as it shares a similarly arch, not to mention feminine, sensibility. Hazy flashes of nostalgia pervade the album, whether it be for the simple guitar music of the 60s that Johnny Marr dresses up in his own svelte flare, or for the startling moments of childhood introspection Morrissey references all over ("will nature make a man of me yet?"). Marr's songs, locked in alternate states of sighing wistfulness, pouting, and tempered euphoria, evoke the seaside towns of Wish You Were Here, frozen in time, caught in a timeless dance with mundaneness and kitchen sink drama.
For the most part, the songs find a perfect home in Morrissey's tales of awkward sexuality and social discomfort, but it's not like they fit hand in glove. For one, there's an undeniable morbid streak running throughout Morrissey's rambling lyrics (see "Suffer Little Children"). The production, which both Morrissey and Marr have derided in recent years, is stark and modulated, a far cry from the more pristine sound of The Queen is Dead and even Strangeways, Here We Come. And of course, we must talk about that voice.
Marr's guitar riff on "This Charming Man" may chime perfectly well, but to hear Morrissey wail, "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear" is utterly jarring, all of which is to say the song is riveting. I imagine it was nothing less than shocking and then hilarious to hear a man who might as well be singing in the shower moan "I've lost my faith in womanhood" and take the forgone tropes of rock n' roll as sex and turn them on their heads with lines like, "She wants it now and she will not break/But she's far too rough and I'm too delicate" ("Pretty Girls Make Graves") in 1984. If Lynda Mansell and Morrissey ever met... now that's a movie I'd watch.
Not even Ellen Page's Juno can quite prepare you for Lynda Mansell (Emily Lloyd), the heroine (or anti-heroine) of Wish You Were Here. David Leland's film about a witty, rebellious 16 year old girl growing up in an English seaside town in the 1950s is of a kind rarely made anymore: a character study serving as a period piece that isn't about a significant historical figure, or what we call a biopic. It's a memoir of sorts, but it's told in the third-person, where no narrator is available to tell you that what's unfolding onscreen has some sort of significance to the wise person telling the story. Lynda is just a teenage girl with a series of tedious summer jobs she can't be bothered to keep, escalating sexual encounters, and a father who doesn't understand her.
A big part of Lynda's problem is boredom. There just isn't much to do where she's from except go to movies with awkward boys, work at the hair salon or the food cart or whichever job it is that week, and ride up and down the boardwalk. The other part of the problem is that her mother -- her only ally in the world -- is dead. Her father, a civilian navy man and general prude, is concerned for her reputation, or more pressingly, his own, as she goes around town hiking up her skirt and cursing people out. The primary source of humor in the film is her fondness for vulgarity, but even then it's tempered with irony, as vulgarity in the '50s wasn't likely to constitute vulgarity in the 80s, and it certainly wouldn't now. Consider Lynda's trademark yet fairly innocent insult, specially reserved for her father on most occasions: "Up your bum!"
Herein lies the paradox of rebellion, for while Lynda's crudeness is certainly a cry for attention, it is also the heroic nature of an iconoclast. In addition to her father, Leland pits his heroine against another crucial signpost of patriarchal order trying to reign in the "wild" female psyche -- that of the psychiatrist. In one of the funniest yet disturbing scenes of the film, Lynda has to attend a session with Dr. Holroyd. At his insistence, they begin to alphabetically chart all the curse words in the English language, until they arrive at a word that even Lynda refuses to say. Not because she's embarrassed to say it. But because Dr. Holroyd implores her to say it, and it seems his motivations aren't entirely professional.
The scene serves to show the ways in which the patriarchy fetishizes taboo even in its insistence on repressing it. That is, behaviors such as Lynda's can be labelled "taboo" or "other" the better to manipulate and contro'. This is precisely the definition of "perversion," and Lynda isn't having it. At least not that form of perversion.
Which brings us to Eric (Tom Bell). He is a friend of Lynda's father, meaning he's far too old for Lynda. The rebellious side of Lynda finds him alluring for this reason, while perhaps the vulnerable side of her wants to find an intimacy that is wholly absent from her relationship with her father (another case of perversion). Needless to say, this is where the "drama" in the "dramedy" enters to the story. Lynda becomes a tragic figure as she bears the consequences of her relationship with Eric, but, to Leland's immense credit as a screenwriter and Lloyd's performance, at no point does she come across as a victim. Even if she is one.
If Lynda Mansell is the girl next door smoking cigarettes in the backyard by the pool, Morrissey is the sickly boy in the window upstairs who's allergic to the sun. The Smiths, more than any other Smiths album, could've soundtracked Wish You Were Here, as it shares a similarly arch, not to mention feminine, sensibility. Hazy flashes of nostalgia pervade the album, whether it be for the simple guitar music of the 60s that Johnny Marr dresses up in his own svelte flare, or for the startling moments of childhood introspection Morrissey references all over ("will nature make a man of me yet?"). Marr's songs, locked in alternate states of sighing wistfulness, pouting, and tempered euphoria, evoke the seaside towns of Wish You Were Here, frozen in time, caught in a timeless dance with mundaneness and kitchen sink drama.
For the most part, the songs find a perfect home in Morrissey's tales of awkward sexuality and social discomfort, but it's not like they fit hand in glove. For one, there's an undeniable morbid streak running throughout Morrissey's rambling lyrics (see "Suffer Little Children"). The production, which both Morrissey and Marr have derided in recent years, is stark and modulated, a far cry from the more pristine sound of The Queen is Dead and even Strangeways, Here We Come. And of course, we must talk about that voice.
Marr's guitar riff on "This Charming Man" may chime perfectly well, but to hear Morrissey wail, "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear" is utterly jarring, all of which is to say the song is riveting. I imagine it was nothing less than shocking and then hilarious to hear a man who might as well be singing in the shower moan "I've lost my faith in womanhood" and take the forgone tropes of rock n' roll as sex and turn them on their heads with lines like, "She wants it now and she will not break/But she's far too rough and I'm too delicate" ("Pretty Girls Make Graves") in 1984. If Lynda Mansell and Morrissey ever met... now that's a movie I'd watch.
