Risky Business
1983
Paul Brickman
So the famous scene hits in the first ten minutes or so. This is good. This is helpful for me. I get preoccupied when the only thing I know about a film is some cultural touchstone. I end up waiting for it, and it distracts me. I've been pretty lucky, overall. I'm thinking back to movies like Psycho and Network, whose famous scenes occurred halfway through. Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard had their famous quotes as the final line of dialogue in the whole movie, but I'm not talking about quotes, I'm talking about scenes, action. Tom Cruise slides into the room without pants on to the sounds of Bob Seger almost right away, and that allows me to put it to the side and figure out what the hell the other 95% of Risky Business is about without distraction.
Even then, I think I was duped a bit. In a good way! Booger (Curtis Armstrong's Miles, but let's call him Booger) gives a nice little speech to Tom Cruise's Joel when Booger finds out that Joel's parents are going to be out of town for a week, about how Joel needs to loosen up and take a risk every once in a while and say "what the fuck!" This led me to believe that this was going to be a teen house party movie, which is one of my favorite types of movies. But it ended up being a lot darker than that. Eventually, there was a big party, but it was joyless and foreboding by design.
Actually, I think this was probably the thing that, for me, kept Risky Business from being a fantastic movie, and settled on just being good—there was a lot of tonal whiplash, to the point where I didn't really understand whether it was trying to be a comedy or a drama. Okay, sure, it was trying to be both, fine. But sometimes, the two halves didn't really mesh. The captivating scene on the subway train (shot in a different film speed, I guess?) was punctured by the fact that it was all a setup; the jokes were all in service of plot points so dark that the comedy struggled to find a way out. No one really talked about the fact that there were a bunch of underage kids getting groomed/molested (technically speaking, but still). And I didn't walk away with a good understanding of what Risky Business was trying to say. Capitalism wins the day? Men are taken advantage of by duplicitous women? Lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want? Ha ha isn't it funny to see Tom Cruise knocked down a peg?
It's not the film's responsibility to give me answers, and I'm not asking for them. I'm just saying that maybe it wasn't the easiest film-watching experience for me. Still fascinating, and I still liked it a lot. In fact, I'm wondering now if the tonal inconsistencies were the point? Hear me out (despite the fact that I'm probably just doing this because I'm a bullshitter, I don't know if I actually believe it).
So being a teenager is confusing, right? We're made to believe that Joel is like seventeen or eighteen. That's a tough age! I have memories from that time in my life but I don't actually remember how it feels. Maybe none of us do. I would assume, though, that when I was that age, just due to lack of life experience and a hormonal brain that tended to exaggerate, I probably felt like my life was equal parts comedy and tragedy. Now, looking back, of course the tragedies seem insignificant. That's in retrospect. When you're in the middle of it, the drama seems all-consuming. Everything that goes wrong is going to ruin your life.
So being a teenager is confusing, right? We're made to believe that Joel is like seventeen or eighteen. That's a tough age! I have memories from that time in my life but I don't actually remember how it feels. Maybe none of us do. I would assume, though, that when I was that age, just due to lack of life experience and a hormonal brain that tended to exaggerate, I probably felt like my life was equal parts comedy and tragedy. Now, looking back, of course the tragedies seem insignificant. That's in retrospect. When you're in the middle of it, the drama seems all-consuming. Everything that goes wrong is going to ruin your life.
And so, in seeing that play out, the "life, ruined" aspect to Joel's story, or at the very least see it teased (since he ends up with everything he wants anyway), we the adult audience get to experience those feelings again. That discomfort I'm feeling at a subway hookup portrayed as beautiful romance, the squeamishness I get at the idea of a bunch of teen boys with bank bonds having sex with prostitutes at a big house party, the revulsion I feel at Joel leaning into his worse impulses and making deals with devils, the perplexing appeal of Rebecca De Mornay's diabolical, beautiful, fragile, complicated Lana, the indignation I experience when Joel's mother yells at him for the crack in the egg, all of these emotions I'm uneasily feeling now hearken back to the emotions that I was stewing in every single day of my life at that age.
So if that's what writer/director Paul Brickman was going for, then I'll say that Risky Business was a success. I just don't know if that was his intention or that's me making shit up. Ultimately, it doesn't matter (especially if I liked watching the movie regardless), but I do wonder. Isn't it funny, though, how the scene that caught on to the pop culture collective consciousness is a scene that has nothing to do with any of this? It's just a silly teen acting silly. I suppose there's a chance that this is what most people are comfortable with, that most adults don't want to feel the pain and misery and histrionics that they felt as teens themselves. They just want some of that old time rock 'n' roll in tighty-whities.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: Group A hits us with their first pick, Mommie Dearest. Look out for up to nine short reactions in that blog post. I'm excited!
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