This bloody road remains a mystery / This
sudden darkness fills the air /What are we waiting for? / Won't anybody
help us? / What are we waiting for? / We can't afford to be innocent /
Stand up and face the enemy / It's a do or die situation /We will be
invincible!
Whether princess or pauper, Molly Ringwald in all her incarnations
meant nothing to me. The sum of her girlish charms left me unmoved.
Neither pouting lips nor thrift-store femininity could persuade me. I
remained unimpressed with her seemingly eternal pursuit of heterosexual
romance -a pursuit which was translated on film as "spunk" or
"personality." As an ominous sign she favored feathered blonde boys in
white linen suits and my god, they were in high school. Bad
taste by way of Simon LeBon was continental maybe, but unfailingly
bland. Or she slummed it for an afternoon with the broken boy from a
broken home, whatever - she got her kicks by crossing the tracks just
far enough to fake the danger.
When feeling especially vicious, I imagined her twenty years later,
her pale mauves and hot pinks turned to suburban corals, a sickly salmon
hue.
From Pretty in Pink to Some Kind of Wonderful to
Say Anything, The John Hughes oeuvre was unfailingly
conservative - either you learned your place in the social-class
continuum, the value of upward mobility, or both -- Reagan-era cultural
politics for teenagers. And the dangerous girls, the ones with potential
-the baby dykes and raccoon-eyed freaks-- were inevitably tamed by the
promise of romantic heterosexual love, that old sleight of (empty) hand.
Like anyone really believed Watts with her red-fringed gloves and
drumsticks in back jean pocket would fall for a chump boy like
sensitive-yet-superficial Keith. We all knew in our heart of hearts that
she was destined for girls like us, girls who wanted to rock (and make)
out with other girls. I envisioned her in Greyhound buses and truck
cabs, blonde head pressed against the rain-spattered window, trekking to
the Pacific Northwest after a last-gasp graduation to join an all-girl
rock band. And I cheered when The Basketcase in her black shadow and
black mood uttered, "When you grow up, your heart dies." That felt real
and prophetic, even. But when Ally resurfaced from high school bathroom
in white lace and distastefully muted eyeliner, I recognized the set-up
and cursed Molly (and Hughes) for her awkward, awful transformation and
looked away.
But Billie Jean -- now she was a girl who could bruise your heart.
This shattered dream you cannot justify /We're gonna scream until
we're satisfied /What are we running for? / We've got the right to be
angry / What are we running for? / When there's nowhere we can run to
anymore /We can't afford to be innocent / Stand up and face the enemy /
It's a do or die situation /We will be invincible!
I love The Legend of Billie Jean. I first saw it when I was
fourteen, three years after it was released. I was an alternateen
looking for punk rock and I found Billie Jean. Not instead, but
simultaneously. It had everything a girl like me could ask for in a
"whirlwind story about a group of kids who challenge the adult world:" a
girl outlaw in fingerless gloves and a righteous sense of justice. Isn't
this every girl's teenage fantasy?
In The Legend, it's summer in Texas, and the heat is
sweltering. Billie Jean is an attractive working-class white teenager
who lives in a trailer park with her divorced mother and bleached blonde
younger brother Binx. Because she is "from the trailers," the local boys
believe she must be cheap, and led by ringleader Hubie, the boys trash
Binx's scooter (and later Binx) when Billie Jean proves otherwise.
Billie Jean arrives at Hubie's father's seaside shop to demand the
exact amount for the scooter repairs after appealing to a sympathetic
but dismissive police lieutenant. The senior Pyatt invites her upstairs
to the office, ostensibly to withdraw money from the safe. Once there,
he suggests a "play as you pay" plan - and he makes himself plain,
sliding his hand against her arm and suddenly lunging. No wilting Texas
rose, she knees him in the groin and flies down the stairs into the
shop, where Binx has discovered the gun in the register. Seeing his
sister threatened, he waves the gun at Pyatt, and the gun accidentally
goes off. Thus begins their headlong flight from the law, taking their
best friends Ophelia and Putter with them in a battered station wagon.
After a failed attempt to negotiate with the
police at a mall -Pyatt brings a gang of teenage thugs for an ambush-
the kids break into a mansion for food and shelter, and discover an ally
in the son of the District Attorney. He suggests they make a video to
present their demands and Billie Jean, earlier mesmerized by Jean
Seberg's portrayal of Joan of Arc (the film is playing during a group
discussion), prepares herself for inadvertent pop stardom. Making sense
of her situation through an image of Jean/Joan burning at the stake, she
shears her locks and shreds her clothes, making herself over into a modern Joan of Arc or a
more righteous (rather than merely art-damaged) Penelope Houston. It is through
a commodity image that Billie Jean realizes her political strategy -- manipulating a cinematic
sensibility, she presents a striking figure on video. Her
friends are awed - and soon, so is everyone else within reach of radios,
newspapers and television sets.
The video of Billie Jean with her fist in the air, shouting, "Fair is
fair," is played everywhere. Inspired by her message she becomes a
touchstone for teenage rebellion, a fugitive aided and abetted by
legions of youth. They slip her past police roadblocks, offer her
shelter in underground clubs, nourish her on their fathers' credit
cards. Young white girls get the "Billie Jean cut" and even Putter (no
stranger to the "real" Billie Jean) invests in Billie Jean's celebrity
and defiantly cuts her hair before a rapt audience of wannabe Billie
Jeans, cops, and her abusive mother.
Beneath the layered guitar wanking and arbitrary
(but temporary) love interest lies not only a critique of misogyny and classism, but also a meditation on commodity
culture, pop presence, and fantasies of identification. This is not limited to Billie Jean's identification with
the cinematic image of Jean/Joan. In the course of
her criminalization Billie Jean becomes iconic as a sexualized body in
ways which she cannot control. Ever the businessman, Pyatt not only displays
the bloody shirt he'd been wearing when shot, but shills photographs of
Billie Jean taken by Hubie's pals, emerging enraged from a local
swimming hole in a clinging top and bikini. He pawns pastel-hued
t-shirts emblazoned with her "mug shot," the red concentric circles of a
target framing her head. There are visors (oh so '80s) and posters and
bumper stickers and frisbees and beach towels, some of them ironically
emblazoned with the slogan "Fair is fair."
Her gender and class status as "white trash," those markers
that contain and constrain her mobility through the world, are coded
as dangerous and criminal. As such her status as a "white trash" teenage
girl makes her hyper-visible to the disciplinary state, but also to
commodity culture, even while her ascent to cult figure in some ways
depends upon ignoring the historicity of those social conditions; so
that even as she is pursued by the mustered strength of Texas law
enforcement, her image reaps profit and (pop) pleasure for others.
The Marxist model of commodity fetishism describes an affective
process, a substitution of meanings - the social relations of labor are
disguised by the commodity form. But commodities and images do not
simply veil "real" conditions, but constitute them. Images are also
social relations, and this
becomes clear for Billie Jean as the line between state surveillance and
her supposed celebrity is blurred. This is a different order of fetishism
- a fetishism of figures, in which the iconic persona
of "Billie Jean" is invested with a life of her own. People relate
not to Billie Jean per se but her image, and in a way that
obscures the histories of its determination as image -- including Billie
Jean's own meditation upon Jean Seberg's cinematic portrayal. Like all pop icons, she (both Jean Seberg
as Joan of Arc and Billie Jean) becomes the screen upon which
an audience of thousands projects their fears and fantasies. In the latter
case, the adults are afraid of her, the kids adore her. They make
meaning of their own lives, whether seemingly threatened or otherwise
encouraged, in relation to her image.
A group of preteens rally to her, hoping that she'll save a
neighborhood boy from the physical abuse of his father; a man spies her
adolescent "gang" and vows to bring her to justice, and like a Old West
vigilante (complete with cowboy hat and rifle) he guns his pick-up truck
at the gathered children. And as a pop figure the social relations that
conditioned Billie Jean's outlaw status are obscured - the girl who
offers Billie Jean a ride in her Ferrari might not have done so if she
were not a celebrity, and the throngs of teenagers who sport her image
may very well have been her torturers only days earlier. The girls who
turn themselves in to the police, all claiming to be Billie Jean,
participate in a projective fantasy of being "bad" like Billie Jean in
ways that elide uneven class relations and hierarchy and also
manifest a desire for "authenticity." It is a fantasy with material
force - while the sense of solidarity forged between the girls is
mediated by commodity culture (and punk rock is no exception), it is
still a meaningful relation, enough to inspire the
contradictory impulse to both appropriate and inhabit Billie
Jean's notoriety. Their gesture is not simply part disrespect and part
homage, part consumption and part conviction, but a mixture of all these
things at once.
The conclusion of the film finds Billie Jean confronted with her
iconic stature, literally. Her brother has just been shot by state
troopers -mistaken for herself in a dress- and disappeared into the back
of an ambulance at the beach where she was to turn over the "hostage"
and receive a new bike. There are crowds of young and old (but mostly
young) attracted to the beach by the media-frenzy over Billie Jean's
scheduled appearance. In the hours before the exchange -boy for bike-
was to be made, beach-goers are treated to Billie Jean haircuts, Billie
Jean contests, Billie Jean souvenirs. Radio station DJs broadcast from
sandy towels and portable amps and the teenaged audience parties in
anticipation.
Billie Jean only notices once her brother is taken away that everyone
has her face stuck to some part of their bodies, and follows the trail
of lights in the dimming dusk to the circus tent Pyatt has erected to
sell his wares. Towering above the beach is a paper-mache effigy of
Billie Jean, pointing a gun toward the ground, other hand on hip. Before
the crowd, the cops and the cameras she confronts him about his sexual
coercion, his unwillingness to otherwise pay for the damages to the bike
- and seeing that she has an audience, he grins, stutters, and attempts
to bribe her into silence, or submission. He reaches into the register
and pushes a wad of bills into her limp hand. "A little more, a little
less, does it matter?" he says. "It's not about the money," she replies
scornfully, and throws the bills into the fire. As Pyatt scrambles on
all fours to recover the cash Lloyd moves behind her to toss a poster
into the growing flames. Soon the crowd is coming forward to lay their
souvenirs in the fire, or lofting them through the air. Everyone watches
as the fire grows to consume the posters, t-shirts, tent and effigy,
perhaps participating in another, totally different kind of collective
pleasure.
In film after film Molly (and others like her) triumphs when she wins
the rich boy in her homemade prom dress or bride's maid gown, proof she
is worthy of heterosexual desire. Not Billie Jean. In the end she walks
away from the fire, the boy, and Texas. (This is when the Pat Benetar
song "Invincible" plays, and this is why I tear up like a big gooey baby
every time I hear it.) Her burning effigy is not only an allusion to
Joan of Arc - having led the people to a dream of freedom, she's
misunderstood and betrayed by the very same- but a potential critique of
consumption as "revolutionary" activity. But at the same time it speaks
to the dangers of consuming and appropriating radical stances and
images, of the depoliticization of historical conditions or capitalist
relations, it also points to the contradictory pleasures of fantasy
identification with our pop stars and the possibility for that pleasure
to become a kind of political agency, however temporary.
Is any of this coincidence? One of the screenwriters for the film was
Walter Bernstein, a blacklisted writer in the 1950s who was targeted by
the House on Un-American Activities Commission for his leftist political
alliances. It's entirely possible that he was versed in the kinds of
intellectual debates circulating among leftist cultural workers at the
time, and retained some of these threads even in penning a mainstream
film marketed for the vast American teenage market.
Is it cheesy? Well, you could argue all teen flicks by necessity are
idealistic and melodramatic, and this is a fantasy about a
teenaged heroine who struggles against a homegrown injustice. Overt
metaphors (perhaps Joan of Arc is a bit much) and the cringe-worthy
menstruation scene are distracting. And clearly Billie Jean the
character depends upon Helen Slater the actor being recognized as
conventionally "pretty:" tall, thin, blond. My more "serious" friends
roll their eyes when I say I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer or
The Legend of Billie Jean. Suspicious of desire and pleasure in
popular culture, they can't imagine how I might enjoy any of the fruits
of a "sexist, homophobic, white supremacist society." But I think the
demand for absolute resistance is misguided, and to demand purity in pop
culture ignores contradictory and complex realities, and so maybe
there's hope for Molly after all. We know by now that no mass cultural
production (especially film) is shaped outside of corporate management
and market influence; we know capitalist culture is able to assimilate
even the most "revolutionary" sorts of images or themes without threat
to its survival. But it may be that because we already know these
things, we can begin to ask other questions. The issue of how to capture
the popular imagination is at the center of the struggle for hegemony.
Instead of dismissing popular culture (and its audience) for the fact of
its messy manufacture, we might probe further to examine the character
and range of any given commodity form's power and possibility, what
moment of crisis it might represent, what (problematic) pleasures it
might afford. We should neither blindly denounce nor embrace these
pleasures, but instead try to understand what produces them. This does
not mean we abandon the analysis of late capitalist culture or
patriarchal relations; on the contrary, it might mean that we take these
more seriously. And as black queer theorist Wahneema Lubiano
writes, "It might well be that taking popular culture seriously could
teach us something about form, about aesthetics and about the
development of pleasure in politics."
And maybe I just want to be able to take seriously my own pleasures;
as a bi-queer Asian American girl reader of pop culture, I remember what
it meant for me to harbor crushes on Duckie and Watts (and thus
imagine her alternate endings), or to read Wonder Woman as "almost
Asian" (I was seven, and it was the black hair that did it). But it's
also because when I first saw this movie at fourteen, it was like how
punk rock used to feel - impossibly, hopefully idealistic. However
uneven my own fantasy of identification, it fueled both my nascent
desire for rebellion and my sense of its potential. And watching it
however many years later, it reminds me how good it felt to believe.
I'll always love you, Billie Jean.
And with the power of conviction /There is no sacrifice /It's a
do or die situation /We will be invincible /Won't anybody help us? /
What are we running for? /When there's nowhere we can to anymore /We
can't afford to be innocent /Stand up and face the enemy / It's a do or
die situation /We will be invincible!
::
This column is dedicated to the lovely Wendy Beauchamp, who also tears
up every time she hears Pat Benetar's "Invincible," the theme song to
The Legend of Billie Jean. She is the only other person I know
who fully appreciates the joys of this film, and reminded me not to
leave out the good parts. Wendy also happens to do the amazing zine
Subject to Change, chock full of personal-political insight and
analysis, which you should get from her (POB 400686 / N. Camb, MA 02140)
or Pander Zine Distro (http://www.panderzinedistro.com). Other great
rock 'n' roll girl films include Times Square (1980) and
Bandits (1997).
I've been listening to The Pleasure Seekers' 45 recently re-released
on Norton and its all-girl rock 'n' roll rules. What a way to die,
indeed.
Mimi Nguyen / POB 11906 / Berkeley, CA 94712-2906 /
slander13@mindspring.com