Phoebe Cates – Bitch Flicks

This guest post written by Angela Morrison appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s.

The only thing people seem to remember about Amy Heckerling’s 1982 film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is Phoebe Cates emerging from a swimming pool in her red bikini, removing her top as she tells Brad (Judge Reinhold) how cute she always thought he was, The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” playing on the soundtrack. First of all, this is ridiculous because the entire movie is memorable, and there are much better scenes than Brad’s masturbation fantasy. Secondly, it is completely unfair to reduce Phoebe Cates’ character to a mere sex object, existing only for male viewers’ pleasure.

Phoebe Cates brings life to the energetic, worldly, confident-yet-vulnerable Linda. Her character is the heart and soul of the movie, as she gives Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) advice on sex, relationships, and navigating her way through high school. Linda is a few years older than Stacy, so she takes on the role of mentor, passing on her knowledge about the world to her younger friend. She is also Stacy’s number one supporter when her heart gets broken by both Ron Johnson (D.W. Brown) and Mike Damone (Robert Romanus).

One of the most striking things about this film is the casual way that Linda and Stacy discuss sex. Linda often expresses surprise at 14-year-old Stacy’s sexual inexperience, and she quickly reassures Stacy that “it’s just sex.” Linda’s attitude toward sex – which she passes on to Stacy – is that it needn’t be a big deal, but rather, should be seen as a fun and pleasurable activity for young women such as themselves. Part of the fun for Linda is deciding who she wants to have sex with – she assures Stacy that if she was not in a relationship with an older boy named Doug, she would go after Ron Johnson herself. She urges Stacy to make her own decisions, letting her know that she has the power to decide who she wants to have sex with, and when. The film never takes a judgmental attitude towards these young women, their sexual activities, and their frank discussions of sex.

Stacy takes Linda’s advice and has sex (for the first time ever!) with Ron Johnson. For some people, having sex for the first time is a big deal, an important event in their lives. However, Linda lets Stacy know that it is okay for it to not be a big deal, for it to just be a pleasurable part of going on a date – it does not mean she has to get married, and she does need to be in love with her sexual partner. Having sex with Ron Johnson is a positive experience for Stacy, although she ends up feeling rejected when he does not call her for another date. Linda is right by Stacy’s side as always, supporting her and telling her that she can do better than a 26-year-old stereo salesman. Linda lets Stacy know she is loved and supported, and that she need not worry about Ron Johnson disappearing from her life. This film portrays women supporting women, and the power of female friendship.

Most 1980s teen movies feature female characters who are insecure for any number of reasons – films such as Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club portray characters who are unsure of themselves and the world they are growing up in. While these films are realistic in their portrayals of the pain that comes with being a teenage girl, Fast Times at Ridgemont High gives us a character such as Linda, who exudes confidence in everything she does. She gives Stacy expert advice on how to give a blowjob, she lounges by the swimming pool and tells Stacy she and Doug always climax simultaneously, and she moves through the school hallways and her job at Perry’s Pizza as though she always knows what she is doing. When Damone does not show up to drive Stacy to the abortion clinic, Linda does not hesitate to call him out publicly, and humiliate him by telling the school he is – and has – a “little prick.”

Of course, Linda is a more complex character than simply being “confident.” She has a vulnerable side, which is evident at many points during the film. Stacy points out discrepancies between Linda’s claims about Doug – that he lasts 30-40 minutes in bed, rather than 20-30, as she previously said. After she tells Stacy that she and Doug always climax at the same time, she follows up with “I think…” And at the end of the movie, when Doug does not show up to her graduation, she is seen crying in the bathroom, reading an angry letter to Doug out loud. She confesses that she wrote two versions of the letter, one in which she calls Doug an “asshole.” Stacy assures Linda that the first version is more “mature” – Stacy knows that Linda only wants to portray herself as mature and self-assured, and she is there for her friend in her time of need, as Linda was for her. Just like everyone else, there are times when Linda is also unsure of herself – but she does not let that stop her from dancing elatedly at the prom, and going on to have a relationship with her abnormal psych professor in college, as the epilogue informs us.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High remains one of the most honest, smart, and funny teen comedies of the 1980s. The frank portrayal of female sexuality sets this film apart from many of the other “classics” of the teen movie genre. The film ends with Stacy deciding that she’d rather have romance than sex – she decides that anyone can have sex, but she wants to find someone she can connect with on every level. Linda of course has one final gem of wisdom to impart on Stacy: “You want romance? In Ridgemont? We can’t even get cable TV here, Stacy, and you want romance!”

If only we all had a Linda to guide us through our lives.

Angela Morrison is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto Cinema Studies program. She loves classical Hollywood, French cinema, John Waters, and feminist film theory. She hopes to one day be a Cinema Studies professor, one who will not teach movies made solely by boring straight white males. She writes about cinema on her blog Les Demoiselles du Cinema.

For the uninitiated, Rik Mayall is what happens when you take a classic English punk from the Sex Pistols era, and tool him up with the comic attitude of Bill Hicks and the comic style of Jim Carrey. Though part of a wave of “alternative comedy,” it was always Mayall who had the Hicksian snarl and the burning, Goatboy-style obsession with his own abjection. A major reason why Hicks found overnight comic stardom in the UK, after years struggling to gain acceptance in the USA, is because Rik Mayall had cultivated the British public’s taste for ferocious comedy anarchism. Mayall and Hicks are products of convergent evolution: unrelated creatures evolving resemblance from environmental similarities. Specifically: Rik Mayall and Bill Hicks were politely raised, intelligent, articulate, straight, white boys of above average height and looks, who spontaneously combusted into epic, punk rock guiltsplosions of belligerent basic decency and self-satirizing privilege, while feeling kinda bad that their raging libidos tempted them to objectify women. Add a feverish energy homaging his beloved Wile E. Coyote, that can only be compared to a punk Jim Carrey, and you’ve got the slapHicks, Rik Mayall. In 1991’s Drop Dead Fred, Mayall starred in a sharp deconstruction of the early-onset socialization of girls to reject their own anarchic impulses – one that films like Seth MacFarlane’s Ted have recycled into a far duller exploration of a man’s choice between his loudly celebrated childish impulses and his Mommy-lover-lady. In Drop Dead Fred the heroine’s own anarchic impulses, comic sense and anger at her mother have been more acceptably regendered as Mayall’s “Fred,” while she herself can be squeezed into an icon of servile ladylike behaviour.

Drop Dead Fred opens with Marsha Mason’s patriarchal mother reading a fairy-tale to the young Elizabeth, telling her that the princess received her happy ending “because she was a good little girl. If she had been naughty, the prince would have run away.” Young Elizabeth considers for a moment, then fires back “what a pile of shit,” healthily immune to social pressures to value herself by a man. Flash forward to adulthood, and Phoebe Cates’ Elizabeth has become pressured into the ideal Mommy-lover-lady of patriarchy, wearing demure floral gowns and fussing over her paternalist, condescending husband’s clothing and shaving. Gradually, we learn that Elizabeth’s mother had blamed her anarchic, destructive behavior in childhood for making her distant father run away, like the prince of the fairy tale who abandons naughty princesses. With her imaginary friend, Drop Dead Fred, being sealed away in a jack-in-the-box on the very day that her father departs, and with her father sharing Fred’s English accent in an otherwise American cast, the film wears its Daddy issues on its sleeve.

Drop Dead Fred is a Dream Father who is a radically present, anti-materialist, anti-provider, implying criticism of the traditional role of fathers, in the same way that the film challenges the traditional conditioning of girls to passive and submissive “goodness.” By standing up to Elizabeth’s mother in all the ways her own father fails to, Fred models self-assertion to her, rather than grooming her to self-sacrificing compliance. There is a deeper truth here: by setting high expectations of men and offering models of liberated behavior that can be imitated, a strong male role model can be a young girl’s best mental defense against patriarchal conditioning. In the absence of one, Elizabeth has created an imaginary friend who models her mental resistance, gendering her own inner anarchic impulses as male.

The adult Elizabeth must finally learn that the sealing away of Drop Dead Fred represented the sealing up of the part of herself that society had coded as masculine: namely, her assertiveness, her anti-conformity and her anarchic disdain for social norms. When her unfaithful husband boasts that he has Elizabeth under control, he feeds her green pills to kill her “imaginary friend” and force her back into tranquilized Mommy-lover-lady perfection, pills that represent rewarded conformity as much as the blue pills of The Matrix. While its patriarchal mother is a figure to be resisted, Drop Dead Fred also showcases positive female friendship and solidarity between Phoebe Cates’ Elizabeth and Carrie Fisher’s Janie. Janie unquestioningly accepts Elizabeth’s accounts of Fred and seeks to fight him on her behalf, curtly telling her older lover that this is “girl stuff.” Yes, apart from the imaginary Fred, all the men of this film are the stuffy, unimaginative equivalent to mainstream cinema’s Mommy-lover-ladies, while battling your anarchic imaginary friend is “girl stuff.” I would say that Drop Dead Fred is “Ted for girls” or “Fight Club for kids,” but it predates both.

Rarely has a showbiz marriage been more divinely inspired than Drop Dead Fred‘s between Elizabeth Livingston’s story of imaginary, anarchic male role models, and Rik Mayall’s self-deprecating punk. A man whose entire career was founded on savage interrogations of toxic masculinity, Mayall was offered a chance to reimagine himself through Elizabeth’s perspective, as a being whose natural anarchism was a liberating force for women. It is impossible to overemphasize how intensely Rik Mayall’s self-authored (or any male-authored) image of Rik Mayall lacked all sense that Mayall’s characters could be good for women. He blossoms visibly in Drop Dead Fred. Watch his interactions with the young Elizabeth. Yes, it’s manic Mayall, but see how wholly his energy is focussed on responding enthusiastically to whatever the little girl gives him? See how visibly thrilled and emboldened that little girl is by his attentive encouragement? See how Phoebe Cates reveals entirely unexpected comic talent as a mime, when wrestling an invisible Fred, and even the brilliantly brassy Carrie Fisher gives her wildest comic performance in a knock-down, drag-out imaginary fight with exactly the physical humor that women are routinely, subtly discouraged from? Rik Mayall was finally cast as a catalyst for female self-expression, so he catalyzed every actress in the film to gleeful unruliness.

Anarchy is a state of mind, not a material state, as many Marxists learn when attempting to enforce their materialist philosophies of antimaterialism (so much devastating humanitarian tragedy that could have been avoided if communist regimes carefully studied “Rik the accidentally authoritarian anarchist snot” from Mayall’s sitcom The Young Ones and cultivated a sense of thunderingly obvious irony). The point is not to sink a houseboat, but to value the adventure over the boat. Not to chop a little girl’s hair, but to teach her that it is irrelevant to her worth. Note also that, while playfully childish sexuality is part of his persona, Fred never sexualizes Phoebe Cates’ Elizabeth. Not ironically. Not jokingly-not-jokingly, to subtly put her in her place. He is her anarchist Dream Father, and he Dream Fathers her with wholehearted focus on her personhood and self-assertion. Rarely, if ever, has a larger-than-life comedian given a performance more generously dedicated to the actual purpose of his role. If you can see Rik freaking Mayall, decked out in hideous fashion and wildly clashing hair that is as classically punk as it is childish, earnestly mentoring a little girl in the joys of antimaterialist, anarcho-punk self-actualization without being moved, then surely you have a heart of stone. Far from selling out, Rik Mayall’s Hollywood family film was the most truly punk statement he ever made.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgh27gCgiQw”]

Drop Dead Fred finally justifies the endlessly abused loyalty of women like me to male comedians like Rik Mayall, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Monty Python, Trey Parker or the Farrelly Brothers. Like the character of Drop Dead Fred himself, each combines an off-putting, abrasive surface sexism with more profound lapses in empathy for female perspectives, but their comic purpose remains egalitarian mental liberation. As women, we are conditioned to express admiration for such men by rewarding them sexually, rather than by identifying, imitating and integrating the qualities we are actually drawn to. As little Elizabeth might say, what a pile of shit.

Brigit McCone loves her some comic anarchy. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and clicking this link

Tag: Phoebe Cates

‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’: The Confidence and Wisdom of Linda Barrett

‘Drop Dead Fred’ and the Gendering of Comic Anarchy