1/3rd life crisis

Strangers wondering about that guy on the fifteenth floor dancing around his living room idiotically with his dog in his arms ought to know that academics, apparently, hit mid-life crisis a decade earlier than most folks. The pressure to stay hip, and the fleeting ability to pass as one of your students, combine to turn many a junior faculty on to such adolescence-prolonging projects like my current one: (punk) rock in the 1970s and early 1980s, which has led me, via the able curating of Anthony Mark-Happel, to spend the last week or so re-viewing the ouvre of Allan Moyle, or at least that portion of his ouvre available via Netflix.

I watched a lot of these movies back when I could care less about directors, and promptly forgot them, so it was a real blast from the past to realize I had actually seen Empire Records (1995) and Pump up the Volume (1990). Via Mark-Happel's able film archive column in Impose magazine, I was also able to connect with an earlier film, Times Square (1980) that was before my time. Man is this a film, and not just for the fact that it has not one but two female lead characters, neither of whom has 10 things she hates about a boy or is writing a Princess diary about some hunk or any of the other idiotic roles teen queens are reduced to these days.

Moyle may not be a particularily great director (with the possible exception of Times Square, if only for the scene in which the two girls break into a radio studio and force the DJ to broadcast them live singing a fuck-you to one of the girl's father). But they are so different, and possibly better, than the John Hughes films that so dominate contemporary nostalgia for the 1980s teen flick. I mean, those films are important too, but I have to admit that I always found the teen characters in those films to be inexplicable and slightly embarassing, and their rebellion maddeningly inarticulate. I always ended up identifying with the adults in these films who had to put up with such twerps.

Maybe the tables are turned now, but I think Moyle's films are a bit different, in particular, in their more authentic connection to music and better understanding of what music actually means when you are an adolescent. That at least is the best explanation for why I have been listening to Kirstie MacColl on non-stop rotation today, and my puppy is getting a bit scared of my erratic behavior.