"I'm sorry about your son - sorry he was on drugs!" --
Walking home from work, fall day, Cheap Trick's "Surrender" came on my ipod, out of the blue, whisked me back to New Grenada, 1979...OVER THE EDGE, my favorite. In my real 1979 I was 12, going to Knapp Elementary in Lansdale, PA, I'd walk home from school through the park and play out this whole movie in my head I'd written, called "Let's Blow Up the School!" All I needed was a camera. It never got made, or did it? Blowing up the school is not a new idea, and nowadays it gets muddied in terrorism and Columbine elements, so it's no longer permissible to even blow up the school in one's mind! Or cinema. There's very few films that have ever acted on this basic childhood fantasy, one is ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (see: Columbine Queen: PJ Soles) and the other is the awesome OVER THE EDGE.
None of us knew about the film when it was made. It was quietly snuffed out for being too cool, finding its audience years later as a cult classic. I stumbled on it accidentally, via a 'TBS' afternoon screening one day - I checked my Leonard Maltin - ***1/2? Sort of stunned that Lenny could get a review of an edgy film like this so right, I ran to tape it but only got the last 70 minutes, which I then proceeded to watch nonstop (on a tape right after RIVER'S EDGE, directed by the guy who wrote OVER!) while slamming my dad's bourbon and pretending to look for a job in the early 90s.
The change couldn't have been more drastic: In 1979 we were running loose all over the neighborhood, playing sprawling week-long all-night games of kick the can, making out in closets, starting fires, smoking, drinking stolen bottles, lusting after our denim jacketed babysitters. I went to school with kids like those in OVER THE EDGE; they were like one or two grades ahead of me, in Middle School when I was cresting the wave of Elementary. I knew the Farrah feathery style of the girls' hair; I knew the long haired blonde boys, the badasses in denim jean jackets and bandanas; the teachers with shawls and sexy hair who had us sit in circles and rap about issues. In EDGE we see it all: cigarette smoking privileges (in Middle School!) being revoked as a reprisal against school vandalism, Claude taking speed to help him with a test, but realizing as he's presented with a slide of Bosch it was acid he took, and we in the audience being trusted to know the difference and get the humor rather than just be shocked and appalled; Vincent Spano with his air rifle and pre-emptive beatings; Matt Dillon with his real pistol and smirk, all free from the urge to bow to parental rule-making hysteria; the thrill of breaking and entering, police harassment, rec centers, sex, rock, Cheap Trick. The big rock band at my school was KISS, but whatever, this is how it all... ends.
The parents in this film never bother to think about whether or not the 'trouble' some of these kids are in has any basis in fact, or what defines 'trouble' -- they're still getting over the fear of being 'in trouble' themselves. "I don't have to tell you how deep... in trouble... some of these children are," Jerry says at the parent's meeting, as if lecturing a bunch of kids caught shoplifting. My point is, the only way your children can become criminals is if you have make stuff they like to do illegal. It never occurs to the parents that the laws could be wrong, not the kids.
Look at that dad above, with his horrific white checkered suit and gaudy white leather interior Cadillac. This is a man who has chosen to conform to some 'image' of a successful man in the USA vs. being 'human' and going for comfort over conformism (he could get sheepskin seat covers!) and tribal accessories, the kind of things associated with potheads, but which should really be associated with 'awake' peoples, bro. Can you tell I hate white leather interior? That car makes me carsick just to look at it. Point is: the Dad ain't awake. And if a cop calls him regarding Carl it taps into a nest of his own unresolved father discipline issues and it's all going to get ugly because the man is repressed, you dig?
Any kid who's ever been hassled by petty cops like Doberman (above) know the deal. He considers you dangerously strung out on 'narcotics' if he catches you with a sliver of hash. He chases you on a high speed pursuit if you throw a narc-rat-fink kid into the pond ("a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"). Though I think laws are good overall when you insist on making benevolent drugs like marijuana illegal, refusing even to allow it to dying cancer patients, or just pull otherwise nice kids into the station whenever you feel like it, on suspicion, ratting them out to their parents every five minutes, you asked for it. As we become adults we just roll with these sorts of idiocies, understanding the hopelessly entangled process by which genuine democracy lurches blindly forward and backward and never in any one consistent direction. Kids got the power to maybe effect change. Maybe this time. Maybe!! Come on... for a brief second even we old-timers can feel the giddy thrill of being young and alive to the danger of a first-time for everything kind of world.
These kids may be fucked up and angry but they're mainly bored, and who wouldn't be? They aren't archetype cliches cobbled together for an after school lesson about drug abuse, vandalism, guns, and curfew-breaking. They're real. Stuck in the isolated hypocrisy of New Grenada, trapped by the world, by parents and cops and teachers all of whom push and prod in directions handed down from memos and teacher-parent conferences, none of it at all relevant to the matter at hand, these kids are awake in a town that's asleep, and the best the town can do is make waking up illegal.
This is my generation up there and the film represents the dawn of the crackdown on our freedom to live in the moment and create our own tribes, or own interlocking separate society. We had a freedom kids today with their 'play-dates' and nannies can't even imagine. If we ruined it for you, we are sorry... But they started it. Or at any rate, Vincent Spano did, shooting out a cop car windshield with his air rifle then racing away on his bike to Cheap Trick's "Hello There" and on to Doberman's routine harassment of Carl (Michael Kramer) and Richie (Matt Dillon); the attempts to close the rec center leading to a near-riot; the waste-case poetic soul of the film, Claude (Tom Fergus) busted by Doberman after the kid who sold him the hash rats him out, the reprisal against the rat, Doberman's killing Richie, the final cathartic explosions, it all has a Greek tragic inevitability.
Throughout the film's loyalty is unquestionably with these kids, for whom every day is a challenge and a bore, hanging out in a half-completed townhouse, a sad emblematic space of the American dream --especially today; waving around stolen guns; treating their own safety with the disregard they feel it deserves, in a town where there's nothing to do, no legal outlet for their accumulated energy and drive. It's like if Cary Grant and his crew of aviators in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS lost their postal contract, and were suddenly just a bunch of dudes in a bar in South America, nowhere to put all their nervous energy and death defying fearlessness. The group needs a cause, a Camelot, a band, a mail contract, a bowling alley, something to hold onto and belong in that's bigger than family but smaller than country. It doesn't matter if they're kids, they're still people, and they can fuck you up if you don't respect them. When they're ready to rock, you better get them to an instrument quick, or else expect storms.
It's important to note that OVER THE EDGE changes the usual math of the parent-kid divide by siding itself with the kids... all the way, and allowing us to exult in the little moments of true rebellion, even if they are ultimately pointless: Richie standing on the hood of Doberman's car as he tries to haul off Claude on bogus search and seizure; the retribution against the Leif-y narc; the kids locking the parents in the PTA meeting, etc. --it's all cathartic as hell, but then as the cars in the parking lot erupt in flames and the kids rage Lord of the Flies-like we start to become afraid of ourselves for the primal inner wild child joy of seeing the school--the kid equivalent of a soul-deadening prison-- destroyed. We fantasize about blowing up the school, but when we actually blow it up, we see the ugly core that drives that fantasy. We devolve along the Hawksian axis all the way out of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and find ourselves in MONKEY BUSINESS, with the drugged Cary Grant as the painted savage preparing to roast his rival. By then it's too late to save the baby in the boiling bathwater, the wild chaos of death and anarchy tails childhood idealism like a dogged detective and the reactionary rabble roll over everything like a tide, shedding the old skin of the country as they come ripping through the amber waves like a sloppy zipper.
The reactionary rabble, ah yes, they are on the move even now, as the juggernaut of parental outrage has slowly been gaining steam as it roars forward into the new world of cyber-bullying, teen online suicides, and the right to be gay even if your township's awash in red state Christian condemnation. We all knew the catch-22 as kids in the earlier eras-- in order to convince your parents you were really depressed and needed to see a shrink you had to commit suicide. Only then--maybe--a shrink. Similarly coming home traumatized from bullying was just 'adjustment' and learning to stick up for oneself. Now--only now--after this string of suicides--are parents admitting maybe there might be a problem with the way inter-child harassment---extortion (for lunch money), assault, sexual harassment, stalking--is tolerated.
Like the exploding police cars at the end of EDGE, it's too much too late. By the time the rabble are done smashing stuff, and the crazed parents erecting new 'freedom-enhancing' laws, it won't even matter. The repressed will be off to erupt in a new dimension, a new location, and the laws will just hang there along the coast like waiting empty straitjackets for the next wave of kids, who shouldn't have to wear them --they didn't do nothing, but you'll make these kids put them on anyway won't you, mom? Just in case. And so good for their posture! Thus are victimless crimes like possession of marijuana and possession of a knife treated as harshly, even more harshly, than crimes like breaking and entering, vandalism, or assault, all confirming what their kids suspected: adults don't have a clue and their whole idea of what constitutes a law -- legal vs. illegal drug or prescription vs. over the counter, or anything else-- is patently absurd, nonsensical. Laws are society's delayed reaction to your grandparent's mistakes and parental anxieties take root and form the vine prison that keeps you from being you, man.
A smart parent or cop understands the social order exists in two simultaneous dimensions- the top 'normal' and the fantasmatic underbelly, conscious and unconscious-- and drug laws may serve the purpose of allowing kids a way to rebel and bond through the risk of smoking pot and drinking underage, rather than having to resort to something truly dangerous in order to rebel. If a child never learns to break unjust rules his or her growth as a free-thinking individual is stunted. He or she can become, in the words of Varla in FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL, "a real-safety first Clyde," and when he shows up in movies that aim to be the equivalent of EDGE, he's played by Michael Cera or Jesse Eisenberg, and directed by Cameron Crowe.
This is not to say OVER THE EDGE necessarily condones these kids' rebellious actions, it's just to say they don't condemn them either --instead they make an effort to understand them. The parent's tendency to 'combat' the issue with escalated police presence and curfew mirrors our often clumsy military intervention in other nations, indicating as always that the parent's in their castrated social slavery don't respect the genuine freedom that comes with a strong, unified peer group. The dad would cower when a cop told them he was in trouble; dad would cry and beg and be chastened, so if his son dares sneer instead and dares fight back and refuse to recognize the cop's authority, it implies the kid is free/brave and the father is a cringing, castrated Cameron Crowe coward.
When a peer group is captured correctly on film, as in Howard Hawks, or Richard Linklater, you get a feeling of the power and joy of belonging, a power and joy most adults hiding behind the evening paper at home have no recollection of. They condemn it in their children as dangerous, but without that kind of peer group power there wouldn't be a civil rights movement, a free India or America, or women voters, or even the current Wall Street occupation. And I can't help but wonder if EDGE wasn't shelved just for that reason -- because of the terror producers must have felt when seeing a movie where the kids were genuinely dangerous, instead of just screwing in cars and kidnapping the school mascot and being 'edgy' in that edgeless rote misogynist PORKY'S way.
An aspiring filmmaker friend the other day told me he was blowing through twenty grand he'd raised for his debut film and getting nowhere: the actors weren't following his directions, the cameraman was eating up the budget on extraneous lights, etc. Ethan and I said loosen up, rehearse and improvise with your actors, shoot on the sly, get rid of the DP, film it yourself with a cheap HD camcorder; focus on the idea of film as joint creative process rather than getting hung up on his mental image of what it should be. Otherwise you'll stall and fret until you're broke and have nothing to show for the money. I've seen this happen a few times when kids I know have tried to make a 'real' film, and in the process spent a huge amount of money on insurance, crew and equipment, for very little actual result, when they could have just shot it all off the cuff, for no money, and had at least something. They don't want to start at the start, on the card table in the basement with a super 8 film cutter and a microphone. Film teachers discourage no budget basement filmmaking for obvious reasons --they have to mystify the process to make themselves relevant. Similarly, whole towns, like New Grenada, can stagnate and die when they try and force the natural development of a town to occur only 'above' board, and neglect the repressed undertow -- Jerry the main adult bad guy is not too far from the corrupt mayor in JAWS, and the kids then would be the sharks, and they'd be fine with that.
I mention the previous anecdote as indicative of why the parents in OVER THE EDGE lost their kids in the process of trying to realize their vision. In AA there's a saying "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." The ultimate factor that destroys New Grenada is the refusal of the parents to admit that the base of their pyramid will probably not widen, and that their kids aren't going to just stop growing just because the town isn't. Nowadays kids don't blow up their schools and the result is micro-managing parents breathing down their necks. Today's kids are fighting back, finally. It's Wall Street they're going after now... where the money from Middle America flows and drops like a giant Coinstar. I watch these protesters on the news and for the first time in awhile I have hope. One day, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun, but first, I guess, the darkness... like homework, must be endured. Give the darkness to Claude, let him smoke it! Matt Dillon, go on and create modern indie junkie comovage cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford. Motorcycle Boy yet may he Live! Never before has a bus ride to juvenile hall seemed like such a triumph, a march into Valhalla, on the rays of a beautiful sun, one day, when the world is much righter.
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