Of a Different Time

When it comes to raunchy teen comedies, few hold as high a place in the minds of audiences as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s one of those movies that’s oft referenced, with people talking about how good it is, how funny it is, how honest it is. They discuss the characters and the comedy and the music. It’s a film that, apparently, lives on despite, at this point, being over forty years old. Few films get to live on with that kind of legacy, but somehow Fast Times at Ridgemont High has managed to do it.

So now I’m going to ask a question that I think few people actually ask: why? Just why, exactly, does everyone talk about this film as if it’s one of the greatest comedies ever made. I will admit that I didn’t watch this film when I was younger (it’s a solid hard-R film, and I was too young to see it when it was in theaters or airing on cable). Watching it for this review is legitimately the first time I’ve ever sat down to watch the whole thing. Maybe because of that I don’t have the rose-tinted glasses others have for this film. I really felt like the film was kind of gross, a tad silly, and generally not that funny. I fail to see the appeal.

The film is a loose, year-in-the-life comedy focusing on various students at Ridgemont High. There’s the freshman student, Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a 15-year-old who works at the pizza joint at the mall. Stacy often hangs out with her slightly older best friend, Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates), and the two frequently talk about their sex lives. Stacy starts the film as a virgin, but over the course of the year she loses her virginity and then tries to find a number of guys that she can sleep with so she can learn to enjoy sex (all at the urging of her friend).

Along with Stacy we get a number of other characters, like her brother, Brad (Judge Reinhold), a senior who suddenly finds himself single and bouncing from one dead-end job to another. There’s Mark "Rat" Ratner (Brian Backer), a nerdy guy who works at the movie theater at the mall, and who also has the hots for Stacy. There’s Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), the student “fixer”, always running an angle including scalping tickets and running bets on games. And there’s the iconic character, Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn), a burnout surfer bro who just wants to coast through life. We see all of these characters bounce off of each other over the course of the year as high school slowly carries on.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High reminds me a lot of a few movies that came after, namely Empire Records and Dazed and Confused. Although this 1982 film stretches its story over the course of a year, instead of a day or two, it still has that same easy going, cruising style like those other films. Characters cycle in and out, plots meander, and things just slowly happen until, finally, we build to something of a conclusion once the year is over. There aren’t any easy answers, or complete storylines. We’re just here to experience life for these students over the course of one school year.

I get it. I understand how the film is structured and how it’s meant to work. I just don’t feel like it necessarily works as well as it could here. I think my big problem with the film is that it’s just a little too formless. We could easily break the film down into three arcs: Stacy and Mark, Brad and his job situation, and Spicoli trying to get through history class. While they all technically have beginnings, middles, and ends, none of them feel like really developed stories. You never get a vibe for why Stacy likes Mark, especially since we cut away from their dates so we can’t see them actually bond. We don’t really get to see Brad as a good employee, so his job hunt never feels like it lands. And in the case of Spicoli, well, he doesn’t actually exhibit any growth, so the emphasis put on him, over and over, feels wasted.

I wish the film could have focused better on one storyline to really carry the film. Much as I know he’s a fan favorite character, I would ditch Spicoli entirely and give his story time over to Stacy. She’s effectively the main character, the first person we’re introduced to and the only one to have real character growth over the course of the year. If we could spend more time with her, learning about her and then seeing her on her dates so we could see how she bonds with guys, that would let us feel a better connection to her story. Development for her would make the film’s main story (such as it is) work better.

Stacy goes through a lot. She starts off dating a 26-year-old (which, again, I feel like I have to question just why 1980s films really liked hooking up underaged girls with adult men) before pivoting to Mark, and then Mike, and then Mark again. In the process of this she has sex a few times, ends up pregnant, has to deal with an abortion and the aftermath, and then rebuilds herself. That’s a lot for any character, let alone a teenaged one. In this regard I can see why the film is considered to have artistic merit (putting the abortion in the film is culturally relevant, for sure), but at the same time I don’t feel like the film really get to the emotions for Stacy, or anything that happens to her, as well as it should.

I do think it’s interesting that our main character in a teen sex comedy is a girl. Women are generally just objects in these kinds of films, but Fast Times at Ridgemont High puts the two female characters front and center, which is respectable. Less respectable is the fact that both women, Stacy and Linda, are underage in the film (even if they were played by adults) and the film shows them naked more than once. That’s pretty gross, and should have been considered gross in 1982 when the film came out. Stacy tells an adult male she’s 19 to have sex with him, essentially goading him into committing a sex crime, and then the film ogles her as it happens. That was a bridge too far for me.

That happens very early in the film and I won’t deny that it threw me for the rest of the film. It was hard for me to find the film funny after that. There were some funny moments, a few times where I caught myself laughing, but overall I was mostly grossed out by the perspective of the film. If the characters had been high school seniors and of legal age I wouldn’t have minded as much, but because they’re so young it felt wrong the whole way through. I just couldn’t get into most of what the characters were up to (i.e., all the sex and sex talk) because of it.

Are the scenes depicted in the film realistic? At times, sure. Stacy trying to figure herself out is honest. Mark and Mike essentially falling for the same girl and dealing with the crumbling of their friendship feels real enough. Some of the stories and characters (Brad and Spicoli) don’t feel as honest or real but they’re clearly there as comic relief. Still, on the whole I can see a centerline through the movie that has some honesty to it. I can see, from a certain angle, while teens at least might have felt a connection to this movie. I get it.

But that just means that this is a film that resonates with a certain group, a certain generation. Coming to this film four decades after the fact does it no favors. I have to view it as an adult, seeing it with the eyes I have now, free of any kind of rose tinting. From that perspective it feels like a movie far too obsessed with ogling its young, female characters, all to get laughs and titillation. Maybe that worked for some back in the day, but it absolutely didn’t work for me now.