❉ An appreciation of Nicolas Cage’s totally tubular first lead role, by Graham Williamson.
“Nicolas Cage’s screen adolescence in the 1980s rarely intersected with that decade’s famous teen films. Valley Girl is, therefore, our only chance to see how Cage would have fared as a teen pin-up.”
“My god, what a hunk! Check out those pecs!”
Readers, which ’80s star do you think inspires that comment? Rob Lowe, perhaps, or Tom Cruise? Try Nicolas Cage, whose first appearance in Martha Coolidge’s 1983 film Valley Girl is overlaid with admiring comments from his female co-stars.
Cage’s screen adolescence in the 1980s rarely intersected with that decade’s famous teen films. He’s in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but only for about three seconds, and his romantic lead in his uncle Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married is weird enough to have taken him off John Hughes’s wishlist. Valley Girl is, therefore, our only chance to see how Cage would have fared as a teen pin-up. It gets more fascinating the more Cage’s legend grows, and so Eureka reissued it last year as a lavish fortieth-anniversary limited edition Blu-Ray.
As Cage became more famous, his films would structure themselves around the intense, grandiose performances he likes to give. Valley Girl‘s Randy is one of his more down-to-earth turns, but he’s still clearly the most magnetic thing in the picture. The titular San Fernando resident, Julie, is played by Deborah Foreman in a sadly less indelible turn. The most memorable players in the supporting cast are Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest as Julie’s laid-back parents, both of whom are clearly glad to be on a less stressful set than their last on-screen match-up: Apocalypse Now. Everything in Hollywood goes back to the Coppolas.
The social and sexual politics of 1980s teen movies has been picked over endlessly, from Revenge of the Nerds‘ dubious attitude towards consent to the vexed question of who Andie should have ended up with at the end of Pretty in Pink. Films like The Breakfast Club present teenage hierarchies as being only slightly less strict than an absolute monarchy, which can make for strange viewing in an age when being the class nerd is no longer a social death sentence.
On one level, Valley Girl is no different. The plot sees materialistic rich girl Julie having to choose between her social status and her love of the punk Randy. (Like all early ’80s Hollywood films that aren’t Repo Man, this film’s definition of punk is completely unrecognisable) In all of cinema’s variations on Romeo and Juliet, there can scarcely have been a more low-stakes dilemma than this. It only carries weight if you can buy into the film’s – and the era’s – viewpoint that different social cliques are something akin to different species.
There is, however, something in Coolidge’s directorial style which makes this easier to swallow. The best teen films take this mania for categorising social types and elevate it to the level of anthropology; there’s a reason why the aforementioned Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Mean Girls both have non-fiction source material. Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane’s script doesn’t have a similar depth, but there’s something intriguing about how Coolidge’s camera hangs back, refusing the lure of then-new quick editing in favour of a more observational quality. Valley Girl‘s vision of upper-crust LA isn’t the haunting, hallucinatory world of a Sofia Coppola (that family again!) film. It’s more like a wildlife documentary.
This is a necessary distancing effect. Teen movies often traffic in superficial, consumerist pleasures, but Valley Girl can’t let its audience fall in love with its heroine’s lifestyle. If they do, they’ll stop rooting for her to get together with Randy. The film’s relationship with satire is a complex thing – not just tonally, or narratively, but legally.
The now-familiar descriptor “valley girl” was coined by Frank Zappa for a song he performed with his then-fourteen-year-old daughter Moon Unit; it unexpectedly became the veteran experimentalist’s biggest hit. The rock star had explored the possibility of making a film based on the song’s central character, and when Coolidge’s film went into production he tried to halt production with a lawsuit.
The song Valley Girl is as scathing as you’d expect from Zappa père, with lines like “I, like, love going into, like, clothing stores and stuff”. The film is more redemptive, always focused on the chance of Julie escaping her shallow life. The difference between Zappa’s Valley Girl and Coolidge’s can be read as an example of how the 1980s wrestled with the legacy of the 1960s, venerating its fashions and innovations – not least the ascent of the teenager as a taste-making group – while being uncomfortable with the anti-conformist, counter-cultural ideas underpinning these cultural leaps. In this regard, the final scene of Valley Girl is a statement of intent, visually recalling the ending of The Graduate while completely altering the pessimism and uncertainty Mike Nichols’ film left the audience with. The scene is set at night, but make no mistake, it’s morning in America.
Any discussion of Valley Girl‘s relationship to wider culture has to take into account its legendary soundtrack. It’s hardly unusual for the soundtrack to a 1980s teen flick to be cooler than the film itself, with Echo and the Bunnymen and The Psychedelic Furs popping up in mainstream films. Even so, there is something quite jaw-dropping about seeing a party of clean-cut LA teenagers dancing to Angst in My Pants by Sparks. Elsewhere, Josie Cotton gets to perform her eyebrow-raising Johnny, Are You Queer?, and there are two separate uses of Modern English’s I Melt With You. A late inclusion, Coolidge heard it on the radio by chance and rang up to find out what it was so she could include it in her film.
That anecdote, and many, many others, turns up in the voluminous extras. Coolidge, Cage and Foreman are all interviewed, with the former providing one of the set’s two commentaries. The other is provided by feminist film scholars Maya Montañez Smukler and Maria San Filippo, while there’s also a featurette from the film’s twentieth anniversary (now, itself, twenty years old!), music videos, a soundtrack documentary, storyboards, three whole hours of additional interviews and a gorgeous, pastel-pink new sleeve by Sam Gilbey.
❉ ‘Valley Girl’ (1983) Eureka Classics Blu-ray is available now from the Eureka Store: https://bit.ly/3JdtAhT
❉ Graham Williamson (he/him) is a writer and film-maker from Middlesbrough who runs the Pop Screen podcast for movies either starring or about pop stars. His writing has appeared in The Geek Show, Horrified and Byline Times. Follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd for Bowie hot takes.
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