Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A Kid’s-Eye View

Nevertheless, Fast Times—with its R rating, mostly for female nudity and mildly raunchy humor—was wrongly typed as a teen exploitation film by most mainstream critics of its time. That included Roger Ebert, one of my earliest critical lodestars thanks to his visible perch on syndicated TV in the eighties. Ebert gave the movie a single star, leading off his review with a lament about the film’s unromantic deflowering of its heroine: “How could they do this to Jennifer Jason Leigh? How could they put such a fresh and cheerful person into such a scuz-pit of a movie? Don’t they know they have a star on their hands?” As a budding movie snob even at that age—if one still too unformed to understand why I responded to the films I did—I remember harboring a faint sense of shame about my fondness for this curiously irresistible “scuz-pit” of a movie, which I watched over and over that summer, and for years to follow.

The criticism that Fast Times was degrading or demeaning to its female characters—or indeed to any of its characters, including some who do debatably scuzzy things—would never have occurred to me had Ebert’s pan not implanted that idea in my brain. Almost four decades later, as a working critic myself, the reason why that is so seems crystal clear: in its focus on the inexperienced but sexually curious Stacy, Fast Times is the polar opposite of exploitation. Deep in its horny heart, this is the story of one fifteen-year-old girl’s clumsy and sometimes painful introduction to the world of sex, related without judgment or preconception or the least hint of sentimentalization. Heckerling’s film is a raunchy crowd-pleaser replete with stoner humor, a masturbation gag, and a blow-job tutorial that makes use of school-cafeteria carrots. But it is also attuned to the emotional lives of teenagers—girls and boys—in ways that place it far ahead of its time. In the pivotal pool-house sex scene between Stacy and Robert Romanus’s Damone, Heckerling at first included frontal nude shots of both—nothing too revealing, just glimpses of her breasts and, for the briefest of seconds, his private parts. But the studio objected to the male nudity, fearing that it might earn the film an audience-limiting X rating, so the shot was reframed to show Romanus from only the waist up. For this release, Heckerling has chosen to restore the original framing, allowing both characters to share in this moment of vulnerability.

As the eighties wore on, Fast Times would become a heavy-rotation staple on cable, a movie my siblings and I and all of our friends could and did quote liberally from memory. Now, with a few decades of distance, it seems obvious that Fast Times is one of the most distinctive directorial debuts of its era, and one of the most influential high-school movies ever made. Like the impressionable, eager-to-please Stacy, who careens from one confusing sexual encounter to the next in a quest to become what she sees as a sophisticated adult, I was probably too young to understand at the time just why it was that this film felt different from most movies then being made about people my age, and I couldn’t have known how hard it would be to find other movies like this one over the years to come.

Fast Times’ kid’s-eye view of high school was something new, after a decade’s worth of movies and TV shows like American Graffiti, Grease, and Happy Days that had popularized a nostalgic gaze on an earlier generation’s teenagehood. Heckerling has talked about using oversize props—tall-backed chairs, giant menus—to emphasize the childlike smallness of Stacy and her nebbishy suitor Mark “Rat” Ratner (Brian Backer) in the scene at a German restaurant in which they clumsily enact their idea of what a first date between sophisticated adults might be like. The nineteen-year-old Leigh was cast in part because of how young she looked; when Stacy assures a flirtatious older customer at the pizza shop where she works that she’s nineteen, our gut sense is that he knows she’s lying. Even when, in the more typical casting style of the time, the actors look older than the age they’re playing—Reinhold was twenty-four and Romanus twenty-five—they use that physical difference to their advantage. Brad, with his sweet vintage car and distinguished fast-food résumé, and Damone, with his suave seduction tips and sideline in ticket scalping, clearly see themselves as the school’s advice-dispensing grown-ups. But they both still speak the language of cocky-but-insecure boys, in a particular eighties SoCal dialect that Crowe had picked up with unerring exactitude during that incognito year.

Valley-speak became a part of the teen lingua franca for the rest of that decade and has persisted, in ever-mutating forms, into our own time. Would we have Bill and Ted, The Big Lebowski’s Dude, or Brad Pitt’s True Romance couch potato without Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli? This instantly immortal character, a carefree surfer with a bottomless stash of tasty lingo, is a minor figure in the Ridgemont High landscape, more an observer than a participant in the passing scene. As Heckerling envisioned it, Spicoli is the movie’s “spice,” descending from his bong-smoke-filled VW van only occasionally to dispense nuggets of zonked-out Buddhist wisdom, never overstaying his welcome.

Though he had been noticed by critics the year before in Taps, this was Penn’s breakthrough performance, the one that immediately launched him to A-list Hollywood stardom. Nearly forty years later, it’s still easy to see why; his every line reading is a comic revelation, especially when he’s in the sublimely cranky company of Mr. Hand (Ray Walston). Walston, a veteran of classic Hollywood who had worked with Billy Wilder, was bemused and sometimes put off by Penn’s Method intensity—the twenty-one-year-old actor remained in character throughout the shoot, and sometimes improvised fresh insults to catch Walston off guard. But their contrasting styles are what make their exchanges crackle. The late scene where Mr. Hand visits Spicoli in his centerfold-plastered bedroom for an impromptu tutorial on American history contains dialogue that will still make me laugh as I’m drawing my last breath. But the major Hollywood careers launched by this movie are hardly limited to Penn’s. Within a few years of its release, half a dozen of its cast members were bankable stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and Nicolas Cage—who, at seventeen years old and billed as Nicolas Coppola, appears in a small, nonspeaking role as “Brad’s bud”—in addition to Penn.

“Each new viewing makes you notice a different well-thought-through detail.”

Prior to the runaway success of Fast Times, Heckerling had already caught the eye of Universal Pictures executives with her AFI thesis film, Getting It Over With, a twenty-eight-minute short about a college girl losing her virginity—the kind of story Heckerling would later express annoyance at being unable to dissociate herself from. Eager to try her hand at something different, she followed Fast Times with Johnny Dangerously (1984), a Mel Brooks–style spoof of the gangster movies she had loved since childhood; it underwhelmed commercially, though it has since attracted a devoted cult following. But the next year, she scored another big hit, with National Lampoon’s European Vacation; soon after that, she spun a running parental joke between her and her then husband into the wildly successful comedies Look Who’s Talking (1989) and Look Who’s Talking Too (1990). In 1995 came Clueless, Heckerling’s second seminal high-school comedy. This time, she was working with a bigger budget and from her own script, a Clinton-era update of Jane Austen’s Emma. Clueless was a huge sleeper hit, coming in second at the box office its opening weekend, and it almost immediately
became a cultural touchstone that captured millennial kids’ imaginations the way Fast Times had 
captured Gen Xers’. Alicia Silverstone’s Cher Horowitz, whose unshakably optimistic temperament and airheaded wisdom made her the heir apparent to Jeff Spicoli, joined him in the pantheon of cinema’s most-quoted SoCal teens.

In the years since Clueless, Heckerling has found plenty of work in television, but her feature films have been fewer and farther between. Some projects have been complicated by financing and distribution woes: her semiautobiographical romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman languished on a shelf for nearly two years before its release in 2007, perhaps because Heckerling had the audacity to cast the forty-seven-year-old, and heart-stoppingly gorgeous, Michelle Pfeiffer as a woman in love with a younger man (played by the director’s Clueless discovery Paul Rudd). As Heckerling put it in one interview, “If they didn’t have the results that they wanted, that wasn’t like, ‘We didn’t develop that movie right’ or ‘That wasn’t the right person to be in it,’ or any of that. It was always ‘Well, it was women.’”

Heckerling has always had many more tools in her toolbox than her understanding of the female experience—every one of her films also features complex, sympathetic male characters, and many center around them. But in retrospect, Fast Times’ most radical contribution to the teen-movie genre may be its matter-of-fact treatment of abortion. When Stacy gets pregnant after her pleasureless encounter with Damone in the pool house, she does no hand-wringing about how to move forward; we don’t even get a scene in which she learns of her condition (the now requisite peeing-on-stick montage) or see her break the news to her best friend, Linda (Phoebe Cates). When she asks Damone to split the cost of the procedure, she is a little shy, but straightforward; later, when she comes out of the clinic and finds her brother waiting to drive her home, there’s a moment of mutual sibling awkwardness but not a hint of shame. And I’ve always loved the detail that, as Damone sits on his bed calling his debtors to raise money for the procedure, one of the expenses scribbled in his notebook (right above the David Bowie tickets) is “abortion”—a word that a quarter century later, as Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up demonstrates, had become unspeakable in a mainstream comedy except in code. Another thing I couldn’t have known watching Fast Times in 1982, at the start of the Reagan administration, was that terminating a pregnancy was as unstigmatized in that movie as it would be on-screen for the next forty years and counting.