Kill Your Idols
Kill Your Idols
By Luke Goodsell
A look at Out of the Blue, a film haunted by the ghosts of teen cinema’s sad boys, bad girls, and the punk bands that could’ve saved them.
Out of the Blue plays Metrograph November 7-30
A whole lot of shit got blown up in teen movies at the turn of the ’80s. Liveried in blue jeans, biker jackets, and bad attitudes, a generation of baby-faced wastoids demolished schools, set fire to youth centers and occasionally detonated their parents—when they weren’t busy forming punk bands, getting high, or generally drifting into some illegal variant of teenage oblivion. Consider the evidence: Over the Edge (1979), Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979), Scum (1979), Times Square (1980), Christiane F. (1981), Deprisa, Deprisa (1981), and Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains (1982), to name just a few—a boomlet of anarchic teen cinema from a fleeting moment before the freaks ceded the genre to the geeks. (Keeping with the spirit of the times, some actual children’s movies—see 1981’s Time Bandits—cheerfully exploded mummy and daddy, too.)
It was, per Mary Woronov’s priceless line reading as Rock ’n’ Roll High School’s pinched martinet, “a shameless display of adolescent abandon.” Just as punk had taken the DNA of garage and the back-to-basics chords of early rock ’n’ roll, these films riffed on the juvenile delinquent cheapies of the postwar era, dawn-of-the-movie-teenager tales with titles like Bad Boy (1949), So Young, So Bad (1950), and Problem Girls (1953) about wayward youth gone wrong on society’s watch. Perhaps even more than their forebears, the films were sympathetic and often seditious, posing as cautionary tales but embracing their protagonists’ anarchic worldview. Few promised much in the way of a brighter tomorrow, yet even among this detention class of burnouts, none were as bleak, or as infused with pain, as Dennis Hopper’s fatalistic howl into the void, 1980’s Out of the Blue. And none of its kids burned quite as fiercely as the film’s pint-sized star, Linda Manz, who gives one of the great—perhaps the greatest—teen performances in all of cinema.
“Seeing Linda Manz in that movie as a teenager definitely helped me feel like, ‘Oh, I’m not that alone in this life,’” actor and erstwhile teen star Natasha Lyonne told Interview in 2013. When Manz faded into the black in August last year, aged just 58, the news went beyond some forgotten child star sparking a long-dormant movie memory; for every listless, maladjusted teenager who’d found and loved Out of the Blue on a beat-up VHS or bleary AVI rip, it was as though they’d lost a piece of their teenage selves. The timing of Manz’s passing was bittersweet, coinciding with the rollout for Out of the Blue’s 4K digital restoration—to which Lyonne, along with fellow Manz-head Chloë Sevigny, lent their celebrity imprimatur—a labour of love for producers Elizabeth Karr and John Alan Simon that bowed at Venice in 2019.
It was Simon who first rescued Out of the Blue from the distribution purgatory where it languished, unloved and unreleased in the U.S. before he secured the rights and took the film, and Hopper, out on the road in 1982. At a legendarily out-of-his-gourd appearance spruiking the movie at Rice University in Texas the following year, Hopper—whose diurnal intake around that time comprised of some 28 beers, half a gallon of rum, and three grams of coke—channelled his film’s explosive sentiment by performing a ‘Russian Suicide Chair’ stunt for assembled onlookers (including a 22-year-old Richard Linklater), crouching amid a ring of dynamite sticks rigged to go off. Correctly deployed, he’d be protected by the vacuum created by the blast; if not, well—it would be a punk gesture. (It’s on YouTube, and worth watching for Hopper’s post-stunt expression alone.)
The man was in a weird way, but he had a knack for being attuned to the whims of the zeitgeist. As a fledgling actor he’d shared the screen with his pal James Dean in Nicholas Ray’s teen movie big bang Rebel Without a Cause (1955); as a filmmaker he’d both jump-started New Hollywood with Easy Rider (1969) and foreseen its hubristic demise in The Last Movie (1971). He was nothing if not wired to the chaotic energy of the punk moment. “I don’t know much about the past, I’m not really interested in the future,” he said of Out of the Blue. “I like to make things about what I see.” What he saw was the nihilistic rage and burnout of the kids around him, a sensation he says was “written on the walls”—and one that must have been clearly legible to a filmmaker coming off a decade in which he’d been all but blacklisted from Hollywood. In 1979, hired to act in a Canadian tax shelter movie that variously went by CeBe and The Case of Cindy Barnes, Hopper was ‘promoted’ to director when the original footage (shot by the film’s ousted director and credited co-screenwriter Leonard Yakir) was deemed unusable and the project had stalled in disarray. He overhauled the script, which had originally been told via a court-appointed shrink (Raymond Burr, whose part was greatly reduced in Hopper’s version), transforming a movie-of-the-week about a troubled teen—a cautionary ’70s staple along the lines of Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975)—into a freewheeling psychodrama about nothing less than the generational apocalypse of the American family.
Re-centering the film on the perspective of its teenage character, Cindy “CeBe” Barnes, played by Manz, Hopper found an intuitive collaborator in his 18-year-old lead. Looking at images of the pair tooling around Cannes in 1980, where the film had played to raves, they seem less like on-screen father and daughter than kindred spirits, cut from the same faded denim. Manz, born to a Manhattan cleaning lady and raised tough on Second Avenue, was fresh off breakout roles as a diminutive greaser in Philip Kaufman’s nostalgic ’60s throwback The Wanderers (1979) and Terrence Malick’s ethereal masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978). “I met this guy named Ding-Dong,” goes one of her unforgettable, free-associative voice-overs in the latter. “He told me the whole Earth is going up in flames.” Contrary to his name, Ding-Dong was on to something.
With her knife-fight facial scars (Manz insists she ‘fell down’ a lot) and veneer of hostility, CeBe is a punk rock truant drifting through a desolate Pacific Northwest town, 15 but looking all of 11 in her embroidered ‘Elvis’ jacket, “Heartbreak Hotel” warbling on her portable cassette player as she mumbles barely coherent aphorisms, mostly to herself. Her idols have let her down: Elvis, Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, and especially her trucker dad, Don (Hopper), who’s finishing up a five-year manslaughter sentence for ploughing his 18-wheeler into a school bus full of kids (while drunk and fooling around with a pre-pubescent CeBe… and that’s just the movie’s opening minute). Still, CeBe worships him, keeping his image in a photo frame next to her bedroom shrine to Elvis Presley, the kind that—girded with a smattering of contemporary punk posters—gives the audience an instant lens on her interior world. Child services couldn’t imagine a more grim scenario. Dad’s an incarcerated fuck-up; heroin-addicted mom (Sharon Farrell) is dating a bearded, beta male who seems beamed in from some dreary indie-rock future; and leering, middle-aged predators (including a scary Don Gordon) brazenly hit on CeBe’s under-age girlfriends.
When she’s not giving junkyard eulogies for absent heroes, CeBe is holed up in dad’s abandoned big rig, amusing passing truckers with her gnomic radio banter, slogans delivered with a childlike mimesis of punk attitude: “Subvert normality,” “Kill all hippies,” “Disco sucks.” (“I never really knew who Sid Vicious was, or Johnny Rotten for that matter,” Manz, who loved disco and owned an autographed picture of Barry Manilow, told Hopper’s longtime buddy Satya De La Manitou in the 2016 doc Along for the Ride.) As quick to suck her thumb as she is to issue a well-placed “Motherfucker!”, she’s both ingénue and old soul, a Little Rascal crossed with the live-wire physicality of a young De Niro and the stiff-limbed, performative masculinity of every girl who thought she was James Dean for a day. (Manz, in fact, had based her performance largely on Dean’s in Rebel.) All the while, Neil Young’s ‘theme’ song, “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”—a Hopper touch—trails her like haunted fanfare from hell, beckoning her closer toward the movie’s climactic act of violence.
The dawn of the ’80s was something of a golden period for punk rock moppets yelping over adult noise, whether in music—where barely-tween singers like Chandra Oppenheim and Venus DeBaun spat chipmunk vocals over New Wave shapes—or on screen, where CeBe’s fellow tomboys and miscreants seemed to be everywhere. In Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, another piquant vision of annihilating boredom and parental neglect, Manz’s fellow New Yorker Matt Dillon, then a cherubic 14, feels like CeBe’s separated-at-birth twin—all shaggy hair, suburban malaise, and tough-guy strut. (The gender blurring is even more explicit between Dillon and another denim-clad deviant, Kristy McNichol in 1980’s Little Darlings; the John Travolta and Lily Tomlin of summer camp.) But none were closer in spirit to CeBe than Diane Lane’s insouciant punk rocker in Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, or Brooklyn brawler Robin Johnson, whose runaway urchin Nicky Marotta in Times Square—producer Robert Stigwood’s attempt to ride a New Wave Saturday Night Fever (1977)—teased out the queer energy of CeBe’s gender rebellion. (Nicky’s declaration, “Assholes, your time has come, ’cause I’m a time bomb and I’m gonna explode all over you,” might as well have been a line taken verbatim from Hopper’s script.) These performances all share a rawness and anger, punk attitude fueled by scattergun rage and frightened, childlike naiveté—a sense that everything is wrong with the world their parents made, and the only thing left to do is rebel.
Without the punker girl lifeline of the Stains or the Sleez Sisters, however, CeBe —whose one joyous escapade, not incidentally, involves drumming on stage with Canadian punk band The Pointed Sticks—is left to tumble toward Out of the Blue’s inevitable cataclysm, where the dreams and delusions of the ’60s will go down in flames, finally buried in a grisly cocktail of drink, drugs, and sexual abuse. In the film’s devastating denouement, a butched up CeBe, wearing dad’s Brando biker cosplay like some Tom of Finland twink, fends off her father’s horrific plan to quash her perceived queerness with the ultimate rejection of a parent—a scene that might be cathartic if it weren’t so deeply, depressingly sad. “Take a good look,” CeBe sneers, bringing a pair of scissors down on pops in the style popularized by Brussels’ original riot grrrl, Jeanne Dielman. If rebellion had seemed liberating a decade ago, now it was a matter of survival, of killing the idols that corrupt.
Hopper considered Out of the Blue a sequel of sorts to Easy Rider, and the 1980 film certainly offers a gruesome riposte to its predecessor’s ode to the open highway, drug experimentation, and communal lifestyles. As a teenager of the early ’50s, however, Hopper was no hippie: Easy Rider’s famously brutal climax foresaw the demise of the ’60s youthquake while Hollywood was still figuring out how to market it, and the filmmaker’s self-destructive tendencies surely found a like-minded worldview in punk—as Linklater noted, “He was punk before there was punk.” (For a consideration of Hopper’s film in the context of the punk movement, Nick Pinkerton’s Substack piece “Dead End America” is indispensable.) The ’60s were already dead by 1979; Out of the Blue merely flicked a cigarette butt onto the corpse and set it on fire.
Speaking of funeral pyres, Out of the Blue has come to seem like an elegy for the teenage cinema of its moment, itself about to crash and burn in the cold light of Reagan’s Morning in America. Outright anarchy was hardly de rigueur in the teen cinema that took hold of the culture in the ’80s, where pretty soon the films of John Hughes—gentler tales of good-looking angst that relegated punk to tastefully curated bedroom posters and soundtrack cuts—and their like would reign supreme, a template that more or less continues to hold true today. Manz, too, had all but vanished from acting by the mid ’80s, consigned to diminished bit parts and the eventual—if largely self-imposed—obscurity in which she’d live out her days, occasionally emerging for a tap-dancing, moonwalking cameo in Harmony Korine’s scuzzball fantasia Gummo (1997), or to bless the world with her clam bread recipe. (Party snaps of Manz and Dillon sharing cake at Brooke Shields’s 16th birthday have only acquired a more surreal air over time.)
Punchlines and fringe-dwellers on mainstream teen screens, punks and burnouts became the genre’s outliers: in films like Tim Hunter’s hesher dirge River’s Edge (1986), with a double-denimed Keanu Reeves doing a virtual CeBe tribute and Hopper himself as an impossibly more deranged adult figure; in the horndogs of the apocalypse who tore across the films of Gregg Araki; or in Matthew Bright’s exquisitely disreputable Freeway II: Confessions of a Trick Baby (1999), with Lyonne channelling Manz as a trash-talking juvie queen. (One might suggest there’s a hint of Manz to the shruggy, disaffected genius of Kristen Stewart, too, most obviously in her Joan Jett pantomime from 2010’s The Runaways.)
And of course, Out of the Blue’s theme song would resurface in the farewell note from that most famous of rock ’n’ roll suicides, Kurt Cobain—like CeBe, another Pacific Northwest kid of the late ’70s who elected to burn out rather than fade away. As Rebel’s planetarium lecturer prophesizes while a simulation sucks the assembled teenagers into a doomsday black hole, it’s all gonna “disappear into the blackness of space from which we came, destroyed as we began, in a burst of gas and fire.”
