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Pump Up the Volume (1990)

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Strange Pleasures is a regular Metrograph column in which writer Beatrice Loayza shares unconventional desires found across underground and mainstream cinema alike.

Christian Slater: Outsider opens at 7 Ludlow Friday, August 18.

Halfway through True Romance (1993), Tony Scott’s uproarious, shitshow of a take on the lovers-on-the-lam crime flick, Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley works out a drug deal aboard Viper-a looping, emergency-red roller coaster located in California’s famed Magic Mountain theme park. Eliot (Bronson Pinchot), the middleman for Clarence’s potential buyer, is wrecked by the steel coaster, whose twists and convulsions hit like snaps of a whip against the open sky thanks to Scott’s shotgun editing patterns. 

Roller coaster manufacturers had been cranking out thrill rides on increasingly spectacular scales since the ’70s, but by the ’90s, the so-called steel coaster wars had taken hold-when Viper opened in 1990, for instance, it was the tallest and fastest looping coaster in the world, a title usurped the following year. I’m going on about roller coasters and their obscene proliferation throughout the decade because they seem to me to be reflections of the zeitgeist: pure hedonism, a desperate craving to feel something big and wild, and a fuck-it disregard for the rules of self-preservation. The feeling is also quintessential Christian Slater-or to be more precise, young Slater in his first act as America’s favorite bad boy, both onscreen and off. While Eliot struggles not to gag, Slater’s Clarence is all impish delight, cool in his crimson Hawaiian shirt opposite his sweaterdouche seat-companion.

Clarence was one of the first aloha toughs conceived by Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the script (in case that wasn’t immediately obvious from the film’s onslaught of kung-fu and old Hollywood references). True Romance takes the dynamic of Gun Crazy (1950) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967)-two sexy young’uns, emboldened by their hots for one another, go out and do crimes-and makes it newer, weirder, bloodier. Clarence is a veritable nobody, a comic-book store geek who transforms into a smart-aleck lunatic after experiencing some good lovin’ from Patricia Arquette’s Alabama. Where Warren Beatty’s Clyde, a countercultural Robin Hood, rebels because of his sexual and social impotence, Clarence finds love and realizes, “Why the hell not?” He can be like Sonny Chiba, Travis Bickle, or Elvis-the latter of whom appears as a projection of Clarence’s subconscious (Val Kilmer in a metallic blazer, no less!). If the scoundrels who inspired Clarence (and Tarantino and Scott) believed in only “livin’ fast, dyin’ young, and leavin’ a good-lookin’ corpse,” they weren’t necessarily conscious of their approach to existence, they just were.

True Romance (1993)

That’s certainly not the case with Clarence-nor Slater, who explicitly modeled his early performances after the sardonic sadism of his hero Jack Nicholson. True Romance, Slater’s first leading man part in a big-budget blockbuster, came at the crest of his popularity, and the freewheeling role was expressly in conversation with the persona Slater had carved out for himself with his previous features, namely Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1989) and Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume (1990).

Both films are dark subversions of the stereotypical ’80s high-school movie à la John Hughes. They deal with teen suicide, and dig into the knottiness of young love and ennui with far more care and complexity than the usual jocks vs. outcasts vs. mean girls fare. And in both films, Slater plays a kind of Gen-X messiah preaching the gospel of catharsis-quite literally in Pump Up the Volume, in which he’s a loner who secretly moonlights as a raunchy pirate radio host. 

The Winona Ryder classic Heathers, however, was Slater’s true breakout; his character, J.D., the blueprint for his reckless persona. Early on, he’s confronted by two meatheads in the school cafeteria, pulls out a gun, and fires. It’s like a dream sequence, enacting what the average high schooler would love to do to their bullies, but J.D. is no fake. The moment really happens, though this first attack is equivalent to a predator playing with its food. There are blanks in the gun; later, it’ll be loaded with the real thing. Naturally, Ryder’s Veronica Sawyer falls for J.D.’s James-Dean shtick, and follows his lead when he angles to murder the school’s jerkiest jerks-clique leader Heather Chandler, football goons Ram and Kurt-under the justification that they deserve to die. “The extreme always seems to make an impression,” he explains to Veronica, which seems sexy at first until we see J.D. at home with his pops, the owner of a demolition company. His mother had committed suicide by running into a building moments before his father blasted it to bits, but J.D. tries (and fails) to brush off the tragedy when Veronica probes him to open up-briefly, Slater looks uncomfortable in his own body, as if showing us a glimpse of the true, vulnerable J.D. Worldly as he might seem with his cigarettes and motorbike, J.D.’s dysfunctionality speaks to a kind of stunted growth. He’s smart, well-read-see the way he quotes Moby Dick and draws inspiration from The Bell Jar to cover-up his killings. Ultimately, however, his sociopathic actions mirror Dad’s crude line of work; his smooth-talking, like a half-baked Nietzschean defense of foul play. Better to blow everything and everyone up-kids with Lego blocks-style-than deal. 

Slater came after the so-called Brat Pack of actors including Rob Lowe and Sean Penn; like them, he was a disgruntled beauty, captivatingly dangerous. But his air of intelligence-something in the way he narrows his eyes and dramatically wriggles his eyebrows-makes Slater seem like he’s knowingly performing the part. Plus, he is a convincing lunatic. In Heathers, his commitment to the bit allows him to divorce himself from reality-thus his suicide-bombing send-off at film’s end. In Pump Up the Volume, he leads a double life: as his alter ego DJ Hard Harry, he scandalizes and hypnotizes his classmates with his raw energy, vocalizing everything they want to, but are too frightened to say.

Disturbingly, these teenagers act on their desires-one kills himself; the other, commits microwave-explosion-induced arson-which leads the adult authorities to blame Harry for inciting violence. He’s only voicing what’s already there, simmering like a pressure cooker: “They say I’m disturbed, well of course I’m disturbed, we’re all disturbed. … Doesn’t this blend of blindness and blandness want to make you do something crazy? Then why not do something crazy?” he proclaims, speaking to a Reagan-era disaffection; the country’s rampant commercialism, socio-economic corruption, and suburban dead-ends. All of these phenomenon coalesced into the ’90s, culturally, in the form of downer-fueled grunge rock, angry-as-fuck hip hop, Reservoir Dogs-style shootouts in which nearly everyone dies. In this brief transitional period, Slater was the golden boy at the eye of the storm; crying because he knows better; cackling because he doesn’t really care. 

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to The New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Artforum, 4Columns, and other publications.

Heathers (1998)