The Travolta/Cage Project #2 Valley Girl (1983)
John Travolta and Nicolas Cage have reigned as the wild-eyed crazy uncles of American cinema for so long that it can easy to forget what Hollywood super-hunks they were as young men.
Of the two, Travolta is better known as an impossibly gorgeous dreamboat whose androgynous beauty set teenyboppers hearts aflutter with his dreamy good looks, voice and dance moves. In contrast, Cage got weird, old and balding much more quickly. Yet the defining characteristic of Cage’s breakthrough turn as Randy, a soulful punk rocker/New Wave freak in love in Valley Girl is explosive, incandescent sexuality.
In Valley Girl, Nicolas Cage is a sexy motherfucker, a bad boy with a heart of gold.
Cage’s broodingly intense rocker receives an introduction as unforgettable as it is unlikely given the career that would follow.
It’s eerie how realistic this is!
The Face/Off icon began his life as a cinematic leading man by emerging out of the surf a vision of wet, watery and wonderful perfection. He’s Bo Derek in 10. He’s Esther Williams in her aquatic musicals. He’s the alternately buff and busty lifeguards of Baywatch when they run in slow motion in a manner both heroic and boner-inducing.
He’s pure sex, a gorgeous, pouty face of feminine delicacy and beauty along with a casually, understatedly buff body lovingly and generously showcased in a skimpy bathing suit.
Our heroine Julie (Deborah Foreman) and her friends ogle him shamelessly, reducing him to eye candy, something to gawk at. The girls and the film are equally shameless about objectifying Cage. “What a hunk!” they coo lasciviously, “Check out those pecs.”
The girls are united in their conviction that a sexy slab of man-meat like Randy could definitely get it.
Cage isn’t just disconcertingly hot in Valley Girl; he’s also almost inconceivably cute. When his love-sick rebel tries to win the Valley Girl of his dreams back through stubborn persistence and a borderline stalker level of devotion and determination, the adorableness is so intense it threatens to shatter the screen.
Cage would never be this fresh or new or young ever again. He perversely and inexplicably might have been the only young actor in the world not cast in Uncle Francis’ The Outsiders but this Ponyboy’s radiant youth was Golden, and nothing gold can stay.
In the years and decades ahead, not being from the Valley would prove to be much less of an impediment for Cage.
Deborah Foreman is terrific as Julie, a denizen of the Valley who communicates in slang that in a different, lesser film would instantly date the movie as a tacky, opportunistic time capsule. Instead Valley Girl captures the language, rituals, customs and overheated emotions of its cultural milieu with such verisimilitude and unexpected sensitivity that if feels closer to pop sociology than typical teen schlock.
It is exceedingly rare for a teen sex comedy to even attempt to capture the complicated, fraught, fascinating emotional reality of teen life. It’s even rarer for a movie, book or TV show, about horny teenagers to succeed in presenting an emotionally authentic portrayal of adolescent life.
That’s why we revere movies and books that get this impossible age right, that feel so real and so true that it almost feels like they’re telling our story as well. That’s Catcher in the Rye. It’s Rebel Without a Cause. It’s Dazed & Confused. It’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s Clueless. And its Valley Girl.
Valley Girl reminds me a lot of Clueless, another understatedly wise and warm comedy about a young woman whose fizzy exterior hides a good heart and even better brain who falls for the wrong person who happens to also be the right person and has a wonderful relationship with her father.
In Valley Girl, the wrong/right man is Randy, who she first spies as a vision of masculine perfection at the beach and then runs into at a preppie party where Randy and his buddy stand out like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten at an Up With People concert.
It’s love as well as lust at first sight for Julie and Randy. From the moment he first lays eyes on her, she’s all he wants in the world. She’s a Valley Girl Juliet to his Rocker Romeo united by love and divided by circumstance.
That’s one of the many things I find fascinating about Cage as an icon and an actor: he’s a rocker. He married Elvis’ daughter, channeled the King for Tiny Elvis and Wild at Heart and has made his love for rock and roll a sizable element of his persona. That began in a big way with Valley Girl.
Punk and new wave aren’t just entertainment for Randy. They’re his life. They’re his identity and his community. The punk club is Randy’s home away from home, his world, outlaws and outcasts his people. Randy takes Julie on a guided tour of his world and her universe expands instantly and dramatically and wonderfully.
They experience the rare falling in love montage that genuinely captures, in glistening, glossy pop music shorthand, the exhilarating experience of falling hopelessly and deeply into true, albeit hopelessly complicated love.
Valley Girl’s soundtrack is so jam-packed that it seems to contain not just an impressive assortment of New Wave and punk hits from the era but rather ALL of the New Wave and punk hits of all time. Valley Girl has the spirit of a musical, and the wall-to-wall music of a musical, and performances from the Plimsouls and Josie Cotton. Its heartbeat is a drumbeat, its soul pure rock and roll.
Forrest be smoking them trees! #Marijuanahumor #ItsnotjustforDougBensonanymore
It’s the kind of movie that gets made for the sake of its soundtrack, which makes it all the more surreal and unfortunate that due to licensing issues, a full-length soundtrack was not released in a timely fashion. Modern English’s “I Melt With You” was used first and most poignantly, pointedly and perfectly here. Like all great rock and roll movies, Valley Girl understands that some emotions and feelings are so powerful that they can only be conveyed through music, not dialogue.
Valley Girl subscribes to the radical notion that parents are people, and deserve to be treated with the same sensitivity and depth as their teenaged children. Valley Girl has great parents both in the sense that health food proprietors Steve (Frederic Forrest) and Sarah Richman (Colleen Camp) have done a wonderful job of raising their daughter but also in that they are both written and performed with such enormous warmth and nuance and affection that it almost seems a shame they aren’t the main characters.
In a perfect world Forrest would win an Academy Award for his remarkable performance as Julie’s adoring dad, a pot-smoking hippie health food proprietor who radiates decency and love for his family from every pore. Camp is just as good and just as shockingly multi-dimensional; her sexual hunger for much younger men is treating with astonishing sensitivity and a total lack of judgment.
Something amazing happened to all of the broad teen movie caricatures and sex comedy archetypes somewhere along the way in Valley Girl; they all turned into flesh and blood human beings you can’t help but care about and root for.
Cage is almost too sexy and irresistible. His chemistry with Foreman, who he apparently dated in real life as well, is so explosive and they seem so deliriously happy together that when she makes the Faustian bargain to give up her star-crossed soulmate for the sake of holding onto her popularity and place within the high school hierarchy it feels like a terrible betrayal. But it also feels all too plausible. God knows teenagers will do terrible things for the sake of being popular and for the sake of fitting in, for not rocking the boat, for being the prom queen dating the prom queen, not the weird boy with the dyed hair from another school.
Conceptualizing the first episode of the Travolta/Cage podcast I found myself thinking that Carrie and Valley Girl would be so different that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to compare them, that they’d be the proverbial apples and oranges.
I also assumed that Carrie would win in a landslide because it is an important, iconic classic. It’s been parodied and ripped off and lovingly remembered and mis-remembered and quoted to such an extent that I figured a much slighter cult movie like Valley Girl couldn’t possibly compete.
Carrie and Valley Girl are very different movies in some crucial ways. Valley Girl is tender and sensitive, the rare romantic comedy that is genuinely romantic in addition to being consistently funny. It’s a hang out movie full of wonderfully realized, three-dimensional, sympathetic characters of all ages.
Yet Valley Girl is also about the horrors of high-school conformity. It’s about the way high school and peer pressure corrupt us, how they bring out the worst in us, reducing us to calculating opportunists willing to put comfort and position over true love and being your best, most authentic self.
Thankfully Valley Girl is a comedy and not a tragedy so true love ultimately triumphs over craven pragmatism after Randy wins Julie back at the prom after skirmishing with her soon to be former boyfriend.
Cue the limo and Modern English, again, the perfect, inevitable, totally 1980s soundtrack to our melting hearts.
I remembered Valley Girl being good. I didn’t remember it being great but it really does belong in the upper echelon of teen sex comedies and truthful movies about young people that manage to emotionally authentic in their depiction of high school life without also making everyone depressed to the point of being suicidal.
Valley Girl is the perfect way to kick off this project. It’s a reminder of what a remarkable and original performer Cage has always been, of the way he burns up the screen, of how utterly irresistible and appealing he was in his very first incarnation.
America fell in love with Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman, separately and together, and Valley Girl. According to Wikipedia, it grossed a little over seventeen million dollars on a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar budget. It got mostly excellent reviews as well.
Roger Ebert, who famously had a bit of a blind spot with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, understood and appreciated the film, calling it a “little treasure” that’s funny, sexy and appealing.
With Valley Girl the nephew of one of the most famous and successful figures in Hollywood proved himself incontrovertibly as an actor but also as a romantic leading man and a movie star, in part by achieving extraordinary, iconic success outside of Uncle Francis’ tremendous sphere of influence.
There’s something special about the first time. That’s true of movies as well as sex and romance. Valley Girl is in many ways a wonderful anomaly in Cage’s incredible life and career.
The teen hunk phase of Cage’s career was as short-lived as it was unexpected and glorious. When we think of Cage, “teen dreamboat” is not the first thing that pops to mind but Cage is magnificent in Valley Girl, a movie that set out to exploit a passing linguistic fad and ending up articulating profound truths about what it means to be young and alive in love, in the Valley and outside of it.
Cage would go on to make many more wonderful films and, as this column will also reveal, several less than transcendent ones as well. We have a long, exciting journey ahead of us and re-experiencing Valley Girl has me even more excited about the road ahead. Because Nicolas Cage is magic onscreen and has been from the very beginning.
Get in on the red-hot, regularly updated Patreon for the Travolta/Cage podcast at https://www.patreon.com/TravoltaCage It’s the only place you can read Reading This Won’t Bring Back Your Honey: A Travolta/Cage Reader
Support independent journalism and help ensure a future for the Happy Place over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
And last but not least y’all can still get in on the red-hot Weird Accordion to Al pre-sale campaign, which is so dope it’s legit bonkers at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders