Old-Hat Reviews: Fast Times at Ridgemont High

In our continuing quest to educate ourselves in popular culture and movies we may have missed, we found Fast Times at Ridgemont High appearing in our mailbox courtesy of Netflix last week. This 1982 oeuvre was the seminal high-school movie for a lot of people a few years older than me - Ferris Bueller's Day Off was probably the nearest equivalent American-high-school movie that I saw when I was actually the age of the protagonists.

Although this turns up on TV all the time, I'd only ever seen a small part of it. And the real thing is R-rated, so the TV version is pretty sanitized, which would make for a somewhat different experience.

It's notable for being the first big movie of a ton of famous-later actors: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Phoebe Cates are the big names, but there are also small roles here for Anthony Edwards (that's Dr Greene from ER), Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage, rolling pizza dough. I have decided that Sean Penn has spent the rest of his career choosing worthy, overwrought, thinky roles because this one, as the ultimate stoner surfer dude, was so embarrassing. But maybe that was just the hair.

When you didn't go to high-school in America, viewing these movies - and shows we watched like Beverly Hills 90210 or even Degrassi Junior High (I have to admit that I didn't really understand that Canada was a different country) - was somewhat confusing. Not having experienced the real thing, we had (and still have, to be honest) no understanding of where fact ended and fiction began. Those rows of tall lockers in the corridors, talk of hall passes, free periods, and study hall, boys and girls in all manner and means of clothes - these too were things of fiction as far as I was concerned: my school was filled with green-and-grey-clad girls, and lockers were small and square and mostly in our classrooms. As for sex, I have very little idea who was doing it and who wasn't (apart from me: I was very much on the wasn't side, and found it hard to believe that anyone really was). I tended to assume that teenagers in America were all straight out of Judy Blume novels, and was very relieved not to have to be one.

I had no idea, before watching this, that that its writer was Cameron Crowe - the guy portrayed in Almost Famous. He went back to high school masquerading as a pupil, and took notes. (Very Never Been Kissed, though if Almost Famous is to be believed, that wasn't a problem he had.) So I have to assume that it was quite true to life.

Which is damn scary, what with all the sex going on. And the complete disregard for STDs or pregnancy. Poor 15-year-old Stacy is pressured into Doing It because her friend Linda says that's what all the guys want: she ends up with an abortion - which is totally glossed over; makes it look like a visit to the dentist, with no more psychological impact than having a tooth out - and finally - duh! - discovers that the nice guy who actually likes her is happier to wait. Evidently condoms weren't invented till after the AIDS crisis.

I suppose I still don't know who represents the norm: Linda, who had all the sex - or at least said she did; or Stacy, who did, but didn't really want to? Then again, I could reassure myself that maybe this is what goes on in Californian high schools, but not in the rest of the country (lie!) or that this sort of thing may have been prevalent in the early 80s, but everyone's much better informed now and girls don't think they have to put out just to get a boyfriend (maybe?). What I can't tell myself any more is that this sort of thing only happens in America, and I'm safely in good old Catholic (ahem) Ireland, where the grass is green and the girls are virgins and the boys only want to hold hands and you have to keep a phone-directory's distance apart at all times until marriage, because whether I'm coming from the point-of-view of a shy teenager or the mother of a daughter, that's not true any more. It's probably not true in Ireland either.