A Gen X introvert’s Baby Boomer dad uproots their family from New York and moves them across the country to a prefab Arizona suburb. Gifted a short-wave radio to keep in touch with his friends back east, the isolated and disoriented Mark finds an outlet for his existential angst as a pirate radio shock jock. But tragedy and controversy ensue when he goes too far.
That’s the setup for 1990’s teen dramedy Pump Up the Volume. If you’ve never seen this movie before, you can be forgiven for thinking it fit into the early 90s urban youth genre alongside Juice, Menace II Society, and Boyz n the Hood. The soundtrack wouldn’t entirely disabuse you of that notion, either. Because this movie, like its contemporary Uncle Buck, was one of the first to depict the shift in American teen music preference from rock & roll to rap.
Related: Of Hip-Hop and Corporate Pop
The film’s portrayal of Gen X disillusionmnet is also reminiscent of the post-Ground Zero movie SLC Punk! which author JD Cowan mentions here. But upon recent viewing, Pump Up the Volume doesn’t handle that material quite as well. It features the same themes of identity crisis, rapid societal change thwarting established rites of passage, and Boomers selling out after causing those drastic changes. Just on a more superficial level.
In anoher odd and rather specific similarity with Repo Man, a third punk-coming-of-age film, Pump Up the Volume casts ex-hippie radicals as fans of Evangelical preachers for some reason.
Yes, the kids in Pump Up the Volume are confused and aimless. But conspicuously, their confusion and depression are only expressed in the most nebulous terms. In one on-the-air rant, Mark’s alter ego Hard Harry goes off on the futility of the dating scene and declares that sex is out. Then in the next, he’s exposing a dweeby guidance counselor for expelling a girl that got knocked up. That subplot of corrupt administrators ejecting undersirables clashes with the lament, made by every young character in the film, that their high school sucks.
If you think about it, the main antagonists’ motives actually overlap with the hero’s. The students who are being expelled are shown to be antisocial, of questionable morals, and, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb. Just how being forced to attend class with such disruptive kids would improve Mark’s high school experience is never explained. Some platitudes about every child’s “right to an education” are thrown around. But that’s beside the point. The problems that Mark, and most of the student body, have are alienation and atomization. Increasing diversity has been proven to worsen, not fix, those issues. Yet an outsized number of the expelled students have last names like Chavez and Garcia. (Unintentionally based Hollywood check?)
The closest Harry comes to identifying the symptoms of his malaise is complaining that there’s nothing to do. It rings hollow to members of Gen Y, who eye shots of a thriving, socially coherent suburb replete with well-stocked video stores, arcades, and music shops. Yet the pirate DJ’s griping isn’t baseless, the 1990s were not optimistic times. and young people then could feel the approach of Cultural Ground Zero. That’s one forgotten aspect of the 90s zeitgeist that Pump Up the Volume does excel in capturing.
Related: The 1990s – Decade of Despair
Another sour note the movie strikes if you spend five seconds considering it is a seething hatred of the flyover states. Mark’s family come from New York, and he can’t shut up about how culturally dead Arizona is by comparison. Keep in mind that this movie came out during an inner city crime wave unequaled till today. It’s no coincidence that the gangster movies mentioned above were popular at this time.
The cinematography takes pains to make Mark’s suburb look sterile, desolate, and artificial. There’s even an oil pipeline running right past his campus. And maybe those visual tricks worked on audiences of the day, but to Current Year eyes, Paradise Hills looks like Heaven on Earth.
It’s probably no accident that Pump Up the Volume’s writer-director Allan Moyle hails from the Eastern Seaboard. The urban hivedweller blinders are apparent in this movie. So is raging case of stage 3 Boomerism. From Gen X-er characters talking about Ice-T “shredding” to their rebellion for rebellion’s sake, Pump Up the Volume smacks of a Boomer making a token effort to explore the challenges and concerns of Generation X but failing to escape the relict mental categories that prevent understanding.
Which brings us to the worst of the movie’s internal contradictions. Every single problem that torments Mark and his classmates is a direct result of their parents having overturned the stable American culture they inherited. From the Sexual Revolution to civil rights, the Boomers’ rebellion deconstructed society. Mark understands on some level that he’s living in the ruins of a once-functional civilization. But his answer is to hammer the rubble into dust by pointlessly rebelling some more.
By the way, the “subversive” antics the kids get up to are portrayed as crimes that demand the feds’ intervention. By the standard of cell phone videos shot every day in Clown World schools, Harry’s fans’ riot looks like a rather tame Wednesday.
Related: The Boomer Black Hole
If you want a movie that accurately captures the look and mood of the early 90s, Pump Up the Volume is your jam. Just be aware of the subversive messaging, which is frankly so incoherent that it’s more apt to leave you confused than convinced. Bigger issues are the vulgar language spewed and degenerate situations at least simulated on screen. This movie is rated R for a reason.
To be honest, we’re probably better off letting the 90s lie in their grave instead of burning incense over it.
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SLC Punk succeeds due to the fact that it was A) an independent movie, and B) that the people behind it were of the generation they were portraying. So what you get is a window into Gen X from Gen X made in the period when everything started caving in. That makes it a much more interesting movie that is still worth watching today.
As for this movie, this sort of confusion was a specific theme in a lot of boomer-made “Our kids’ sadness is because of our parents!” movies in the ’80s. This kind of died out in the ’90s as Gen X started getting “confused and alienated young love” movies while Gen Y were getting “wild and gross” kids comedies. Of course all of that was turned into flavorless focus-tested mush before the end of the decade.
I haven’t seen this movie but it feels a bit like a prototype of Pleasantville, though at the very least this film does not feel so much malicious as ignorant of the world it is trying to portray. Contrast that with every “retro” 1990s period piece we’ve gotten in the past decade and none of them can even maintain the accuracy of a kids comedy movie like Camp Nowhere. At least this one benefits by being made in the era it’s trying to portray.
Much as I enjoy these youth confusion movies, I much prefer when they are bizarre like Repo Man or wild like Gleaming the Cube. They tend to have to be more forthcoming about the problems to work. It’s the same reason Band of the Hand, Class of 1984/1999, or Only the Strong, were much better watches than the overhyped and overexposed at the time Dangerous Minds. Boomer smarm became a well known film trope for a reason.
SLC Punk! = Gen X movie made by X-ers
PUtV = Gen X movie made by Boomers.
That is the equation I was missing. Thank you!
You’re welcome! I tend to find Gen X movies fascinating before they got full of themselves, which was around the time of Dogma. That was the exact moment they went from trying to understand how things went wrong into actively joining in the destruction.
Pleasantville has a comparable subversion level. Pump Up the Volume is the superior movie, if only because it displayed impressive prescience. Hard Harry would have fit right into the Internet Bloodsports era of YouTube. And the movie accurately foresees the unintended consequences and yellow journalism surrounding social media. An airhead reporter even starts stalking Harry when one of his listeners commits suicide.
But it’s not worth the subversion. The worst is a a scene that’s shoehorned into the movie wherein a same-sex attracted fan calls Harry’s show to dispense brazen pro-sodomy agitprop. Besides riding the leading edge of the rap trend, this movie is one first in the transition from “It’s their choice, so we need to respect it,” to “They were born this way, and we have to celebrate it.”
From your description it sounded promising until you hit the stock boomer plot beats. Much like Pleasantville, there is actually a good story here, but it being weaponized against a target instead of explored makes it a dead end viewing experience.
You pretty much summed it up.
“In antoher odd and rather specific similarity with Repo Man, another punk-coming-of-age film, Pump Up the Volume casts ex-hippie radicals as fans of Evangelical preachers for some reason.”
I haven’t seen either movie, so I don’t know exactly how this aspect is portrayed in them, but is it possible that it’s meant as a reference to the Jesus Movement (which involved a lot of hippies)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_movement
It’s the film makers attacking Christianity.
It was an attempt to pass off the failures and self-destruction of the hippie movement onto Christianity. They didn’t try it for very long, though, so it feels out of joint if younger audiences watch something with that abandoned trope in it today.
Related: it’s actually interesting seeing a lot of younger generations getting into this stuff now and rightfully asking questions about things in them that make no sense. The Gen X ennui movies like Fight Club or The Matrix feel antiquated to them because they would like that decent paying office job boring the main characters. Even Easy Rider comes across as dumb to your average Zoomer.
Then they watch Pleasantville and are puzzled at the movie’s final message being that everything is getting worse deliberately so you have to accept and embrace it even though there is no reason to (if you related with Tobey McGuire’s character, even back then, the ending does not jibe with the beginning or what his stupid sister unleashes on everyone) and even though the people doing it hate you and want you to die.
This is why I typically recommend Devon Stack’s streams where he tackles movies from the past and what they are actually trying to get across. Sometimes he even covers things that aren’t poisonous, like Office Space. Regardless, they are a good indicator as to just how far Hollywood has declined in talent. He just covered that Beekeeper movie and it does everything wrong to the point that you have to actually be dumb to buy anything in it.
I really do think in the future films in the 21st century will be studied for various reasons but this stuff will be looked at as to the proof of what sin does to your brain.
“I really do think in the future films in the 21st century will be studied for various reasons but this stuff will be looked at as to the proof of what sin does to your brain.”
Forget the Bible verse billboards. We should take out large ads that say “Sin makes you stupid” as helpful PSAs
“The Gen X ennui movies like Fight Club or The Matrix feel antiquated to them because they would like that decent paying office job boring the main characters.”
Neo might be bored with his job, but that’s more due to the fact that he instinctually senses that something isn’t quite right with the world (a “splinter in his mind”) than anything wrong with the job itself. One doesn’t have to see Neo’s job as boring or unsatisfying to get the point of “The Matrix”, as the story depicts the simulated world as comfortable, while the real world is harsh and barren. That’s why Cypher turns traitor; he prefers the comfortable illusion over the harsh reality. Even if a viewer envies Neo’s job, that message still comes through.
“The Matrix” is one of those movies that will probably never be interpreted the way its makers want it to be. There’s a reason why the terms “red pill”, “blue pill”, and derivatives thereof (like “white pill” and “black pill” – the latter being prominently used by Devon Stack, who you mentioned) have become mainstays among various people who are against the current far-left establishment (including conservatives and men’s right’s activists – that’s not to endorse the latter, which are often as bad as feminists in their own way, but they are not part of the typical social or political establishment of today).
The movie’s narrative of a comfortable false reality, an uncomfortable actual reality, and the tough choice of whether to choose comfort and falsehood or discomfort and the truth rings very true in today’s world, in which the mainstream media’s false reality is crumbling. Regardless of how the Wachowski Brothers might want people to interpret the movie, they made something that powerfully resonates with people who see through the illusory world that the government, media, and academia have built for decades.
“The Matrix Resurrections” (2021) was made to try to “take back the red pill” from the right (the writers admitted this). However, it is already virtually forgotten, and did nothing to change the culture or how colloquial language using various colors of pills as metaphors is used by the public. It’s a case in which the creation got away from the creators and took on a life of its own in the culture.
“Regardless of how the Wachowski Brothers might want people to interpret the movie, they made something that powerfully resonates with people who see through the illusory world that the government, media, and academia have built for decades.
“The Matrix Resurrections” (2021) was made to try to “take back the red pill” from the right (the writers admitted this). ”
Only real events can be in all senses unbelievable. The vast majority of working authors/filmmakers/etc are liberals who like fantasies of all kinds.
The only way to tell a really good story, however, is to go find some reality and weave it into your story. We can only suspend disbelief so much. Most of us will rapidly get bored by a story that demands that we accept balls thrown into the sky will make it into space.
Thus wildly liberal content creators leaning on Christianity and right wing/reactionary political themes, quite often without acknowledging it. It’s interesting how often they misjudge the message they think they are putting out there. Norman Lear thought he was dunking on Archie Bunker, when he was probably the most popular character he ever created. I am sure that list of “Hey, why are the right wing people “twisting” my art??” is pretty long.
To the extent that any sort of Christian theme or even the mildest of right wing political ideas have become completely taboo, the corporate arts are dying on the vine.
Zoomer reactions to Gen X ennui movies is basically like Samir from Office Space, when he responds to Peter’s lament that he might be working his office drone job into his 50’s by saying “it would be nice to have that kind of job security.”
“portrayed in them, but is it possible that it’s meant as a reference to the Jesus Movement (which involved a lot of hippies)?”
That was my first thought, too, the Jesus Movement. Both the Jesus Movement and evangelicals shared a very strong cultural component, which had not nailed down the particulars of the underlying faith.
That a native NYCer, probably non-Christian, had a certain dislike of them both is hardly surprising. He may have been astute in seeing the connection between what seemed like disparate groups.
Hear me out, Blast From The Past.
1999, so getting towards tail end of Gen X, hey it’s a silly comedy, but it is accidentally a true counter cultural movie. It portrays:
-a Christian family from the 60s(they don’t lean on it, but the main character refers to prayer as “always a good idea” and they instinctively show respect to “Bishop” Melchor’s “church group”)
-free market (the father made a great deal of money through patents, actually building things worth selling, and invested wisely)
-a hero who would be called a “grind” or “try hard”, absolutely no hint of the Gen X slacker in him, which is why he’s intelligent and skilled mentally and physically
-an odd respect for sexual purity so far as it goes, at least comparatively
-society degenerating aggressively from 1962 onwards
-a near absolute unironic message that pre-1962 America was a just a superior civilization
All of this wrapped up in a goofy rom com with hijinks. It’s no one’s idea of an art house or important film, and I feel like its messaging was almost accidental. However it was a name brand widely released film at the time. This kind of messaging had to be made as a comedy, it couldn’t be conceived otherwise, the goofiness was a defense against admitting a truth that everyone on a heart level knew but couldn’t talk about. They saw the same destruction portrayed in PUTV, but unlike that movie chose life as it were.
I need to rewatch it (it’s been years since I last saw it), but I’m very fond of it. It strongly resonated with me, because its story is sort of like an exaggerated comedy version of my own upbringing. Brendan Fraser’s character Adam is very relatable for me.
I more or less agree with your assessment. It pokes fun both the old and new cultures, but mostly comes down on the side of the older culture being better. I consider it sort of the polar opposite of “Pleasantville”.