On Pump Up The Volume...

 

 I don’t write this to claim that “Pump Up The Volume” is great art or that I was egregiously wronged by the little petty things that kept me from finishing watching until now.Nope, not even my stepdad and all of his revved-up revulsion at Hard Harry’s masturbatory antics.  Even though I have not learned as much about life, or men, or much else as I hoped by this age, I should have been obvious to any adult that all of that was, frankly, Talking Shit, and if he had been more patient instead of making us bring it back, there’s a clear contrast between Mark’s real character and what Harry does. Not to rub it in—that’s what she said—I do think putting up with a little cinematic smut is closer to high-ground behavior than making a whole family trust you and then “working late” by hollering online at some skank from the Rust Belt. That’s just me, though.

The movie looks different when you’re not…well, I was going to write “under my parent’s thumb”, but that would imply that I pushed and they shoved me in there. Here and there, maybe, but mostly not. Mostly, we didn’t have that kind of relationship, both because they were gentler on me and because I didn’t really have sufficient sense of myself as separate—as we’ve covered before, I felt often like The Littlest Boomer—to have pushback.

In 1990, I was in my parents’…dishwater, or wherever else hopeless goody-goodies go when they’re not looking for gold stars for acing stuff.  Not all my fault. I hadn’t really come to grips with the ways disability meant that all the things they were casting off as the oldest hat(school, clubs, extracurriculars) was something I was always fighting to *get in and stay in*. I wasn’t a generational traitor cause I didn’t learn to slack till I was over 30; I was, literally, in a different place than most of the young women who braved the fumes of popcorn, Red Vines, and Teen Spirit to view it.(The movie was more right about the fact that homework doesn’t save than the people I got advice from in high school.  Even now I wonder if that would be true if I were in the absolute top of my class, instead of the top 20%, but that seems to be moot now.)

Say what you will about my generation, at least the suicide in the movie didn’t take anyone down with him.
In some ways, I think it predicted the internet, both pro and con.