Pump Up the Volume is about resistance

Words are like, weapons, or something.

A while back I caught the video for “Everybody Knows”¹ from the soundtrack of the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume. If you’ve read my newsletter before, you know I love a good soundtrack, especially when the videos include scenes from the movie. I was half-watching this one, waiting for some database stuff to process at the day job, and almost spit out my coffee at the sight of young Christian Slater’s abs.

Not the best quality image, but you get the idea (Source)

I cannot overemphasize the chokehold this actor had on the celebrity-crush attention market of the 1990s. He had the abs, he had the mean-looking eyebrows and squinty eyes that made him look like he was smoking a cigarette even when he wasn’t,² and he had the classic Hollywood bad boy roles both on- and offscreen. It seemed like every week there was another article in People or whatever about his carousing and womanizing and showing up late to film sets. Which eventually led to a bit of a decline in his career, but he was in Mr. Robot, he’s fine!³

Pump Up the Volume also happens to be one of my core-memory films, so naturally seeing bits of it has inspired/required a rewatch.⁴

The movie is about high school misfit Mark Hunter (Slater) who runs a pirate radio station out of his basement using an impressive collection of equipment that his parents somehow do not know about. Despite having Christian Slater’s abs, Mark is shy and insecure, so he has created an on-air persona he calls “Happy Harry Hard-On” (kind of a proto-Joe Rogan or Howard Stern, only with better music in the background). In between his college-radio playlist, he expounds on what he considers to be the truths of the universe, a lot of edgelord shit like “Everything decent’s been done…all the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks.” This is catnip to the suburban teens who make up his audience.

He also reads listener mail on the air. One of his regular correspondents is fellow Hubert Humphrey High student Nora (Samantha Mathis), who sends in slam poetry written on red paper (the symbolism in this film is not subtle!) and dresses in magnificent ‘90s fashions. Witness:

Blond dude on the left is like “Yep, that is a completely unnecessary leopard print muff on Nora’s friend’s arm.” And holy crap, I’d forgotten all about the ‘90s patchwork knapsacks! (IMDB)

Nora develops an interest in Mark IRL, but he’s too shy to respond and neither of them fully connects the other to their baby shock jock/horny poet personas, so we have a bit of a You’ve Got Mail/She Loves Me situation.

This endures until a nerdy, lonely kid named Malcolm writes in to the show, including his phone number so “Harry” can give him a call on the air.⁵ He’s obviously in a bad place, but Mark doesn’t take him seriously, and Malcolm ends up taking his own life.

This, and Mark’s on-air processing of his guilt in the form of a rousing manifesto about how much it sucks to be young,⁶ is the tipping point in a sequence of events that gets all the adults extremely fired up. We can’t have these TEENS taking to the airwaves, saying things that are true and making the future valedictorian crash out and…blow up her family’s microwave!

Hard Harry does do some actual good and display attitudes more progressive than the stereotypical podcast bro’s. There’s a subplot in which he helps expose the school’s corrupt practice of expelling low performers to bring up average test scores. While broadcasting a call with a gay classmate who was humiliated by his crush, Harry tells the guy, essentially: You’re not the one who’s confused and messed up, this other person is.

On one level Volume is a standard Very Influential Teens story, complete with a car chase involving…the FCC?!? It’s quaint how upset the adults in this movie get over what amounts to some guy’s podcast! (Especially when modern social media platforms are determined to do the least to rein in hate speech, harassment, and disinformation, and the bullies who drive people to suicide rarely experience meaningful consequences.)

But rewatching in our current moment, as power becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few, made me think about the subversive (or destructive) forms that resistance and conflict can take when paths to more constructive change are cut off. Mark’s difficulty relating to other humans in person also tells us that the “male loneliness epidemic” is not new, nor is the framing that it’s women’s problem to solve. Nora is Mark’s saving grace: she reassures Mark that his classmate’s death is not his fault, and literally drives the getaway Jeep in the climactic chase scene.

As a teenager, I thought they were so romantic. Boy longs for girl in suffering silence until he finally gets her! (Not coincidentally, this was the exact dynamic I had with all my adolescent crushes except in reverse and without the “actually getting to date them” part. If only I’d started a pirate radio station!) Now I just think Nora could do better than someone who uses his platform to simulate masturbation on the air, then gets her arrested for federal crimes.

So you could say Volume doesn’t “hold up” in the sense that there are some problematic things about it.

DO NOT watch Sixteen Candles is all I’m saying

However, it does hold up in the sense that many of its points are relevant today. Resistance is valid and useful even when the participants “lose the game” or get in trouble. The privileged should not leave the hard work to those who stand to lose the most, but should risk some of that privilege to speak out against injustice. And even people with less institutionalized power (e.g. minors and those who don’t happen to be elected officials) can still do something. Near the end of the film Mark tells his audience “It begins with us!” and that’s absolutely true.

I attended my local Hands Off! protest last weekend and it was heartening to see so many people out demonstrating for good causes and calling out the ridiculousness of our current situation (tariffs on penguins! You can’t make this shit up!) Of course a protest is not all that needs to happen. But I disagree with people who say it does nothing.

Weird thing I am researching

Yachts of the late 19th and early 20th century robber barons (feels relevant to our current moment as we watch our retirement funds go poof, assuming we had them in the first place.)

Reading/watching/listening

Reading: The Favorites by Layne Fargo. I’ve loved her other novels, with their unapologetically angry and driven women characters, and this one (a retelling of Wuthering Heights! Set in the high pressure world of ice dancing!!) has had me on the edge of my seat repeatedly.

Watching: I’ve been acting as totally chill and non-overbearing emotional support while my 14-year-old plays The Last of Us Part II. Sort-of-inattentively observing this game while scrolling/reading is probably the only way I can handle the bleakness! I watched that one not completely depressing episode of the show and it almost destroyed me.

Listening: I’ve been playing my messy WIP playlist on shuffle a lot as I get deep into the second half of my draft. In another newsletter I’ve gone into some detail about how I integrate playlists into my creative process, and while usually I don’t listen to them as I draft, with this book I have been. Then again, this book has been different in almost every way (good ways!) from my previous ones.

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If you enjoy my ramblings, you might like my books!

The Other Me, which PopSugar called a “Black Mirror-esque rabbit hole,” is an inventive page-turner about the choices we make and the ones made for us.

When I’m Her asks the question: How far would you go to get even with the woman who ruined your life?

1. The archive of MTV’s 120 Minutes is well worth a spin if you want a shot of nostalgia. The original Leonard Cohen version of the song is also featured in the film, while the Concrete Blonde cover appeared on the soundtrack for what I assume are complicated contractual reasons. However, both versions are amazing.

2. I’ve watched a higher-than-usual number of movies from the 1990s in the past months and I am flabbergasted by the number of people who used to smoke…and I was there!

3. His costar Samantha Mathis, an up-and-coming Hollywood It Girl at the time, also fell out of the limelight for complicated reasons…but she has an Off-Broadway career and was vice president of SAG-AFTRA for a while so she is fine as well. IMO there’s a lot to be said for a steady low-to-medium-profile career over a shooting star career, but that’s a whole other newsletter.

4. Pump Up the Volume isn’t streaming anywhere but for the purposes of this newsletter we will say I found a pristine LaserDisc copy on eBay (along with a LaserDisc player) and watched it that way.

5. By tapping into a neighbor’s phone line. I’m betting that if post-high-school Mark didn’t launch a manosphere podcast, he founded a tech startup. Maybe both!

6. I do remember a lot of this stuff really speaking to me though! As a teenager I never once felt comfortable in my own skin and would have loved to become somebody else (and later wrote an entire novel based on the most literal interpretation of this premise). Part of the reason this film has stuck with me was that it acknowledged a reality that felt glossed over by all the “these are the best years of your life” and “it gets better after high school” platitudes. I don’t think art made for teenagers can be successful unless it takes teens seriously!