Pump Up the Volume (1990)

directed by Allan Moyle

Michael T. Fournier

Pump Up The Volume was one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager. The movie’s main character, Hard Harry, played by Christian Slater, is a teenage pirate radio DJ who fights against the corruption in his high school while spinning sides by the sickest bands: Descendents, Richard Hell, Concrete Blonde.

I rewatched it recently to see if it held up.

And I started crying.

Like, weeping.

Because of a teen movie.

What the hell?

*

So, briefly: Christian Slater plays Mark Hunter, who moves from an unspecified east coast town to Paradise Hills, Arizona, where his dad becomes superintendent of schools. It’s a beautiful place, to be sure, but, in retrospect, a samey one: we see Mark walking through anonymous strip malls and construction sites, no real markers to distinguish one locale from another aside from the states of relative (dis)repair and the particular businesses located in their intersections’ stripmalls.

It’s also samey in its depictions of race. Arizona, apparently, is a predominantly white place. Sure, there’s the concerned black dad at the emergency school board meeting who stands up and announces he “used to work with gangs in the inner city,” and there’s a Hispanic student who is kicked out of school, but the film is largely devoid of diversity.

I never noticed this as a teenager from New Hampshire.

At ten o’clock every night, Mark turns on his pirate radio set and broadcasts as Happy Harry Hard-On, a pseudonym that’s a bastardization of his new school’s name, Hubert H. Humphrey High.

Hard Harry (as the press calls him) is juvenile as hell—in some ways. He pretends to beat off every ten minutes, makes a bunch of fart jokes, plays songs like Ice-T’s “Girls L.G.B.N.A.F.”  But he also plays Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” as his theme song, and adapts an ultimately humane Jello Biafra-esque persona: performative and healthily cynical before the omnipresence of both shock jock and troll culture. He champions students who have been hounded out of the school for getting pregnant, being too crass, too weird. It’s easy to see this empathy as an outcropping of his own misfit status as the new kid in school.

*

The film’s female lead is Nora DeNiro, played by Samantha Mathis. She’s brash, outspoken, artistic, stylish. She writes poetic mash notes to Hard Harry—adopting her own persona as the Eat Me Beat Me Lady—even as she tries to sleuth out his civilian identity.

Paradise Hills distributes face books to their students. Nora meticulously scans hers, trying to match a printed face to a voice. She jots clues from Harry’s broadcasts—like “eats lunch in stairwell with book”—on a whiteboard. Nora gets an inkling that Mark is Hard Harry when he returns a copy of How To Talk Dirty And Influence People to the library while she’s working, but doesn’t think he’s the type.

One thing that has always bugged me about the movie—a thing that still does, so many years later—is a massive error in continuity. As a teenager, I didn’t know the name of this convention. I just knew this woman with fantastic fashion sense wore the same outfit to school two days in a row.

Everyone did.

This would never happen.

Maybe it’s a small thing, but it’s noticeable at first glance, and in repeated viewings. So maybe it’s not a small thing at all.

*

Hard Harry checks the P.O. box he’s rented at a mini-mall postal store every few days. He reads listener mail, and calls the enclosed phone numbers on-air.

Since his dad is superintendent, he has access to confidential school materials. These include a memo written by guidance counselor David Deever, discussing how student Cheryl Biggs is “unremorseful” about her pregnancy. He recommends suspending her.

Harry calls Deever’s home phone number and confronts him on-air.

It’s another small thing, but this is a bum note for me: ten in the evening on a school night, and a guidance counselor is taking phone calls, still fully dressed in school best?  (To be fair, I didn’t think anything of this scene the first zillion times I saw the movie—only after I started teaching.)

One night a guy writes in with a question: should he kill himself?

With his cool persona intact, Harry calls the guy:

How are you going to do it?

I’m going to blow my fucking head off.

Do you have a gun?

No, I’m going to use my finger, genius.

The guy on the other end of the phone says he wants to kill himself because he’s all alone.

Harry tries to identify, saying that he didn’t talk to anyone but teachers at school that day. And that it’s okay to be alone.

*

Ms. Emerson, the kindly teacher we’re pretty sure susses out Mark’s alter ego, announces to the class the next day that a student, Malcolm Kaiser, killed himself.

Mark is stunned, laden with guilt.

He walks to his post office box in a daze, not realizing Nora is tailing him. Her suspicions are confirmed: he opens and reads her latest Eat Me Beat Me Lady letter, distinct in its red stationary and handwriting. She recites lines from it before he runs away.

That night, on air, he apologizes to Malcolm: “I never said don’t do it.”

Then he says that the show is over and shuts the station down.

This one of three or so times he decides to quit being Hard Harry throughout the film.

In the past, I got stuck on this: too much quitting.

Now, though, this seems incredibly real. Despite his Biafra-as-Jack Nicholson schtick, Mark is shown again and again to be incredibly shy: through the modern lens, he has extreme social anxiety. Why wouldn’t someone hiding behind a persona lack confidence? Why wouldn’t he fold under adversity, especially if the sensation was so new?

*

The school administration already knew about Hard Harry before the David Deever and Malcolm Kaiser phone calls. But after Malcolm Kaiser kills himself, principal Loretta Creswood—the film’s villain, who is interested in test scores as a metric of success, at the cost of students who don’t fit her narrow vision—declares war on the DJ and his show.

Mark finds out about the school’s intentions to shut him down as he walks home from school.

Get this: he reads the headline on a newspaper he finds on someone’s lawn.

I laughed out loud when this happened. This used to be A Thing.

No texts, webpages, scrolling chyrons.

Newspaper exposition trope, RIP.

This seems like a good place to mention how many cigarettes everyone smokes throughout the film, too. Seriously: when he’s broadcasting from his parents’ basement, Mark rips mad butts. They must smell it seeping up through the floor, to say nothing of Mark’s clothes. But they never mention it, even though we don’t see them smoke.

At the time, I thought nothing of characters smoking in films. Now it seems so arcane, so bygone.

One more and we’ll move on: a character named Donald sells bootleg cassettes of Harry’s radio show for “five bucks each” throughout the film. Donald helps a denim-vest-clad character named Joey hack into the school P.A. to play a Max Headroom/Negativland-sounding doctored cassette of David Deever’s phone call with Harry, sound effects springing and glitching in the background.

Students hang signs in the school’s common area bearing subversion like “The truth is a virus.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Creswood calls an emergency school board meeting.

This, too, is A Thing.

Apparently Creswood has never seen Over The Edge. If she had, she’d know that nothing positive ever comes from this particular trope. But she calls it, and all the parents show up (and Mark/Harry’s dad makes his public debut as superintendent in the meeting).

After having feinted at quitting his broadcasts right after Malcolm’s suicide, Harry gives a very Nicholson-y on-air speech about expressing pain by acting crazy rather than letting it fester inside.

Throughout the film we’ve seen a character named Paige Woodward, pretty and preppy. She walks to class surrounded by similarly preppy and upwardly mobile dudes, all of whom talk at her—but never to her, her loneliness apparent.

So when Harry urges listeners to do something crazy instead of killing themselves, she gathers up all of her school awards and trophies and throws them in the microwave, which explodes. (Nora tells Mark/Harry that Paige’s dad “was unthrilled,” a phrase which I immediately and probably excessively adapted into my lexicon.)

Paige bum rushes the stage at the school board meeting, dressed down rather than wearing her usual tightly knit (and wound) preppy attire. She tells the assembled crowd that Harry is pointing out scandal at the school. She says that she’s tired of being a character rather than being herself: “I am not perfect...inside, I am screaming!”

Once the meeting ends, the assembled media scrum bombard her with questions like “Will you do anything [Harry] says?”

Paige steps to the cameras and between growls and grimaces urges Harry not to quit, to keep doing what he’s doing, to keep talking.

(This is where I started crying.)

*

After the school board meeting, Harry calls a listener who wrote him a letter.

This guy on the phone had a crush on a popular boy in school.

The two go to a makeout spot, take off their shirts, start screwing around.

Take their pants off.

And the popular boy’s friends come out of the woods, “drinking beer and laughing.”

Harry asks what the listener did.

“Everything,” the listener says. “Everything they told me to.”

Throughout the film, Harry’s persona is full of a bluster that’s easy to recognize as insecurity. He envelops himself with swagger to deflect attacks, real and imagined. But Christain Slater’s strength as an actor is his ability to let this persona drop to reveal sensitivity, vulnerability.

He feels for the listener.

Feels horrible that the listener was sexually assaulted.

Feels horrible that the listener’s sexual preference became an object of derision, even as the deriders took advantage of it—and him.

Feels horrible that he doesn’t know what to do next.

*

The radio show and its stark honesty results in complaint calls from listeners. Since the show is being “rebroadcast over state lines,” the FCC is called in to shut Harry down.

We’ve seen The Man try and squash the radio show a few times by now. Harry has evaded detection by registering his P.O. box under the assumed name Chuck U. Farley, by stealing phone service from a neighbor. The FCC brings triangulation vans to track his location.

All the film’s weirdos, who we’ve seen around boomboxes and in bedrooms and cars, arrive at the school to wait for Harry’s broadcast, with the media surrounding them all.

And then he doesn’t come on.

It’s worth noting how little division there is in Pump Up The Volume. So many teen movies pit groups of teens against each other for laughs or plot points. Hard Harry’s broadcasts unify the student body: in addition to the aforementioned weirdos, many of whom are expelled for being undesirable, we see jocks and preps listening to the radio show, too.

Teens aren’t pitted against each other. I didn’t realize what a rarity this was.

Harry does show up, with all this said—just a little late. In a montage (also A Thing) we see him retrofit his mom’s Jeep with all his radio broadcast equipment. He plays Urban Dance Squad and “Hi Mom, I’m In Jail” by Was (Not Was) as Nora drives the Jeep and FCC vans nearly crash into each other.

It’s no surprise that the film ends with Harry’s apprehension at the school, in full view of his assembled fans—but not before Mark’s dad fires Principal Creswood for expelling so many students, before the voice disguiser Harry used throughout the film breaks and he goes on-air with his real voice, before David Deever breaks from his institutional cruelty and defends the ousted students, before Cheryl Biggs is allowed back in school following her expulsion.

*

A docket of ‘80s teen films haven’t held up well, with their casual sexism and racism and cruelty and sexual abuse. Through a modern lens, it’s easy to see and pick out the flaws in Pump Up The Volume (and we didn’t even talk about the unlikely absurdity of Mark’s parents accidentally buying him FM radio broadcasting gear, thinking they got him a shortwave set—or a noosed effigy of Loretta Creswood is burned by the student body while Soundgarden’s “Heretic” plays in the background).

But at its heart, Pump Up The Volume is an earnest attempt to communicate the complication and confusion of the teenage years. It’s a film remarkably unmarred by spite or cruelty in its depiction of high school, even as it rails against unfairness—and the injustices that are present in the film, perpetrated by adults, are solved because of a heterogeneous group of teens rallying around one of their own. The film deals with LGBTQ+ issues, social anxiety, depression, and suicide honestly and sensitively.

Paige Woodward growls at the idiot cameras and reporters who ask her stupid, sensational questions. She speaks directly into those snouty lenses poking into her space: Keep doing it. Don’t stop. Keep talking. And I’m in tears on the couch.

The continuity of this message might sound trite, Hallmark-y, but the film’s underlying kindness and empathy and belief in teenagers as people, as complex individuals trying to work out, work through problems and confusion still resonates. As I write this, a series of ‘ok boomer’ memes are viral across the internet. One such meme depicts Darth Vader as boomer, locked in a lightsaber battle with Millennial Luke Skywalker. Meanwhile, Gen X Han Solo—me—shrugs.

I knew early on that I could never work an office job, and have cobbled together a life that doesn’t make me miserable. It doesn’t get easier. But what am I going to do—quit?

I was blindsided by Paige Woodward speaking directly to the viewer—to me, age 45— telling them to keep going, keep doing it.

How simple it is, but how true.

How the emotion was still there, has been there all along.

Maybe Nora DeNiro and Hard Harry and Ms. Emerson and the rest of the class wear the same clothes two days in a row. But despite this, the emotional core of Pump Up The Volume continues to provide a continuity of empathy that still resonates thirty years later. This might not be A Thing, but it should be.

Michael T. Fournier is the author of two novels (Swing State and Hidden Wheel, both from Three Rooms Press) and Double Nickels on the Dime (Bloomsbury's 33 1/3). He interviews writers about punk rock in his Paging All Punks column for Razorcake, and his writing has appeared in the Oxford American, The Millions, Entropy, Electric Literature and more. Fournier publishes the literary broadsheet Cabildo Quarterly, co-edits Zisk, and yells while he plays drums in Dead Trend. He and his wife Rebecca live on Cape Cod with their two cats.