Bookends: Amy Heckerling

Vamps at Ridgemont High

Amy Heckerling can plausibly claim to have directed one of the seminal high school movies of both the 1980s and the 1990s. The film for which she will always be best remembered is Clueless, which was also her last success. It came out in 1995, and her last film came out in 2012, so that’s not great. However, years before creating an aesthetic template that will never die, Heckerling debuted with 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That’s a decidedly different flavor of teen movie. It’s going for something akin to realism while still being a comedy featuring Sean Penn as a stoner doofus. Serious shit happens and the sex stuff and the horniness is…well, I was going to say “messy” but that may evoke inaccurate and unsightly imagery when used in this subject space.

Clueless is a candy-colored Jane Austen riff built around fabricated vernacular and Dan Hedaya. I don’t love it like many people do, but it is a straight-up good movie, even if it features one of my least-favorite moments in any comedy when all the kids at the party in the Valley are sitting on the counter or whatever sort of, like, dancing or swerving like they are in a car chase or…I don’t know what. I just find it so dispiriting. It sucks life force out of me.

Of course, this is about career bookends, so it isn’t about Clueless. It also isn’t about the face “Affair with Chris Kattan” is one of the sections on her Wikipedia page. Seriously, there’s a link to go directly to that heading and everything. Heckerling’s career began with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and it ended, or so it would appear, in 2012 with Vamps. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of the movie. Hence, the Clueless talk.

First, man is the poster for Fast Times selling a certain kind of movie it is at least 51% not:

You know, these days most movie posters wouldn’t have the courage to include a browning apple in the artwork. Kudos, Fast Times marketing team! The surfboard. The Babes In Short Shorts. Penn is holding sunglasses in his hand just to make sure they are part of the mise en scene. You might expect some sort of high school Animal House, or a Rock n’ Roll High School with less Ramones music (but plenty of Jackson Browne, evidently). I’m not saying it’s frickin’ Sophie’s Choice Jr. over here - Jeff Spicoli is still part of the tapestry after all - but Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe (both making their feature debuts) did worth to craft something more akin to “realistic” teenage life. Serious things happen with results that have heft to them. Spicoli is no Ferris Bueller type, skating by without suffering a single consequence for his actions.

Even the raunchier, more-risque elements are designed to feel plausible and lived-in. The sex and the nudity doesn’t feel imposed upon the project, unlike the following year’s Valley Girl where the studio essentially told Martha Coolidge she had to get some tits on screen. In a way, the most-famous scene in Fast Times speaks to the tone and the tenor of the piece. The scene where Phoebe Cates emerges from the pool and takes off her bikini top to make out with Judge Reinhold (I remember his name is Brad, and I couldn’t tell you what Cates’ character is named) (I just looked it up and it’s Linda) (are you enjoying all these parenthetical asides? I know I am) is explicitly a fantasy. It’s imagery being cooked up in Judge Reinhold’s brain as he, how to put this delicately, vigorously strokes his penis with the intention of provoking ejaculation.

Then, of course, his reverie (and his attempt to commit the Sin of Onan, one of my favorite stories from the Bible) is interrupted by Phoebe Cates (accurately, Judge Reinhold expresses annoyance at the lack of knocking on the bathroom door, but also dude lock that shit if you’re gonna crank it) (WAY TOO MANY PARENTHETICAL ASIDES I KNOW) and awkwardness ensues. While that would be startling for both parties, and awkward I’m sure, I do feel like the scene is presupposing a 1982 view that people should feel bad and embarassed about masturbating and that it was Simply Not Done. Well, you can’t take movies out of their time frame.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a significant first foray into film, and Heckerling was truly successful as a comedy filmmaker up through Clueless. Then, in 2000 she made the woeful Loser, in 2007 she made a movie I have never heard of called I Could Never Be Your Woman, and then there’s 2012’s Vamps, which I watched recently for the first time. You could elevator pitch it as “What if characters from Clueless were vampires?” and I would not be surprised if that was, more or less, the actual pitch.

Alicia Silverstone reunited with Heckerling and teamed with Krysten Ritter. Ritter is Stacy, who was turned into a vampire in the 1990s, and soon thereafter she meets Silverstone’s Goody. Goody is an old-school vampire from the 1840s, but to try and help Stacy adjust and to be less lonely pretended to be from a similar age. As the film begins, the two are besties living it up in New York and, crucially, surviving on rat blood because they are cool and chill vampires unless the gal who turned them, played by a scenery-chewing, having-a-ton-of-fun Sigourney Weaver. Also, Wallace Shawn is there.

There are complications and love stories and Richard Lewis has a surprisingly large role. The movie utterly flopped and rang the death knell for Heckerling as a filmmaker, but honestly I liked watching Vamps. It’s more “fun” than “good,” but I enjoyed the experience. It’s goofy as hell but one-out-of-three goofy moments is genuinely entertaining, and then one out of three is entertaining in its dumbness/silliness. Then, yeah, the other third of it just doesn’t work, but I said it was fun, not a god damn masterpiece.

The first time I did one of these bookend pieces, I was looking at Joe Dante, who hasn’t directed anything since Burying the Ex. That’s a tough movie to bow out on. Vamps, on the other hand, is a totally fine, and mostly apropos, curtain call for Heckerling. One, Silverstone stars in it, and those two will always be intertwined in the cultural tapestry. Two, Amy Heckerling’s Vamps is an Amy Heckerling comedy that feels like a successful version of her “thing” and it didn’t work. She could say to that, “You aren’t buying what I’m selling anymore? Fine!” and walk away. Keep collecting Clueless residuals or something. In Vamps, a lot of the vamps feel like eternal life kind of sucks. You can’t direct movies forever, and maybe you shouldn’t want to.