I never saw it, never had any curiosity about it. Maybe I would have if I had known how odd it was. It was on DVD in the public library and I recently watched the Brooke Shields doc on Hulu. so I checked it out.
I knew it was about a teen who sets his girlfriend's house on fire when he's not allowed to see her anymore. Strictly speaking, he could see her at school. He just couldn't have sex with her in her parents' living room.
I assumed the fire setting was a physical manifestation of his burning adolescent passion. It turned out to be a George Costanza-like plan to put out the fire so he'd look like a hero and could start sleeping with his 15-year-old girlfriend again. And it turned out that this happened at the halfway mark in the movie. It goes on for another hour after that. He was a high school senior, I suppose an 18-year-old, so he was facing 20 years for arson, but the judge kindly sent him to a mental hospital.
There was a line in it early on. Brooke Shields' brother tells the boyfriend, David, that just because he's sleeping with his sister, it doesn't mean he's a member of their family. David wants to be part of their Bohemian family. His relationship wasn't incestuous, but he wished it were. The mother is a writer and the father, even though he's a doctor, plays the trumpet with a band they hired to play in their living room for some reason.
So there's this semi-incestuous thing. The mother is dangerously open-minded. She gets up in the night, looks downstairs, sees David violating her daughter in the living room and smiles approvingly. It turns out she has a thing for the young fellow herself.
The father later sees David naked in his daughter's bedroom. She's wrapped in a sheet and goes in and shuts the door. Instead of chasing him out of his house, the father complains to his wife. Says that a girl like her shouldn't go with the first guy she meets, like he thinks she's hot.
As an MD, shouldn't he have noticed David's mental health issues?
I saw this at the time (kinda my generation, I was 20 when the movie was in theaters). Besides being another opportunity to exploit Brooke Shields's (projected) sexuality, it struck me that the parents were being repudiated as irresponsible ex-hippie types who had brought on tragedy with their "permissiveness". The sort of "renunciation of the counter-culture" text that would become increasing popular as the Reagan era progressed.
ReplyDeleteThat's true, although in the movie it was a strange mix. She could sleep with her boyfriend as long as she kept her grades up.
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