A Gen X introvert’s Baby Boomer dad uproots their family from New York and moves them across the country to a prefab Arizona suburb. Gifted a short-wave radio to keep in touch with his friends back east, the isolated and disoriented Mark finds an outlet for his existential angst as a pirate radio shock jock. But tragedy and controversy ensue when he goes too far.
That’s the setup for 1990’s teen dramedy Pump Up the Volume. If you’ve never seen this movie before, you can be forgiven for thinking it fit into the early 90s urban youth genre alongside Juice, Menace II Society, and Boyz n the Hood. The soundtrack wouldn’t entirely disabuse you of that notion, either. Because this movie, like its contemporary Uncle Buck, was one of the first to depict the shift in American teen music preference from rock & roll to rap.
Related: Of Hip-Hop and Corporate Pop
The film’s portrayal of Gen X disillusionmnet is also reminiscent of the post-Ground Zero movie SLC Punk! which author JD Cowan mentions here. But upon recent viewing, Pump Up the Volume doesn’t handle that material quite as well. It features the same themes of identity crisis, rapid societal change thwarting established rites of passage, and Boomers selling out after causing those drastic changes. Just on a more superficial level.
In anoher odd and rather specific similarity with Repo Man, a third punk-coming-of-age film, Pump Up the Volume casts ex-hippie radicals as fans of Evangelical preachers for some reason.
Yes, the kids in Pump Up the Volume are confused and aimless. But conspicuously, their confusion and depression are only expressed in the most nebulous terms. In one on-the-air rant, Mark’s alter ego Hard Harry goes off on the futility of the dating scene and declares that sex is out. Then in the next, he’s exposing a dweeby guidance counselor for expelling a girl that got knocked up. That subplot of corrupt administrators ejecting undersirables clashes with the lament, made by every young character in the film, that their high school sucks.
If you think about it, the main antagonists’ motives actually overlap with the hero’s. The students who are being expelled are shown to be antisocial, of questionable morals, and, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb. Just how being forced to attend class with such disruptive kids would improve Mark’s high school experience is never explained. Some platitudes about every child’s “right to an education” are thrown around. But that’s beside the point. The problems that Mark, and most of the student body, have are alienation and atomization. Increasing diversity has been proven to worsen, not fix, those issues. Yet an outsized number of the expelled students have last names like Chavez and Garcia. (Unintentionally based Hollywood check?)
The closest Harry comes to identifying the symptoms of his malaise is complaining that there’s nothing to do. It rings hollow to members of Gen Y, who eye shots of a thriving, socially coherent suburb replete with well-stocked video stores, arcades, and music shops. Yet the pirate DJ’s griping isn’t baseless, the 1990s were not optimistic times. and young people then could feel the approach of Cultural Ground Zero. That’s one forgotten aspect of the 90s zeitgeist that Pump Up the Volume does excel in capturing.
Related: The 1990s – Decade of Despair
Another sour note the movie strikes if you spend five seconds considering it is a seething hatred of the flyover states. Mark’s family come from New York, and he can’t shut up about how culturally dead Arizona is by comparison. Keep in mind that this movie came out during an inner city crime wave unequaled till today. It’s no coincidence that the gangster movies mentioned above were popular at this time.
The cinematography takes pains to make Mark’s suburb look sterile, desolate, and artificial. There’s even an oil pipeline running right past his campus. And maybe those visual tricks worked on audiences of the day, but to Current Year eyes, Paradise Hills looks like Heaven on Earth.
It’s probably no accident that Pump Up the Volume’s writer-director Allan Moyle hails from the Eastern Seaboard. The urban hivedweller blinders are apparent in this movie. So is raging case of stage 3 Boomerism. From Gen X-er characters talking about Ice-T “shredding” to their rebellion for rebellion’s sake, Pump Up the Volume smacks of a Boomer making a token effort to explore the challenges and concerns of Generation X but failing to escape the relict mental categories that prevent understanding.
Which brings us to the worst of the movie’s internal contradictions. Every single problem that torments Mark and his classmates is a direct result of their parents having overturned the stable American culture they inherited. From the Sexual Revolution to civil rights, the Boomers’ rebellion deconstructed society. Mark understands on some level that he’s living in the ruins of a once-functional civilization. But his answer is to hammer the rubble into dust by pointlessly rebelling some more.
By the way, the “subversive” antics the kids get up to are portrayed as crimes that demand the feds’ intervention. By the standard of cell phone videos shot every day in Clown World schools, Harry’s fans’ riot looks like a rather tame Wednesday.
Related: The Boomer Black Hole
If you want a movie that accurately captures the look and mood of the early 90s, Pump Up the Volume is your jam. Just be aware of the subversive messaging, which is frankly so incoherent that it’s more apt to leave you confused than convinced. Bigger issues are the vulgar language spewed and degenerate situations at least simulated on screen. This movie is rated R for a reason.
To be honest, we’re probably better off letting the 90s lie in their grave instead of burning incense over it.
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