On Jennifer Jason Leigh Part I
Fast Times at Ridgemont High in Conversation with A Filmography That Often Veers into the Extreme
Retrospectively, nearly all of my favorites in my teenage years make sense. Loving David Lynch, Michael Haneke, The Looney Tunes, The Beach Boys, anarcho-punk, James Dean, Todd Haynes films, Chuck Palahniuk (reader, I have regrets), Tennessee Williams, and certain actresses all aligned with my interior tensions: hating how I looked, wanting to look more masculine, rage, traumas from childhood, traumas from my teenage years that somehow were not worthy of getting actual psychiatric counseling, inability to find a word for something that is now just so obvious, yearning for something better but just finding myself stare into an abyss, and that static was the only form of safety and survival.
The ‘certain actresses’ part is an umbrella term that a few women of the past and present fall under. Films were an escape for me. Hardly a revelatory or notable statement to make, particularly as a queer person, outsider, social misfit, or all of the above. It is also not particularly novel for the queer man that I am to be drawn to actresses, especially of a bygone era be it Natalie Wood, Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, Gena Rowlands, Joan Crawford, film noir femme fatales like Lizabeth Scott, or your pick of a Tennessee Williams heroine. Broken birds, broken women, hard women, or defiantly too modern for their then contemporary trappings, these performers linger and stay with me. I was not attracted to their femininity or rewrite on femininity or aspired to be them but they all had something to say about their stifling, untenable surroundings in some significant way that informed their performances, some of the best committed to film, in my humble opinion. These actresses did have the ability to make their interiority and inner turmoil be readable for audiences. Something in their body, their personality, how they said words, or gave looks. Perhaps that is where my appreciation lies the most as the fact that when you cannot explicitly express your disappointment or problem to an understanding public, it infects and recalibrates your whole body in ways that can get beyond your own control. While most of these actresses are dead or whose works are firmly in the past, I also have similar love for more contemporary active actresses like Isabelle Huppert, Jodie Foster, the late Adrienne Shelley, Julianne Moore, Laura Dern, Alfre Woodard, Elisabeth Moss, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. JJL was, in fact, probably the earliest actress of this group that drew me in as a teenager. My entry point to her though was, however, a little unusual if ridiculous.
Does anybody remember the tabloid series E! True Hollywood Story? It feels lost in the history of a changing TV landscape where the cable channels all gave way to unscripted reality programming and left old gossip just hang around on the internet either to be relitigated or passed around for younger generations to discover something like the relationship of Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins as if it was brand new information. In the pre-Keeping Up With the Kardashian world, the E! channel was defined more by Anna Nicole Smith, Joan and Melissa Rivers, Jules Asner, Ted Casablanca, and even a simulcast of Howard Stern’s radio show. But the E! True Hollywood Story was always and forever my favorite. It was a show that I must embarrassingly confess, informed a lot about me as far as my cinephilia, knowledge of Hollywood history of the high-brow, low-brow and middle-brow, and even my queerness. Back then, it felt like the only entertainment show (keep in mind, I was a teenager in Upstate New York who barely had an idea who Harvey Milk was) that talked about homosexuality not as a joke but as a fact of life not just about a person’s life story but retelling gay history through talking about the ways famous people who were closeted still were able to be who they were in certain spaces and acknowledged it to a select group of people. It was how I realized John Waters was more than him making a movie that was the basis of the musical Hairspray and ETHS was my introduction to Michael Musto of The Village Voice, first seen by me dishing on Liza Minnelli’s propensity for marrying gay men. Sure, a lot of it was salacious and the gossip often discussed involved talking heads who ranged from respected biographers to co-stars to hucksters who wanted to cash-in on their questionable associations. But the show also had a wealth of a video and photo archive to spin the tale of how they wanted to talk about a person, behind the scenes of a popular sitcom, or the making of a film that still had you feeling you like you were learning something. The making of the films episodes were a favorite of mine as it would, inevitably, because I was such a mark for the show’s format, have me gain respect for films like say, Dirty Dancing, that I still think is an anachronistic piece of ‘80s poorly pantomiming early ‘60s kitsch but did have a lot going on for it. One such important behind the scenes episode was the making of Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Fast Times is among the pantheon of great Hollywood films on teenagers. A truly important and influential #goteens text. Like Dazed & Confused and American Graffiti, that it has long-lasting cultural currency as opposed to just being a relic of its time of gallerias and stoned surfer bros is that this large ensemble piece featured many young actors and actresses who later became famous. Additionally, Cameron Crowe’s whole backstory as a wunderkind reporter at Rolling Stone magazine who then posed as a high school student (Crowe was then in his early 20s) to research a book that served as the basis for the film he would adapt as his first Hollywood screenplay was in of itself a unique hook for any film’s backstory. And while the way Fast Times is often spoken about does become a case of the male collaborator getting more attention than the female collaborator despite the woman doing the directing, post-Clueless, Amy Heckerling around the release of this episode had begun to earn her due for at the very least having a ‘niche’ of making teenage classics.
Part of Heckerling’s stamp, for me, is the fact this film successfully finesses around serious topics while also still serving the broad comedy moments of Sean Penn’s scene-stealing Jeff Spicoli and Judge Reinhold cranking it to the fantasy of fresh out of the swimming pool Phoebe Cates. This is where the episode of the E! True Hollywood Story becomes essential for me; that this whole teen movie and cultural phenomenon happened and was significant was because the woman behind the camera was defending the content she made in front of the camera and that those fights involved scenes done by its young actress, Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Fast Times is less plot-driven and more a slice of life mosaic of all the various subcultures and student cliques of the fictitious Ridgemont High School in Southern California. While Jeff Spicoli became the avatar of the film there are ostensibly two major characters: brother Brad Hamilton (Judge Reinhold) and sister Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Neither Brad nor Stacy are among the cool kids set and are mostly seen working when not at school, he works at different fast food establishments to pay off a car older than he is while she works at the Ridgemont Mall pizzeria. Brad is outgoing but awkward, the film gets a lot of mileage in making him the comedic punchline. And you, as the viewer, do not mind as he is kind of a twerp and that fantasy scene of imagining her younger sister’s best friend which, once contextualized to the film, is gross and the gag is ultimately turned onto him even having this fantasy in the first place. You do not want to identify with Brad because he is kind of a loser and a little embarrassing. He is a contrast in personality to JJL’s Stacy who is shy and sensitive, the straight woman to her much more outgoing best friend Linda (Phoebe Cates). But Stacy has substance. Her version of sexual curiosity also exists as a fifteen year-old high school sophomore and is, with the exception of Linda teaching her fellatio through baby carrots, not played for laughs. Because to be exploring your sexuality that age as an underage girl does bring its dangers and risks, of which Stacy runs into.
JJL’s career on film from the very start has been about experiencing some of the most extreme traumas any woman can ever experience. Pre-Fast Times her first film role was as the deaf, blind, and mute Tracy Harris in the slasher The Eyes of a Stranger whose conveyance of vulnerability in knowing something is amiss even if she is not completely aware she is the presence of a murdering rapist elevates the schlocky material. She is a final girl in a horror film who cannot even let out a scream. It is a film-stealing introduction of an actress even if her section of this film is a sleazed up Wait Until Dark rip-off. That same year, she is in the television movie The Best Little Girl in the World, as a teenage cheerleader who develops an extreme eating disorder. In real-life, JJL, who took the role after Jodie Foster dropped out, lost a significant amount of weight for the role. These roles really did set the tone in a career marked with what I would call, to borrow a phrase from my colleague Willow Maclay, the ‘fractured feminine’. JJL bears extremity like no other actress I have ever seen, including Huppert. And there is rarely any valor or heroism in the moments of some of these films in which she survives. If anything she absorbs and internalizes these moments of pain, shame, violence, and sexual violence and these are often synonymous with her not just playing a woman in the world but representing a type of femininity within the male gaze.
So what makes JJL’s turn as Stacy Hamilton work as a conversation piece with the rest of her filmography is how her role and perspective is treated by the gaze of its female director. What happens to Stacy Hamilton in Fast Times is not extreme but instead an extremely relatable and human thing that represents the lives of so many American girls. Early in the film, she meets a much older guy in his mid-twenties. She lies about her age and he believes it. She loses her virginity to him at a baseball dugout. The location itself is demystifying and unromantic as a place to lose your virginity but Stacy’s vulnerability, her stiffness while in the act of pleasure, and whole perspective is keyed in on by Heckerling’s camera. The way Stacy is staring off into space, at the ceiling of the dugout than really enjoying herself is perhaps the easiest to pinpoint moment that this film was shot by a female director. It is heartbreaking scene. But Stacy continues to express more sexual interest in boys, brushing it off as a bad first time and focusing more on guys in her age group. She initially vies for the nerdy but sweet Mark “Rat” Ratner (Brian Backer) but then gets serious with Rat’s “friend”, Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), a total player with despicable Cheshire cat smile. They have sex and this time, this sexual interaction is not something she can easily walk away from. Stacy gets pregnant. Damone downplays their relationship when she confides to him she got pregnant and then, insult to injury, bails on Stacy when going to the abortion clinic which forces Stacy into the situation of not only paying for the procedure by herself but having to lie to Brad, initially providing him the ruse that she is meeting up at a bowling alley with friends. Brad sees right through it, his POV shot of seeing his sister in his car mirror when he sees her at the abortion clinic is one of my favorite scenes in the film. He respects Stacy’s right to choose and promises to not reveal this decision she made to anybody. Brad reveals more depth than his self-involved moments suggested earlier in film, but it is all about Stacy getting a break.
There are years upon years of after school television specials on teenage pregnancy that often do place the onus on the young woman, but there is something radical in how Heckerling underplays the act of Stacy’s pregnancy’s termination. The scene itself was a major topic in the making of the film. In Reagan-era America, there did exist embolden anti-abortion groups and conservative parents-group who would disapprove of any film or form of media who tackled this topic. I recall in the E! True Hollywood Story episode that there was some sponsorship that the film lost due the fact that sponsor got word there was an abortion in the film, but I have not been able to corroborate which sponsor. Crowe and Heckerling were steadfast in wanting this storyline to remain in the film and Crowe has gone on to credit Heckerling’s persistence in not only having the scene stay in but to not make it salacious or an act of immaturity or make Stacy be the object of ridicule or shame. The film and script are firmly pro-Stacy and Damone becomes the only teen that is treated like an outright villain. Linda Barrett enters the pantheon as one of the great best friends in movies by tagging Damone’s car with, ‘PRICK’. He deserved it.
Films that show abortion as an existing medical procedure that many women, regardless of situation or background, use remains rare with that puts Fast Times in rare cinematic company. Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always being recently released digitally joins that group although from what I have read, it does differentiate from Fast Times in how it approaches telling the situation of its young woman. For Fast Times, the abortion storyline is what really grounds it into being more than just a riff on the ‘kids of today’ circa 1982 and it is difficult to imagine a better performer to be at the center of that storm of a storyline than Jennifer Jason Leigh.
After the E! True Hollywood Story, I became a fan of JJL. I sought out her work, trying my best to see all of her roles and try to get a read on why she chose the roles she did. It has been a commitment that has me simultaneously in full admiration and still full of curiosity. There are still times I do not think she has ever really gotten her due despite being an actress who was, for a while, one of the most fascinating film careers to watch unfold. I cannot think of a better representative of the changing 1990s film landscape than of Jennifer Jason Leigh. She still works and chooses projects that really do underscore her remarkable taste in choosing great directors and films, but I still think there is a lot more there for people to admire and discuss about her gifts as an artist. That part will make up a bulk of my next piece.