Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

But I can’t do it. Some instinct — or the memory of Angel’s stricken face, her bewildered loneliness in the aftermath of sex — says, Wait : This is an important something, and you do not have to make this important something happen right now . There is no contest, no race to a finish line. And as sweet and tender as this man-boy of mine is, he only tussles and pleads so respectfully so far— a kid your age! — and by September he gives up, and it is over.

I am torn between relief and devastation ( Virgins are weird, right? ); I dramatically take to my bed for several days, an abandoned, rejected Juliet, pretending I have the flu. I feel so very alone, and yet — thank you, Angel! — I know it is better to feel lonesome without him than feel lonesome with him. I am ready for the longing, yes, but not the consummation; I am not ready to be possessed — or to possess — because I am not yet in possession of myself. I am not ready to be seen-through ; I need my invulnerable opacity, the embroidered nightgown, just a little while longer.

LINDA

Stacy, what are you waiting for? You’re fifteen years old! I did it when I was thirteen. It’s no huge thing, it’s just sex,

counsels so- mature Linda (Phoebe Cates), The Worst Best Friend in the World, to baby-faced Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in Fast Times at Ridgemont High . 26Stacy has just started high school (filmed in the unnamed San Fernando Valley, where I live), she and her friends work at the Mall (the unnamed Sherman Oaks Galleria, where I have spent my teenage years eating corn dogs and buying tank tops while waiting for life to flicker on), and everyone is singularly obsessed with sex: Getting it, talking about it, puzzling through the shifting boundaries of physical and emotional intimacy while trying to pretend it is, of course, no huge thing : It’s just sex .

Stacy worries whether or not she will be any good in bed, and Linda assures her there is no such silly question of “good” or “bad”: “You either do it, or you don’t.” The actual experience is meaningless — it’s all about getting to list it on your résumé. She is appalled Stacy has never given a blow job, and, with patient-teacher voice (“It’s so easy, there’s nothing to it, relax your throat muscles. .”), gives her an impromptu lesson using a carrot in the school cafeteria — it’s free advertising for the boys leering nearby. There is so much pressure to do it already, get it over with, what are you waiting for, what’s the big deal, what’s wrong with you? It is a culture of disdain for and diminishing of any aspect of sexuality beyond the genital, a celebration of cool-chick emotional indifference. It is, in a way, sex reduced once again to a cartoony, two-dimensional paper cutout. Insert Penis A in Vagina B; it’s so easy, a child could do it, and you’re already fifteen !

And then the loss-of-virginity moment: Stacy has found her Romeo/Gary/Randy, a twenty-six-year-old Guy she served pizza to at the Mall and told she is nineteen. After being tucked into her stuffed-animal-festooned twin bed by her mom (“Good night, Stacy!” mom chirps), she sneaks out the window and waits at the corner for his chariot to arrive, while Jackson Browne croons on the diegetic soundtrack how that girl’s just got to be somebody’s baby, she’s so fine . . The Guy tells her she looks beautiful — smooth, this guy, I can almost smell the Aramis — and suggests they go to The Point, the local baseball dugout/sex lair. And here, as in Little Darlings , director Heckerling focuses on the female experience rather than the male; the Guy kisses her, teases whether or not he’ll get to first base — an oblique request for permission to proceed, the Guy’s not an asshole — unbuttons her shirt and crawls on top of her. But we barely even see his face; it is Stacy we focus on, her wincing in pain and unease, her dissociative stare at the graffiti over his shoulder. The scene’s final visual is a long shot; we are suddenly watching them from a distance in the dark, reflecting the emotional detachment of the moment, watching the Guy’s white naked body pumping away.

JACKSON BROWNE

She’s probably somebody’s only light

Gonna shine tonight

Make her mine tonight

Yeah, she’s probably somebody’s baby, all right. . 27

The next day, Stacy tells Linda “it hurt so bad !” (referencing the physical pain), and Linda’s sage, so- mature counsel is: “Don’t worry, just keep doing it, it gets better,” meaning that with Stacy now liberated from that annoying virginity-albatross — cherry popped, hymen broken, maidenhood breached, the terminology just gets worse — the act can become even more meaningless, now, hooray. And for most of the movie Stacy follows Linda’s advice, hoping to figure out or find that something of value, about sex, about boys, about herself. She tries, and fails, to sexualize an adorable restaurant date with an equally virginal nerd who’s been crushing on her, then seduces the nerd’s cooler best buddy, which results in another dreadful scene of clumsy genital mechanics that leaves her lying there, naked and vulnerable and hurt as he scurries away. She winds up pregnant, has to ask the guy to chip in for an abortion, has to get a ride to the clinic from her brother. . the sadness, loneliness, and confusion just keep snowballing along.

But for me this isn’t a “wages of sin” lesson. Heckerling isn’t judging Stacy; this is not a “Don’t Lose Your Virginity” story: It’s a “How Not to Lose Your Virginity” tale. This film, so familiar to me in its geographical landmarks and teenage angst-ridden sexual strategizing, is an instructive, confirming deterrent. I am now eighteen, I am still a virgin — Linda would be so horrified — and watching this movie, I am so relieved that I withdrew from the contest, took myself out of the running, that I resisted the Danas and Lindas and older Guys in their slick cars. Stacy finally works up the nerve to tell Linda: “I figured it out. I don’t want sex. Anyone can have sex”—she wants a relationship , and romance; a screen scroll at the movie’s end tells us Stacy and the sweet nerdy boy are still dating, but they “still haven’t gone all the way,” and that is the coming-of-age charm that elevates Fast Times at Ridgemont High above the usual teen-sex-comedy fare. Like Stacy, I’ve learned I want to be somebody’s baby, too. I want to be somebody’s only light. I want the loving gaze as well as the lustful one, the meeting-of-souls balcony tryst with someone willing to risk death for me, a someone who will so overwhelm me with his beauty I am in haste to shed modesty and clothes and girlhood and throw my full-length womanly nakedness upon him. And I’m glad I could learn that without having to publicly fellate a carrot (thanks for the tips, though) or lie wincing on a baseball dugout bench.

However. . by the time I am twenty years old, I find myself identifying with Stacy’s concern that the whole world is having sex but her, that she is being left behind, left out of all the fun. I am once again hearing: Do it already, get it over with, what are you waiting for, what’s the big deal? But the difference is, this time the voice is mine. I have aged out of the contest, the sweepstakes is over (although I am at last almost old enough to do it with camp counselor Gary. .), and I have, by now, eagerly watched enough sex in mainstream movies (and the rare pre-Internet porn video), ranging from soft-filter love-making to relatively graphic fucking, to have accumulated a stockpile of instructive and stimulating images.