little darlings: formative

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1980. dir: Ronald F Maxwell) Amazing to think this was R-rated when it emerged. There's no nudity beyond Matt Dillon stripping down to his skivvies (far more heat-inducing, as I recall, than that later, too-much-ballyhooed Tom Cruise underwear-dance in Risky Business). There's relatively little cussing, and no violence outside of one well-deserved girl-punch to a nose and an unconvincing, momentary girl-fight. There's a lot of teen smoking, but the ratings board didn't care about smoking back then, it was just part of the cycle of life and death. A couple of the hoodier teens drink some lame-looking canned beer, but the only drugs are the ginseng pills the hippie-girl (Cynthia Nixon!) dispenses to encourage sexiness.

And that has to be the crux of the matter, that awkward, teenaged focus on the Sexiness. Carted off to summer camp, rich teen Ferris (Tatum O'Neal, badly cast and looking too old for the role) and tough girl Angel (the kind of kid who in those days would have been called, not consciously derogatorily, believe it or not, just as a matter of identification, a "dirtbag"), played with stunning truth and vulnerability by Kristy McNichol, find themselves the object of a camp-wide bet: whoever loses their virginity first wins. It may be that the upgrade from PG to R came because it was girls, and not boys, doing the clumsy, innocent exploring. In any case, most of it is not so much about sex as it is about the weird things our peers, parents, and society try to make us believe about it, and how adolescence is the time when the discrepancy has to be confronted and somehow reconciled.

Amazing, also, to think that a human of the male persuasion was even allowed to direct it, it's so distinctly about and aimed at young girls, but those were days when women weren't much allowed behind the camera, I guess. (Who did we have in America back then? Seidelman, Amy Heckerling, Martha Coolidge, Penelope Spheeris, and that's about it for the early part of the decade, right?) Maxwell, who would eventually find his true work in Civil War epics (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals), does a creditable job with a woman-penned script (by Kimi Peck and Darlene Young).

Anyone who went to summer camp back then will tell you the kids had nowhere NEAR that amount of autonomy, it was all about regimentation, and that the Armand Assante character, an athletics counsellor chosen by Ferris for The Deed, would not have forgiven her so fully and quickly for so nearly destroying his reputation and possibly his career. But the stumbling into sex that Angel and Dillon's Randy do, a rushed and unwieldy but heartfelt courtship leading to a deflowering in a boathouse, becomes a wonderful unfolding when Angel opens up afterward, saying she didn't expect it to be "so personal", then, "God, I feel so lonesome." As a girl of the same age watching it in the theater at the time, it was jaw-droppingly thought-provoking. (We grew up in the '70s. This was just before AIDS hit. We weren't taught that sex was personal. Everything in our culture told us if you took it too seriously, you were a drag.)

The emphasis on friendship between the girls being the important object in the end, after Angel (with wisdom I remember envying) turns down Randy's offer to start over again (she points out that it's too late, as they'd begun in the middle) is a truth I didn't recognize at the time. When you're fifteen, you take your girlfriends for granted; it's the boys who are the fathomless, life-consuming mystery.