Jeff Spicoli, you were awesome, bud, but you were not the true star of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Nor were Phoebe Cates’ awesome buds. This year, the most poignant cinematic time capsule from the Reagan Era celebrates its 25th anniversary, and that’s as good an excuse as any to finally honor the cast-members most responsible for its poignancy. First, the Ridgemont Mall, and second, Ridgemont High’s three Pat Benatar lookalikes.
At the time of its release, the most notable aspect of Fast Times was its depiction of the adolescent libido. Pretty much every other teen sex comedy of the era—Porky’s, Losin’ It, My Tutor, The Last American Virgin, Risky Business—focused on fumbling tadpoles and their obsessive efforts to bed older women, usually hookers, because obviously girls their own age didn’t do that sort of thing. Or at least the nice ones didn’t.
In Fast Times, however, hot-to-trot Stacy Hamilton and her more cosmopolitan pal Linda Barrett were just as horny as the boys. Maybe even hornier. They weren’t from the wrong side of the tracks either, or Satan’s dope-sniffing brides. They were Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates, two actresses with higher adorability quotients than a litter of newborn Mormon kittens.
And they weren’t just wasting their hormones on soft-focus daydreams about what would it be like to be the star quarterback’s loyal wife—they were banging stereo salesmen in baseball dugouts and deep-throating root vegetables in the cafeteria of Ridgemont High!
For some viewers, this was apparently too much to bear. “I went to a sneak preview thrown by a rock radio station, and the audience had come for a good time,” Roger Ebert fretted in his 1982 Chicago Sun-Times review of Fast Times. “But during a scene involving some extremely frank talk about certain popular methods of sexual behavior, even the rock fans were grossed out.”
But however revolutionary the sex was in Fast Times, it takes a backseat to the mall, at least in retrospect. In George Romero’s 1978 consumer zombie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, the mall is the cluttered, schlocky, flourescent nightmare where American culture goes to die. But Dawn was shot in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where they obviously didn’t know how to build malls.
Fast Times, on the other hand, was shot at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. It presents the mall in all its neon-and-marble magnificence, and it documents, more evocatively than a thousand sociology dissertations ever could, what grand and liberating palaces of commerce such structures were in their heyday. High school may have been the place where Ridgemont’s teens went to get their diplomas, but the mall was both their true institute of higher learning and also the economic engine that fueled their fast times.
Of all the major characters in Fast Times, only Spicoli was happily idle; the rest spent more time at their jobs than their adult contemporaries on Cheers ever did. Moms and dads were invisible in Ridgemont because they weren’t necessary—the kids had their own money to support themselves. And the mall served as the perfect turnkey temple of teen autonomy. It gave them paychecks. It fed them in its food court. It clothed them at Contempo Casuals. It entertained them with its video arcade, its movie theater, its record shops. It was their richest source of potential boyfriends and girlfriends and their all-purpose style mentor.
But the mall, alas, was not a particularly efficient mentor. Look at Fast Times today, and what’s immediately striking about it is how gawky and untutored in the methods of cool everyone is. Even Spicoli is pretty dweeby, and only the Phoebe Cates character possesses the beauty that is now required to land a role in, say, High School Musical. The rest wouldn’t even qualify as extras.
And that’s why Ridgemont’s three Pat Benatar clones are so pivotal. A month before Fast Times started shooting, MTV debuted, and the second video it aired featured Pat Benatar sporting a short, punky hairstyle and New Wave attire. This was a completely new look for Benatar; its remarkably fast trickle-down appearance in Fast Times was both an indication of the awesome impact MTV would have on pop culture and a eulogy for those simpler times when America’s kids could still expect to spend at least a few moments of their childhoods free from the harassment of hipster lifestyle marketers. Fast Times closes with a series of images of the mall shutting down for the night; little did we know the real selling had only just begun.