Valley Girl (1983)

Because TIFF is hosting an ongoing late night series dedicated to him this season, and because we believe (actually) that he might be the essential American actor of the last 30 years, we present Caged Wisdom, a series of essays about the films of Nicolas Cage.

Like most worthwhile romances, Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl takes its cues, loosely, from Romeo And Juliet. But like most worthwhile cinematic romances, it’s really taking its cues from Robert Wise’s West Side Story. It’s not ancient blood feuds or political quarrels that divide the characters played by Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage; instead, it’s the even muckier mires of the cultural divide.

Valley Girl’s ostensibly incompatible lovers—couture valley gal Julie (Foreman) and devil-may-care Hollyweirdo Randy (Cage)—connect at a tacky house party where loosey-goosey, terminally mid-80s parents are hand-rolling sushi for a bunch of a high schoolers. All of the big hair and fashionably popped collars blur into the background when the main characters’ gazes meet over the strains of The Payolas’ “Eyes Of A Stranger.” She is from the Valley: cool, well dressed, and affectedly airheaded. And he ... well, who can say what he is, exactly? His feathered bangs are streaked red like Rufio’s, his ties are skinny to the point of seeming one-dimensional, and he hangs around drinking in a dimly lit rock club where The Plimsouls apparently have a permanent residency. 

As Cage’s first major film—following a bunch of uncredited cameos, and second billing in a 1981 Crispin Glover vehicle called Best Of Times—Valley Girl seems slightly revelatory in hindsight, knowing everything Cage has become. Watching Valley Girl is like watching The Third Man, anxiously waiting for Orson Welles to lurch into frame. The seven-and-a-half minutes before Cage materializes—on a beach, glistening in the sun, at once svelte, imposing, and clunky, as if his naturally gawky frame has been overlaid with some lightly sculpted musculature—are interminable. 

Without Cage, Valley Girl would be a joke, a broad attempt to seize on the voguish culture and “Valspeak” patois (“like,” “you know,” “whatever”) that would come off as one-note as Frank and Moon Unit Zappa’s improbably charting 1982 single of the same name. Watching the film’s main quartet of materialistic California high school girls ringing up clothes on their (parents’) MasterCards and slumming about a mall food court calling things “tubular” and “grody” feels like Bret Easton Ellis lite or an adaptation of that Mall Madness board game. Then Cage enters, and the film is unbalanced accordingly.

At the narrative level, Cage’s arrival shakes up Foreman’s routine of blasé, shop-’til-you-drop materialism. Family Ties-style, Foreman’s parents are hippies, making her put-together, young Republican, distaff Alex P. Keaton image seem inertly contrarian and vaguely rebellious. But she’s more like her sandal-wearing folks than she realizes, seeming to crave more than the vagaries of rebellion. Having grown tired of her square-jawed, popular boyfriend (Michael Bowen), she’s on the prowl for something new. And when she spots Cage on the beach in his swim trunks, she’s immediately smitten. Absent his clothes, it’s hard to even tell how different he is. But when the two intercept again at that crucial house party, there’s no denying how Cage stands out from the crowd—dressed in ragged reds and blacks like some punk-rock pirate—with the blazes of his individuality (something we’ll talk about more when we get to Wild At Heart) smoldering beneath his glassy gaze. And while he too is swiftly enamored (“That Julie chick, she is truly dazzling,” he tells his buddy), it seems clear that his lust is not of the aspirational, upwardly mobile variety. He’s not a maladjusted dork trying to get with the cool girl simply to spite the captain of the football team. Rather, in a modest reversal of many rom-com tropes, he’s the romanticized object of desire—the flighty free spirit that can take her away from all of this.

Like a lot of ’80s teen romances of the Hughesian mold, Valley Girl trades in tropes. Foreman and Cage aren’t as much characters (let alone people) as they are stuffed shirts staging the cultural dilemma of “prom queen meets punk.” It’s to the credit of the actors, and Cage especially, that the film resonates beyond how cooked-up its premise seems on paper. As Randy, Cage isn’t just “different” (the word Foreman’s character repeatedly employs to describe him, struggling for something more suitable) but rather dynamic and alive enough to exceed the confines of a film like this.

There’s nothing like Randy in Sixteen Candles or Pretty In Pink. His vacillations between doe-eyed dopiness, manic likeability, and slovenly self-loathing make him seem like a one-man Breakfast Club. (A late-game montage of Cage trying to win back Foreman’s affections, after she’s defected back to her ex-boyfriend, plays like one of those widely circulated YouTube mash-ups of explosive, unchecked Cageiness.) For all of the caricaturing, Cage makes the character feel real. Because, like real people, he is not just one thing: He is happy/sad, mumbling/yelling, and exuberant/depressed, and often he’s all of these things at once. Valley Girl’s greatest triumph is making Foreman’s attraction to Cage seem like more than a penned-in good girl eyeballing a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. And it’s easy to sympathize with Foreman’s fraught fascination with a guy we love to watch but can never quite get a bead on.

It would be hard to imagine another actor who could play Randy or, for that matter, another role that could have launched Cage’s career. As he emerges from the water in Valley Girl, it’s like he’s rising out of some primordial bog, where he’d been marinating until he was finally fit to surface, fully formed. It is precisely because Cage etches his pirouetting L.A. oddball so finely that the film is able to sell its star-crossed romance. Because it’s so easy to understand how someone could fall for him, it’s that much easier to sell the film’s deceptively downbeat ending, in which Cage and Foreman ride off in a commandeered limousine, recalling the uneasy finale of The Graduate. (The connections to Mike Nichols’ coming-of-age classic are further hammered home via a tacked-on Mrs. Robinson plotline involving one of Foreman’s best friends.)

As Cage and Foreman are ferried into the incandescent glow of L.A. night, the sense of melancholy seems to dampen their romance. One of the film’s best scenes is a dating montage set to Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” which gives a sweet sense of gravity to the characters’ mesh-and-lace romance. But when the song plays over the reunited Cage and Foreman and into the end credits, it feels like cliché—it has become “their song,” and so it becomes routine. As their stretch enters the ebb of freeway traffic, the sense is not of a future that’s open wide, but closed off; one which will fall into tedium and disrepair when Foreman’s dazzle fades and Cage’s defining difference becomes more and more unremarkable, day after day. What will become of them when their romance stands unopposed? What will happen to Cage’s invigorating vitality when he has to do something other than manage a series of grand romantic gestures?

Valley Girl raises these questions gently, but it does so insistently. And these questions elevate the film above the heap of ’80s American teen movies. Valley Girl tempers its pink-pretty romance and its de rigueur synth-pop soundtrack with intimations of fatalism that are true to the Shakespearean source material. Like all the best Cage performances, Valley Girl distinguishes itself by colouring just outside the lines.