*****
Over the Edge
Director: Jonathan Kaplan
Genre: Drama
Publisher: Orion Pictures Corporation
Released: 1979
MPAA Rating: PG
Cast: Michael Eric Kramer, Pamela Ludwig, Vincent Spano, Matt Dillon
Guns, Drugs, Sex, Cheap Trick, and Ugly Architecture
A Review by Jody Beth Rosen
07/18/2001
My obsession with Over the Edge started when I was about 10 years old. One afternoon, as was my routine at the time, I turned on the boob tube and plopped myself down on the living-room sofa.
There was a "premium" movie channel on. The straight-to-cable action-adventure dreck that usually hogged the airtime was replaced by a grainy, faded print—it looked like one of the '70s education-specials PBS used to rerun in the middle of the night. The first shot was of a billboard. It read:
Welcome to New Granada: "Tomorrow's City...Today"
Over the Edge was one of a string of movies made in the late '70s and early '80s characterizing teenagers as the little snots they were. It signified a return to the type of juvenile-delinquency tales so prevalent in the ‘50s (Rebel Without a Cause).
The films made in the late ‘70s ranged from the serious (Foxes, Little Darlings, Carrie) to the slapstick-comical (The Bad News Bears, and in a slightly older age range, Animal House). In the early ‘80s, the trend continued with Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
I especially liked Over the Edge because the teens in it reminded me of the type of kid I was becoming. I had never seen any film, mainstream or otherwise, that had given such an accurate rendering of the culture of disenfranchised youth (those wouldn’t have been my words at the time though—I just thought the violence and mayhem were "cool").
In 1978, according to the message that opens Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge, 110,000 kids in the United States were arrested for vandalism. And in that decade, 25 percent of the population was 15 or younger.
Rather than find out why teenagers were acting this way, Kaplan (along with screenwriters Tim Hunter and Charles S. Haas) decided to make a movie that portrayed the kids as they really lived, and the situations they were up against.
The story focuses on Carl Willis (good kid, good home, starting to fall in with the wrong crowd, Cadillac-salesman father who drinks more than he should), played by Michael Eric Kramer. He and the other teenage residents of New Granada spend most of their time in the planned community's recreational center (known as "The Rec"). The Rec is an aluminum-sided albatross—a glorified bread box with windows.
The town’s planners failed to make good on the bowling alley and drive-in theatre they promised (they ran out of money), and The Rec is the only place for the kids to go. There are no malls, no job opportunities—the kids stand around and play ping pong and score some hash when the supervisor isn’t looking.
Over the Edge is photographed beautifully (thanks to cinematographer Andrew Davis). It shows a static, dirty sky, in a Colorado where the climate never seems to change—and a landscape of weeds and dust. Some shots linger for minutes—the camera pans away from a character’s silhouette walking home at dusk through the typical New Granada overgrowth.
The interiors are straight out of the suburban ‘70s as well. The office of the car dealership where Carl’s father works is all wooden doors and orange vinyl chairs. The junior high school Carl and his friends attend has blow-ups of "important" 20th century figures behind the auditorium’s podium. The playground, where the kids go to smoke pot, has one of those large, fiberglass things that look like massive globs of orange swiss cheese.
There are incidental elements—such as a garbage can with a "Have a nice day" smiley face—that might seem ironic or kitschy in a modern take on a ‘70s film, but seem painfully real and poignant here.
Despite its obscurity, Over the Edge was quite influential to ‘90s filmmakers and video directors. (Musicians, too: Early '90s politico-punks Nation of Ulysses reference a line from Over the Edge with a song called "A Kid Who Tells on Another Kid Is a Dead Kid," on their 13-Point Program to Destroy America album.)
The convenience-store scene of Over the Edge brings The Smashing Pumpkins’ "1979" video to mind. (The song's title reminds me that Over the Edge was released that year.)
Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused lifted a few details from Over the Edge, most notably the scenes in which Carl is sulking in his bedroom, staring at his rock and sci-fi/fantasy posters, music blaring from his humongous headphones.
The feel of Over the Edge, including the bleak, dreamlike landscapes, and the wall-to-wall hard-rock soundtrack (still a rarity in the ‘70s), shows up in Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides.
Another similarity strikes me about Over the Edge and The Virgin Suicides—the underlying theme of decay.
Everything in New Granada is created and left to rot. The school sucks, the facilities and opportunities are depressingly grim, perhaps nonexistent—or were promised and forgotten about. Carl and his friends hang out at an unfinished condo complex (at one time, it supposedly boasted "European living," says Carl) that has been abandoned due to lack of development funds.
New Granada hasn’t turned out to be the booming success its developers had anticipated, and they’re looking to a couple of wealthy Texan investors for the money to build an industrial park to stand where the bowling alley and drive-in would have been placed.
Everyone in town is aware of this, and tries to handle it in a different way. The schools do it by showing cautionary films about vandalism, and threatening suspension for smoking on school property. The police chief does it by enforcing a curfew and seeing to it that the recreational center (which he suspects is the root of all the kids’ mischief) is shut down. He warns the teens to shape up or be sent to "The Hill" (juvenile prison). The kids just do more drugs and get into more fights.
Carl’s best friend is Richie White (Matt Dillon), a thuggish, mullet-haired kid who’s always being hassled by the cops. It’s curious to note that his mother is a dyed-in-the-hemp hippie (when Richie and Carl steal her car, they find a Hendrix tape and a joint inside)—proving that even children of the ‘60s, with their flower baskets full of good intentions, can make neglectful parents.
Richie’s mom, who makes a brief appearance in the movie, is a ditzy drifter—she has only made three payments on her car ("The goddamn bank owns it," Richie says). After leaving town in the car with Carl, Richie yells out "Bye bye, New Granola!"
But most of the adult figures in Over the Edge aren’t so laid-back.
They use the buzzwords of the Clueless Grownup ("growth plan"; "high property resale value"). The cops’ language is as offensive as the kids’. It often resorts to homophobic taunts ("When you two stop making out in those bushes I’d like to talk to you," the Chief of Police tells Carl and Richie).
Homophobia rears its head in the kids’ dialogue too ("All they got in Texas is steers and queers"; "You just remember to keep your mouth shut, faggot").
I suppose Over the Edge is a "guy movie"—it’s about guy friendships, guy oaths ("A kid that tells on another kid is a dead kid"), the guy (Carl) getting the girl (Cory, played by Pamela Ludwig), and plenty of guy posturing and guy tough-talk and in the end, guy violence. Being a "man" is important to the men of Over the Edge, regardless of their age or position in life.
Of course, "real" men aren’t parents or teachers. They lay down the law, if need be, but they’re not the best providers of love or guidance.
Why do kids like Carl come home with black eyes, or not come home at all? Maybe, as one teacher points out in an emergency meeting at the school’s "Cafetorium," it’s because when parent-teacher conferences are held, no one shows up (especially not the dads, who are probably drinking their night away at the sports bar).
Yet the attitude that permeates Over the Edge is Won’t somebody think of the children? Sometimes those sentiments are said in earnest; sometimes they’re meant to mock that whole disingenuous-parent culture. Over the Edge asks an important question: If everyone’s so concerned about the damned children, how come you know so little about your children’s lives?
More on Over the Edge itself, and less on the questions it raises:
The soundtrack is bursting with Cheap Trick, The Ramones, The Cars, and Van Halen. Music is important to these kids—it’s always booming from someone’s headphones, or car radio, or at someone’s party. Balancing the rock soundtrack rather nicely is an original score by Sol Kaplan (every so often, during Over the Edge’s more intense moments, an avant-garde flute line will pop up from out of the blue and disappear, adding to the pervasive eerieness).
The acting is nothing special. The kids hired were mediocre actors (including the young Matt Dillon and Vincent Spano) instead of polished child prodigies, and truth be told, that makes them all the more believable to me. They’re rough, filthy, and ugly, like the teenage brats in Larry Clark’s Kids. You don’t come away feeling cheated by their performances, even if they were plucked straight outta Central Casting.
The detail Kaplan uses to create the visual and emotional atmosphere of New Granada is absolutely meticulous. If you squint, you can see a few pathetic-looking flowers sticking up from the rocks and weeds of the empty fields. There is usually a bit of garbage tucked away in the backdrop of each exterior scene. The school is shabbily decorated with a droopy flag; cheap folding chairs; ugly, bulbous skylight bubbles; and tacky, environment-themed models and dioramas. Much of the architecture is either round or brown.
Over The Edge is a classic that has worked itself into the collective unconscious in more ways than most casual moviegoers realize. It affected me the first time I saw it, and has done so every time since (especially in light of Littleton—this was set in suburban Colorado).
I’m always amazed to learn that people I know (film buffs, even!) haven’t heard of Over the Edge or haven’t gotten around to seeing it. I consider it a favorite, both as a document of ‘70s nostalgia and a masterpiece of sensitive, observant filmmaking.
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