I Netflix'ed "Say Anything" and I'm watching it right now while I fold the laundry. Well, okay, right nowI'm blogging, but I'm in the middle of folding the laundry.
Embarrasingly enough, I decided to see the movie again because it was on a list, somewhere on the Internet, of the best movie sex scenes. Or the best quirky movie sex scenes? Anyway, I was surprised. I did not remember any sex scene in Say Anything; if you asked me, I would have said Diane Court and Lloyd Dobbler haven't had sex yet when they get on the airplane.
What I remember is this: I went to see the movie in the spring of my freshman year of college, with my roommate and the boy who would be my boyfriend in another six months. They both went to single-sex private high schools. As we walked home from the Eric Garden, weirdest-named movie theater in America, we talked about what a good movie it was.
One of them said, "Wow. That graduation party at the beginning."
"I know!" I put in, "I have been to so many parties exactly like that. It was so brilliant, so evocative..." I trailed off as I realized they were both looking at me in horror. They thought the party was appalling debauchery; they fervently hoped it was a satrical exaggeration.
I identified not only with the kind of high school depicted, and the kind of people Lloyd hung out with, but also with Diane's position as the Brainy Girl who doesn't get to know most people until the end of senior year. I have never been as beautiful as Ione Skye, but I think I was that type...soft-looking. Fresh-faced.
There was no Lloyd Dobbler in my life. A couple of would-be Lloyd Dobblers asked me out in high school, and I ran screaming, basically. I only wanted, as Woody Allen says in "Annie Hall," to belong to a club that was not interested in having me as a member. As a consequence I spent most of high school without a boyfriend, which was probably for the best.
PS: Wikipedia has a list of all the (many) pop culture references to "Say Anything," mostly consisting of people holding boomboxes over their heads.
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1 comment:
well, one difference between you and me is that you actually *went* to those parties! I know my high school had them, but I was too under the radar to even go. Plus, I don't know that anyone asked me out, would-be Lloyd Dobbler or not.
I, too, had to think very, very hard to remember a sex scene between the two of them (and I still pretty much just remember that it must have happened, since she got in that big fight with her dad).
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