Speaking of Revolution & The Disease of the Oyster: Pump Up The Volume
This is the fourth and final article in a series regarding free speech and reactionary politics in a personal set of case studies.
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
It starts with Lenny Bruce.
Mark Hunter, the alienated and politically disaffected teenager played by Christian Slater in Pump Up The Volume (1990), is shown to have read Bruce’s bestselling book, How To Talk Dirty And Influence People. Part memoir, part recusal, it’s a perfect insight into the mind of the comedian who would become one of the most important figures of the 20th century. No single individual citizen did more to expand our notions of what constitutes free speech, to call out its hypocritical institutional interpretations, to fight for its complete freedom and to illustrate why that freedom should be fought for.
As he gained prominence, Bruce reached something that was a lot more profound than just getting laughs between lounge acts. He took on societal norms and their hypocrisy and absurdity using humor to get at the deeper and darker truths of the stranglehold that power has over the public. His shows began to teach people that performance and humor could undermine authority, threatening its capacity for abuse. The power of language to stir collective action started with taboo-breaking humor, and the laughter that binds us in saying the unmentionable. Then it evolved into something more noble, with more potential for uniting people against their corrupt, repressive government.
I wouldn’t tell you to expect fall-down laughs, but Bruce’s albums are more than worth discovering for studying their revolutionizing of social satire
In the mid 60’s, Bruce’s dismantling of the power structure and its puritanism and hypocrisy on stage brought intense police and judicial scrutiny. Numerous arrests and convictions based on obscenity statutes began to follow him across the country. The American judicial system was undeniably out to get him. His performances were publicly denounced as dirty and sick and courts across the US tried him for obscenity. However at the same time, his performances continued to raise issues that tested the legal system’s capacity (and willingness) to deal with social change. He’d become highly esteemed by many artists and intellectuals of his day, not just for the ideas conveyed in his act, but for encouraging people to fight for their right to express them publicly.
police who found Bruce dead in his bathroom in 1966 propped his naked body onto the toilet for a cheap photo opportunity in a disgusting final act of humiliation typical of police
The comedian openly discussed his legal affairs and convictions on stage, unpacking the Establishment’s slow process of wearing him down and tarnishing his reputation as it was happening. He was always openly suffering, openly demonstrating the consequences and side-effects of his agitation and martyrdom. He was one of the 20th century’s truly visionary artists. His groundbreaking style made him one of the architects for so much of what we recognize today as satire. And his life as a crusader and a revolutionary should be an inspiration to entertainers and individuals regarding the protection of free speech.
Bruce never wanted the role that was thrust upon him. He just wanted to entertain. But constant abrasive irritation is what produces the pearl. It’s what Kenneth Tynan in his foreword for How To Talk Dirty called “The Disease of the Oyster.” He was referring to Gustave Flaubert’s observation about the artist being the Disease of Society, which would have made Lenny Bruce the Disease of America. But in becoming a crusader and martyr, which absolutely killed him in the most tragic way, Lenny Bruce accomplished something else. He was to lay the groundwork in his challenging the perceptions and the purpose of comedy for a new generation in defending its right to free speech as it formed the social movements of the 60’s.
Like Bruce, Slater’s Mark Hunter had no plans to become the underground leader of a student rebellion. Having moved to a drab Arizona suburb located in a wasteland of strip malls and identikit housing developments, he uses a ham radio console in his parents house to broadcast late at night as “Happy Harry Hard-On,” venting his disillusionment between simulated bouts of on-air masturbation. His insights and attitudes are the stuff of Lenny Bruce’s defiance, showing that he’d internalized Bruce’s ideas as well as his honesty and directness in expressing them, with just a hint of Beat poetry to make them shine.
It’s a style of comedy whose very existence is evidence of disease in the body politic. And it’s the great accomplishment of Allen Moyle’s fresh, sincere and genuinely uplifting movie to cast the story of one frustrated, lonely student and the suppressed student body at his high school as a scaled down version of Lenny Bruce’s struggle and the struggle of all anti-authoritation freethinkers to gather together their audience and inspire them to stand up for themselves.
This monologue I believe precedes Harry playing The Descendants 12-second song about whale sperm.
Pump Up The Volume is so lively with ideas, it’s easy to overlook what a smooth and joyful experience it is to watch. It fills you with an energizing and sexy form of elation, the kind Americans used to hope to find at the movies, before the dominant industry devoted its money and creative energy to manufacturing disposable and solitary funhouse rides. When Mark as Happy Harry says to his listeners, “Everything decent’s been done - all the great themes have been turned into theme parks,” he may as well be describing mainstream movie culture. There is not a shred of self-pity or melodrama to be found here. As a story of nonconformist youth rebellion, it’s a quantum leap forward from a turgid and contrived item like Dead Poets Society (made a year earlier), which is too riddled with false movie character behavior and simplistic notions of moral division to work effectively as real drama.
As Happy Harry Hard-On, Mark uses a harmonizer to disguise his voice and his pirate radio show is an aggressive medley of defiant talk and music. He opens his show with Leonard Cohen’s gloom opus “Everybody Knows” (which should replace our national anthem) and any given show will feature a furious bout of mock masturbation (which reveals a lot about his mindset in doing the show) and carefully chosen selection of music - Liquid Jesus, Bad Brains, The Descendants, The Beastie Boys, Ice-T, The Pixies, Cowboy Junkies and Sonic Youth all feature on the wonderful soundtrack.
Mark even goes as far as to set up a P.O. box for his radio persona where he can anonymously collect his fan letters and read them during the broadcast, calling up the senders live on the air. His targets are the hypocrisies and failures of his school and his parents' generation. He attacks homophobia and a school guidance counselor whose indiscretion about another student’s pregnancy got her expelled. He attacks the shallowness and softening of the former 60’s radicals who became the parents of his generation: their compromising of their ideals and overstatement of their historical importance (“look where the 60’s got them”).
For this, he begins amassing a cult following consisting of his fellow students of Hubert Humphrey High (a name that shares the initials of Mark’s radio persona), who begin a ritual of parking their cars at night on the school’s sports field where the reception is best and eagerly awaiting his next ejaculation of truth. Early in the movie, we see students on campus surreptitiously enjoying a profane hip-hop song before the tape is confiscated by a crew-cutted hall monitor. Later, we see the students listening to the song again, but paying closer attention to what turn out to be very poignant and politically incisive lyrics and this process of learning to pay closer attention to detail in both art and spoken language is what becomes Mark’s legacy.
He doesn’t know it, but in questioning just one of the adult world’s bizarre rules, he’s teaching his peers to question them all. He’s creating the conditions for a social atmosphere charged with the possibility of freedom from censorship. As with the hip-hop number, the shock-jock portions of Happy Harry’s show get people listening more closely and then soon, they’re receptive to more complex and challenging ideas. This is what makes Mark so dangerous to the parental order and to his school’s administration, of which his own ex-hippie father (Scott Paulin) is a high ranking member.
This was Lenny Bruce’s strategy and it becomes Mark’s whether he knows it or not. We may bristle at open displays of vulgarity in performance as cheap opportunities for shock - the efforts of a feeble mind to express itself forcefully. But that vulgarity is shown in Pump Up The Volume to be the first step in highlighting a base level of verbal restraint and censorship that’s imposed and self-imposed in daily life. When we realize we’re no worse for the wear in using words we’re told all our lives are “bad,” or discussing subjects that we’re told are off limits - a mentality based on arbitrary puritanical standards regarding language - then a whole world of possibilities opens up in discovering what other lies we’ve been spoonfed in our childhood and what agendas those puritanical standards actually serve. The cuss words are to get you in the door, while the ideas and the agency they inspire are the real dangerous avenues for liberation that authoritarian leadership fears most.
In scenes that are always believable and real, the students begin rallying around the hard truths coming from Harry’s vented spleen every night. With a keen sense of observation that’s rendered with surprising economy, Moyle’s film reveals the way Mark’s radio show begins to shake the students out of their stupor and depression. They learn the most important lesson you can learn in a Democracy - one the American school system with its function of stripping young people of their individuality and turning them into obedient conformists and consumers will never teach: That they’re not alone.
That their feelings of alienation and anxiety are normal. That they have a collective power. That in strengthening their ties as a community, they can be free from censorship and the authoritarian control of an unfeeling school system that seems to be expelling and punishing its perceived undesirables.
The “undesirables” caught listening to Happy Harry
The quote from Hannah Arendt at the top of this piece is wholly applicable here for understanding the process by which totalitarian regimes promote feelings of isolation and terror, crystalizing the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. When this self-recycling state of loneliness is locked in, those regimes then replace it with ideological propaganda. The modern school system and its conditioning of individuals for life in this precarious state of alienation and despair, for which conformity and consumerism are presented as the adult world’s cures, is the perfect setting for a story about how to break out of these cycles.
In a text to be added as a conclusion to The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) upon which she would expand in further studies, Arendt stated that in isolating people from one another, thus preventing a society from collectivizing, they’re cut off from the human condition, making their potential for action and agency within the world impossible. Schooling is where this process of conditioning begins. And if you ask me, it’s a small miracle the way Pump Up The Volume explicitly shows that process, and then goes bravely and radically so far as to present a solution.
Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill was asked in a recent Vox interview what Arendt would have thought of social media. Unsurprisingly, she makes a case that it would conceivably have been Arendt’s nightmare and there’s no telling how much its existence would have complicated this movie if it had been made today
As Mark is eventually tracked down by his more ambitious rebel classmate, Nora (Samantha Mathis), he comes to discover that he’s not alone, despite his low profile as an inarticulate student who never looks up or says a word at school. This is the woman who’s been writing Harry erotic letters in free verse, which he reads on the air while she lays on her bed at home, mouthing the words in unison. Her obsession with tracking him down finds him apprehensive about revealing his identity. This leads to a wonderful scene in which Mark’s parents discover Nora with him in his studio and for the first time it seems they’re proud of him. His sense of acceptance and validation, both from affirming his parents' idea of “normal” and from the fiery and courageous girl who sees something more in him are what motivates him to see that the voice he claims to be waiting for to pick himself up was his very own all along.
Samantha Mathis’s wonderful debut as Nora has her ending her love letters to Happy Harry with the alias “The Beat-Me Lady,” likely referring to her Beat-inspired brand of free verse - one of many references to supposedly embarrassing 60’s counterculture the movie has the nerve to find inspiring
The Mathis character is a woman I’ve known in one form or another all my life. Her conviction and foresight in seeing the work and dedication necessary to push someone she cares for and believes in to reach their full potential is one of many of this movie’s rebukes to the shallow and demeaning ways most movies regard teenagers. She has a spiky energy that I immediately respond to (as the crush I had on Mathis back in the day would evidence). Nora is not simply “The Woman Behind the Man.” She’s one of many vividly rendered characters with her own motivations.
She’s also the backbone of this movie, with none of the inhibitions that limit Mark. There’s a thrilling and intoxicating jolt of energy created by their feelings for each other, as she convinces Mark to embrace and continue his role as an inspiring, galvanizing force for freedom. In its typically careful and respectful fashion, Pump Up The Volume illustrates how intoxicating and erotic unburdening and self-actualization can actually be. Freedom and liberation from restraint, both externally and within oneself, make for the purest breeding ground for sexual or romantic feelings at their most truthful.
Little by little, the divisions between Mark/Harry and his listeners are dismantled and the consequences of this development are something I won’t give away. I’ll stop talking about the story here because its many turns and surprises are part of what gives this consistently effective movie its lift - one it manages to sustain all the way to the end. But it’s extraordinary that as we watch this process unfurl, how applicable it seems to be to the conditions of the rest of American society, particularly at this confusing and frightening juncture.
How instructive all this is, when so many of us seem to feel there is no way out of our mass lingering predicament of agitation, alienation, isolation, greed, corruption, dehumanization and normalized injustice. And consequently, so many of us have retreated into a mentality of hyper-individualism - a dangerous swinging of the pendulum in the opposite direction that makes collective power impossible and eats away at mass democracy.
Where I give Moyle and Pump Up The Volume full credit is in the way its boldness addresses what are shortcomings in today’s art. The great failure of so much contemporary cinema and art, as I see it, is that it’s given up on trying to tell us about the realities of power. That was the function of Art. Its proximity to money is what puts it up to the task - artists being allowed into the inner sanctums of money in a way people like you or I are not. Dramatizing this power in a way that people could understand was the job of Art in a society. To educate people about the nature of social ills and point them towards new ideas and collective agency. But in the second half of the 20th century, Art became possessed by the idea of self-expression. In many circles, Art became a paean to the narcissism of the new age. Music and film and museum works serving only to prop up a naval-gazing culture that overprivileges the worship of Self are of marginal cultural worth. An agitation that does not produce a pearl.
BBC journalist and documentarian Adam Curtis, who I’ll almost certainly be writing about in the future
I agree with BBC journalist and filmmaker, Adam Curtis (Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Hypernormalisation) about this failure of modern culture and especially modern cinema. His numerous essayistic documentaries are mind-twisting counterhistories on the subject of power relations and cultural evolution. “A lot of modern culture can’t say what it thinks because it doesn’t know,” he told Sight and Sound in April of 2021. “There’s a great hunger for change. You can feel it. But no one seems to be coming up with any alternative visions of a future that really grabs you........What we are living through is a generation of liberal progressives who feel that power is moving away from them, and they don’t have any alternative because they’ve run out of steam.”
Moyle’s film shares this idea of 60’s radicalism and its originary generation of boomers who sold out their values as a class that in 1990 had begun to decline. It’s a hard thing to face up to: progressives who imagined radical new social models retreated into culture as American politics went to the right in the 80’s. They thought they had power but Trump and Brexit showed them that large chunks of the working class don’t care about their utopian vision anymore.
That’s one sad realization Pump Up The Volume highlights: the idea that culture can’t really be the radical force for change we think it is. It may just be a space in which to retreat. We can dance the dance but if power is moving away from us and we’re too individualistic and self-absorbed to collectivize, then culture is just a bad joke. Or “smokescreen,” may be a more accurate term, blindsiding us from the fact that we lack an alternative vision of the world.
Culture and specifically movies that make us feel good about our forward-thinking values perhaps haven’t got the answer about how to tackle entrenched power - a power I’ve stated in the previous articles for this series I believe has become invisible. There isn’t an Art that tells us about it now. There isn’t Art that calls us to specific forms of collective action, towards unity in a common purpose, which could have the effect of actually taking our freedom back from our oppressors and alleviating the mass loneliness that makes us so susceptible to totalitarian rule.
But this film is distinguished in the moment when Mark/Harry and Nora/The Beat-Me Lady begin to realize the scale of what they’ve ignited: a whole class full of energized bodies, united in purpose despite the best efforts of the school to expel, censor and even bully them into submission. An entire student body of Lenny Bruces learning to stand up for themselves. This is a movie that depicts collectivism as the antidote to the isolating and despairing effects of totalitarianism and fascism and it posits this enterprise as a process of fusing the best aspects of 60’s radicalism with what’s on hand at the present moment. Pump Up The Volume is a movie that redefines the present moment with passion and joyous energy, giving the late 60’s a much needed dose of good PR.
Mark and Nora take the show on the road.
It’s hard to extol the virtues of the 60’s social climate to new generations of politically minded young people, especially with the amount of right wing revisionism floating around. Not to mention all the bogus accounts and depictions of the 60’s to be found on TV, which are almost always reductive and specious in painting the era as fake, corny and socially harmful - a practice providing still more evidence of the way television is whitewashing history and wrecking society. This is a movie that can teach people who didn’t grow up in this era about its lasting and meaningful impact - generations of schoolkids whose image of the 60’s was sadly shaped by media organizations with enough money and power to allow them to redefine it from their elite perspective.
That’s the silly premise of Pump Up The Volume that I find totally endearing. It sees these radical ideals as worthy of emulation, more than something to simply be celebrated or shared. “This is how you beat The Establishment,” the movie seems to be saying, suggesting that cinema can be or do something much more than just present a captivating story with a nice message. That it can be exemplary in modeling activism and other benevolent social practices dedicated to affecting social change.
For Hannah Arendt, politics was inseparable from the big existential questions. It was about co-constructing our reality. This is what Mark and his fellow students at Humphrey High learn in order to transcend their loneliness. In order to create a new and better society, we must first imagine that it can be done. It really is imagination that changes the world. To dream the impossible dream is the goal of social movements. And it’s scary that within our current political reality, so many of us can’t seem to be able to imagine a political system that is responsive to living in a plural, modern world. But there’s no alternative. The correction for isolation and despair is collective power and action. If the political space for these things is gone, it must be retaken or reasserted. Take over the system and get it working for everyone.
I attended a Jesuit Catholic high school and in my time there, a number of my friends were harassed and badgered into dropping out. I had the group of friends whose wallets were attached to chains on their belt loops and who’d safety-pinned patches with the names of their favorite bands to their backpacks. Some of them had dreadlocks and skirted the school’s strict dress code. They listened to punk music and had the attitudes to match. They were often pulled aside by teachers and had their bags searched for drug paraphernalia. They were interrogated and treated as if they were always guilty of something. Very few of the people in my circle of friends graduated with me. They had to transfer to other schools, which in addition to causing problems with their families, exacerbated the anxieties and hazards they were already facing as teenagers. I later learned from a friend that this persecution was part of a policy the school adopted that explicitly focused on weeding out those students the school regarded as “undesirables.” This friend had received a letter from one of the disciplinarian Deans after he’d abruptly resigned from his job and it detailed the school’s attitude regarding this policy. I’m talking about a handwritten letter from an outgoing faculty member to an individual student about the school’s deliberate pushing out of students its administrators thought were impure or bad influences or damaging to the school’s image and how he refused to be a part of that system.
Something similar to that kind of funny business is going on at the school in Pump Up The Volume, which is why Mark’s actions are not an exaggeration. This is just one of many reasons why it has a personal significance for me. In one way, the movie presents a fantasy about a collective awakening, ignited by an outlaw truth-teller in the Lenny Bruce vein. But it’s rooted in concerns about loneliness and disillusionment with the system that are very real and feel up to the moment. What it has to say not just about what rebellion requires and how wonderful it feels but also about how afraid authority figures are of it, how those in power show their true colors when they’re being defied, is of tremendous importance. Without Christian Slater’s charismatic performance at the center, this material doesn’t work. Over the course of the movie, he becomes everything in a 60’s social movement personified: vulnerable, brash, conflicted and a bit naive. But also caring, hopeful, sentient and luminous.
truth-telling via pirate radio in Pump Up The Volume is made to look like the most exciting enterprise in the world
Above all, what’s demonstrated in such a simple and fluent way that it requires no subtext, is the power of raw, uninhibited speech to bring people together. The panicking of Authority reveals their real agenda and when they overstep, people who feel as if they’re living their lives as puppets can see that the strings attached to their lives and destinies are not invisible. By just saying the thing, articulating the unspoken fact of our predicament (acting classes call this acknowledging the “what's-between”), we are unburdened by the weight of it. Think. And then speak to each other. Stop censoring ourselves and performing our outrage. Instead, put forth ideas. You don’t agree, then confront it with more speech.
When people come to feel there is nothing to fight for politically, that’s when people start really thinking. And that’s how social movements dedicated to fighting injustice begin to form. If totalitarian power structures and consumer societies are going to identify Lenny Bruce and Happy Harry as part of a social sickness, then may we all be preserved from wellness.
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