‘Pump Up The Volume’ Still Shines In Its Exploration of Depression and Trauma

Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume follows tortured high school loner Mark (Christian Slater) who hosts a nightly, basement bedroom originating pirate radio program as “Happy Harry Hard-On,” a Lenny Bruce-inspired gadfly. Voice disguised, he takes shots at society’s ills while dropping a few choice tracks. Slater was at his best when he played the rebel outsider. His channelling of a young Jack Nicholson suggests he would’ve been a Roger Corman leading man in another time. Like J.D., the character he plays in Heathers, Pump Up the Volume‘s Mark is a high school transfer so damaged by his uprooting that he’s developed a few antisocial behaviors. Smarter than the average Joe, armed with better taste in music, film and literature, he catches the eye of a goth girl Nora (Samantha Mathis) who figures out he’s Harry and eventually serves as his alibi and accomplice. It’s also Nora who, in a poem she sends into the show (evoking e.e. cummings’s “she being brand”), gives Harry his rallying slogan: “Talk hard.”

William Burroughs says that “language is a virus” in The Ticket That Exploded, a book in his “Nova Trilogy” that presages the ideas he sets forth in The Electronic Revolution of the dangers of technology, married to the human voice, of controlling people through ideas of false news and confused political polemics. Pump Up the Volume offers, optimistically, that “truth” is the virus, but it’s wrong and for our sins of not listening to all of these warnings, we’re in bad trouble. A brief scene finds an unctuous reporter saying “Who cares if it’s real? People are riveted.” The romance of Pump Up the Volume is that for all the world-weary cynicism of Mark’s “all the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks,” his insights still feel like the first conscious ravings of a precocious child. His longest monologue, delivered to a pet lizard like Hamlet speaking to poor Yorick’s skull, talks about the difficulty of finding a role to play in a society determined to homogenize expression. What we, as adults ruined by almost three decades of (to borrow a phrase from The National) brutalism and hairpin turns, know about the truth is that Burroughs was right and all these hopes we nursed during our period of rebellion were just dreams, shredded upon waking.

In the late summer of 1990, I found myself in a preview screening of Pump Up the Volume and discovered therein the voice for all of my seventeen years of rage and disappointment. About a year removed from my own suicide attempt, still traumatized, afraid of the looming world, I found the late-’80s zeitgeist to be a parade of teen entertainments that spoke directly to me. A dyed-in-the-wool fan of Heathers (1988), swept along with the Dead Poets’ Society swell (1989) and Marisa Silver’s Permanent Record (1988), these bitter ripostes to Reagan’s carefully-constructed City on the Hill seemed tailor-made for my halcyon teen days of contemplating self-harm. Where Pump Up the Volume retains its power is how immediately it serves as a conduit to these former selves of ours. The moments in our lives where we still believed everything was possible and that we had worlds enough and time. Mark’s English teacher Ms. Emerson (Ellen Greene) tells Mark at one point that she made the mistake of believing she could change things. The miracle of the film is that a film this grounded believes so in Hemingway’s “the world is a fine place and worth fighting for” – even though the odds are against your saving it.

Harry’s show earns the ire of local authorities when a boy at the school, Malcolm (Anthony Lucero), kills himself after calling in one night. The film shines in its exploration of depression and trauma. Harry has no answers, Malcolm has no real means of expressing himself. He says he’s so alone and Harry commiserates. It’s not the right thing to do. It’s not the wrong thing to do. The Hemingway quote about the “fineness” of the world ends with “… and I hate very much to leave it.” Harry says “now I feel like killing myself but luckily, I’m too depressed to bother” and gets to the crux of what despair feels like in the heart of the despairing. The school galvanizes behind Harry’s message of healing as the school’s administration closes in. Students trade bootleg cassettes of the shows like this generation of kids exchange podcasts and links to YouTube channels. Pump Up the Volume is a hopeful fantasy of what happens when the “right” lonely guy gets a voice, what we’ve learned is that the “wrong” guys get a voice, too, when mass communication is democratized. All the bad guys are right. Pump Up the Volume is a prayer that we remember what it felt like to be so naive as to take a stand. It’s not dark yet, see, but it’s getting there.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due Spring of 2019. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.