“I don’t think they would fight if they were in the river.
If they had room to live.”
No film more perfectly captures what adolescence looks like
than Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 “art film for teens”
RumbleFish. And when I say that, I don’t mean the fashion or the
actors--none of the male leads look all that much like teenagers, honestly,
even though some of them technically were--but the surreal photography of
Stephen H. Burum and the calculated exaggeration that makes
Rumble
Fish so distinctive. Shot in black-and-white, and featuring plenty of
practical and in-camera tricks, including self-consciously composed shots,
time-lapse skies, and lots and lots of smoke, there is something about the
off-kilter look of
Rumble Fish that echoes the off-kilter
point of view of a boy struggling with puberty. Nothing looks right, and no one
sees things the way I see them. I don’t understand this world, and it doesn’t
understand me.
Matt Dillon (
Factotum [
review]) heads up
the cast here as Rusty James, a restless delinquent in Tulsa. Rusty James is
horny and bored, and so he spends most of his time chasing girls (including
Diane Lane as his put-upon girlfriend) and causing trouble. He dreams of a
recent, idyllic past when gangs ruled the streets, an era that seemingly passed
when his older brother, The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke,
The
Wrestler [
review]), took off on his bike and headed to parts unknown.
Except we do know, because The Motorcycle Boy has just
returned from California, where he never saw the ocean because, as he says, the
rest of the state got in the way
(tell me about it). The Motorcycle Boy is a legend around town. As the graffiti
informs us, he “reigns,” and as one character describes him, driving the point
home, he is “royalty in exile.” His return will be everyone’s salvation. Or so
they think. It’s more going to be the end of the illusion he created. The
Motorcycle Boy claims to be insane, and others make the same accusation. At
times you may wonder if he is even real, or a mythological creation, the
Tyler Durden of Rusty James. Or maybe it’s really his world and everyone else is
merely living in it. Because
Rumble Fish certainly seems
like Motorcycle Boy’s movie a lot of the time. Its aesthetics conform to his senses.
He has hearing loss and is color blind, and by his own admission, sees the
world “like a black-and-white TV with the sound turned off.” Indeed, there is
no color here, except the red and blue of the titular Siamese fighting fish,
and though the movie isn’t silent, the audio design is intentionally
otherworldly, turned up loud and detached, almost like an intentionally bad
overdub. It changes based on The Motorcycle Boy’s ears. The jazzy score by
Stewart Copeland (drummer for the Police) and amplified sound effects, like the
ticking of the ever-present clocks (there is one in every scene to remind us
that time stops for no man, but will also eventually run out) just prove to
abstract the audio even further. Coppola is bending reality to suit his purposes.
Rumble Fish is based on a novel by S.E.
Hinton, who co-wrote the screenplay with Coppola. The director also adapted her
novel
The Outsiders the same year. As a result,
Rumble Fish has always been the cool older brother to
The Outsiders. It’s certainly aged better. It has none of
the cornball 1950s mawkishness of the other film, even if they share similar
plots (teenage boys fighting, gangs replacing a family structure, being
misunderstood by authority, being turned on by Diane Lane) and a little bit of
the same costume design. In my head, I had always remembered
Rumble
Fish being set in the 1950s, but really, it’s a movie in no precise
time. The only specific pop culture reference is to the Beach Boys, and only
the Pac-Man game and the new wave fashion of the rival gang give us any real
hint that the movie was made in the 1980s. (Well, ignoring some of Copeland’s
incongruous, synthesized orchestration, the worst of the worst signs of a 1980s
movie....)
Rumble Fish is designed to be like a cinematic
Cure record: its adolescent desperation is renewable. All of these details are
what I mean when I say Coppola has visually captured the feeling of
adolescence: like an all-too-smart teen, he is calling attention to his own
awkwardness as if it were a badge of honor. Rusty James is the kind of earnest
bad boy many a young man dreams of being--right down to the fights choreographed
like outtakes from
West Side Story. Our concept of self in
our teen years is often authentically inauthentic.
Holden Caufield is the only
one who isn’t a phony.
Adulthood is the one thing that separates the returning Motorcycle
Boy from who he was before he left. Some heavy stuff happened to him in
California, and he no longer buys the image everyone has created around him. I
like that Coppola portrays The Motorcycle Boy as larger than life, but that
Rourke plays him small, buttoned-up, barely articulate. He is elusive, like a
cat--and indeed, a cat heralds his return, viewed just before the one big
actual rumble in the film, a blown-up shadow, like something out of a
Murnau
film. Note that The Motorcycle Boy’s nemesis, the mustachioed cop Patterson (William
Smith), is at one point similarly preceded by the shadow of a dog, and his brother exists the film not as an animal, but a shadow of the same size. In this
flickering opera, the thug and the cop are two great opposing forces, the double-headed Janus
flipping on the same coin. Symbolically, The Motorcycle Boy has not been fully
reborn--or transformed to the Motorcycle Man--because he never made it to the
ocean, he never found his space (water being a renewing element). Thus it is
that he has to free the colorful fish and send Rusty James to the sea, it’s the
only way either can escape. To stay where they are is to be trapped until you
die.
Which, for all we know, is exactly how Rusty James will end
up in California will do anyway. If the movie fails in any significant way,
it’s that Rusty James has no hidden depth. He’s not Pony Boy, he’s not a
sensitive type waiting to tell his story. He doesn’t learn much on screen. Our
only hope is that by breaking away from his small town, where everyone has made
up their mind about him and who he’ll turn out to be, he’ll make something else
out of himself. It’s doubtful, but possible. I mean, what year did
Boogie Nights take place again? He’s pretty enough, maybe
SoCal can offer Rusty James a new family. He wouldn’t even have to change his
name!
The screengrabs here are taken from the standard definition DVD and not the Blu-ray under examination.
This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.
