Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
On August 22, 2012, the Big Kahuna died. In the mid-’50s, Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy left a stable position in banking to throw together a scrap-lumber hut on the beach in Malibu with a band of surfing originals including Da Cat Himself, Miki Dora. Brentwood’s own Kathy Kohner, five-foot and 15, somehow infiltrated the Pit Crew, and, famously, her tales of shooting the curl as the group’s adopted mascot would find their way into her father’s novel and eventually onto the big screen in the 1959 hit Gidget. In fact, a summer or two before the film came out, county authorities demolished Tubesteak’s digs, after which he took a job driving a delivery truck and finally retired in Orange County. Kathy went off to college, got married, and raised a family; seventy-two today, she greets diners at Duke’s Malibu, where her job is to tell stories from back in the day. The real-life narrative arc of Terry and Kathy roughly parallels that of the film, with Kahuna finally going back to work, Gidget together at last with Moondoggie, and in the closing shot a beach that once brimmed with muscles and bikinis now back-to-school empty. Both stories speak of carefree youth and a necessary reckoning with a real world, of enchanted parentheses and inexorable Septembers.
The tensions of these real and screen lives have in large part remained those of the film genre Gidget engendered. In the half-century since, from the Beach Party franchise and its early ’60s spin-offs, through Big Wednesday, Point Break, Blue Crush, and many others, and on to Chasing Mavericks in 2012, filmmakers have gone to the sand a couple dozen times to produce narratives either focused expressively on surfing as sport or obsessive life choice, or at least as significant background informing and directing the film’s meaning. The result has been movies that are often more incisively pertinent in their treatment of growing up, family tensions, a world of dizzying social change, race and class, and the seductive lure of commerce and appearance than their wicked barrels, great tans, and dudespeak might presage. With an eye to the meanings behind their attractive surfaces, I’ll be looking at a handful of these, at least one from each decade, for the most part relatively high-profile examples of a film type that, if rarely the source of smash hits, has generally met with commercial success. Hardening firmly in place by the 1970s, a highly restrictive formula thereafter rules the near totality of these films: given their interest in young people on the cusp of adult life, it’s not without a certain logic that they return repeatedly to such story elements as the wise mentor, the temptation to sell out, the preparation sequence, and the concluding challenge or competition. The remarks to follow will examine the genre’s creation in the beach-craze ’60s, then turn to its elaboration in what one might consider the main line of “classic” surf films, with their reliably formulaic focus on childhood’s end; the conclusion will explore how, while remaining generally faithful to established patterns, certain films have brought within their widened purview broader social and political issues. With the exception of Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer (1966) — a documentary but vaguely story-centered and, in any case, so iconic as to be compulsory — all of the films under discussion are pure narratives. As such, they should be distinguished from the grainy collections of hot rides Greg Noll brought to stoked kids in countless multipurpose halls and their often lyrical or thrilling cinematic descendants. Whether big deals like Riding Giants and Step into Liquid, or smaller, edgier efforts like BS!, these documentaries are absolutely central to the surfing subculture and merit separate study, with their specialist target audience, their shared values, and visual assumptions.
And what visuals, for there is something basically unbelievable about human beings standing up on a tumbling wave, not to mention carving sleek sweeps and tight reverses back up its face. Cinematically, what’s not to like about good-looking kids in a dream locale practicing a potentially dangerous sport that, even straight-on from a fixed shore location in black and white, films like a million bucks? Considered a moment, however, the scene is much more than its very pretty pictures, in large part because of the richly conflicting signals it emits. As sport, identity definer, and style locus, the surfing we have come to know these last decades is a space of, variously, big-money competition, reverent communication with the natural world, heavy partying, one-to-one confrontation with appalling physical force, proprietary localism of the ugliest sort, New Age self-discovery. It is a counterculture and a culture, a way to rebel and a way to grow up, and some live an entire adult life, work and all, still somehow rhythmed by the daily wave report. Surfing is the Beach Boys sweet in their striped Kingston Trio short-sleeve button-downs, and it’s Dora dive-bombing kooks and bouncing checks. It’s the garden and the salesmen who slither into it. Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learnin’ how, we are joyfully urged, but to paddle out as the new guy is in fact to try entering the most closed of societies. Surfing can seem like an ocean of style, posing, and attitude, but out in the impact zone and beyond, the superficial abruptly washes off. To choose a short board or long, three fins or one, can be no less than to define different selves and value systems.
When Gidget and Moondoggie walk out of frame in the closing shot of Gidget, they are certainly leaving their own Little Eden. Yet, while the couple’s slow, wandering steps betray a hint of regret, their return to solid suburban lives as Francie and Jeffrey has a safe ’50s inevitability, one Hollywood-crafted to will into gray-flanneled order the real, more subversive truth of the film, that just over the cultural horizon lay new notions of social organization, sexual behavior, and feminist possibility. For Gidget’s beach is a place of experimentation with those options, a theater for the competing demands of duty and desire at precisely that Ike-to-JFK turning point in American cultural history. Casual alertness to the cultural breeze helps explain the movie’s popularity and strangely lasting appeal, but just as important is its affectionate openness — naïve by recent standards, fresh by the time’s — to the charms of the surfing life. With its neatly prepared surprise ending, the film also has a structure and narrative pacing tight enough to keep you watching even today, and this despite the wooden acting and gratingly “declaimed” dialogue delivery style.
Moral and dramatic complications ensue in the last reel when the much-anticipated “luau” finally comes round. Gidget prepares for the big night with an elaborate stratagem: she pays one of the fellows to pretend he’s with her in order, says she, to make the Kahuna jealous — when in fact it’s Moondoggie in her sights. Today almost comical in its innocence, the luau’s amalgam of flaring tiki torches, throbbing bongos, and horizontal couples certainly pushed erotic buttons for a ’59 teenage audience. Now imagine the blossoming Gidget’s surprise when she tiptoes into this orgiastic scene to find that the guy she hired to “court” her passed the gig on to Moondoggie! The attraction’s steamingly mutual, but the ruse is so firmly in place that some inevitable misunderstandings send an indignant Gidget off — and straight into the experienced arms of Kahuna. Back at a borrowed bachelor pad, though, honor outs as Moondoggie shows up to declare himself with a right to Kahuna’s chin, while Gidget runs off in the confusion. The film’s coda makes clear that the summer was just that, an interlude, pleasurable and perhaps even necessary, but meant to end so that adult business could begin. Francie’s sweet surprise is that when, resigned, she agrees at last to meet the son of Daddy’s colleague, it turns out that young man is Moondoggie. Fed up with the Kahuna’s phoniness, Jeffrey’s heading back to college. The new couple visit their old haunts in the closing frames. The gang has all gone back to school, and the Kahuna’s breaking down his shack and returning to work. A chance look at an ID badge indicates that he’s an airline pilot. Even the Big Kahuna, it seems, can’t shake responsibility.
As slight and hokey as it can seem, Gidget flirts with myth, its heroine an Ugly Duckling, its hero a prince in hiding, its disguise ruse and surprise twist straight from Elizabethan comedy. Though only at film’s end is it off to work they go, Gidget’s seven-strong beach crew could be tall dwarves, with their muscular mutual support for the heroine and their customized nicknames. On the sand, by the way, such sobriquets are the norm. There the guys are only Stinky or Loverboy, and the token of Francie’s acceptance into the beach clan is the gift of the title Gidget. Then there’s the mysterious Kahuna. Plosive monosyllabic prose at last overwriting assonantal poetry, his real handle, we finally discover, is Burt Vails. The family name hints at the ultimately superficial nature of the aliases adopted by all these supposed marginals along the shore — thinly shrouding but in no way deeply altering fundamentally conventional selves. As Kahuna admits, that Hawaiian mask on the hut wall in fact comes from Acapulco. At the death of his pet bird — a wild pirate’s squawking partner, an evident image of freedom — the illusions begin to fade, until the only wings left to Burt the Korean War vet lead back to a sub-branch of what President Eisenhower would denounce less than a year later as the military industrial complex. Jeffrey’s pseudonym is most significant of all. When this character who most ostentatiously breaks with his past life circles back to his businessman father’s world, we realize that Moondoggie was never the lone wolf his nickname promised, but only a domesticated pup pretending to howl. And as the film closes, the protagonists are clearly once again Jeffrey and Francie. The fraternity pin he gives her gestures ironically at the band of beach brothers that is now just a memory, while fastening the couple into a stable, socially acceptable relationship and securely fixed identities.
While, Hollywood oblige, the protected young thing growing up in Gidget finally resists premarital relations, she does offer a refreshing vision of new feminist possibility. A century earlier in Jane Eyre another girl stared across open reaches and lamented that women “must have action,” that they “need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.” Gazing across the sea’s suggestive, dangerous expanse, then taking on its breakers, no-nonsense Gidget finds that field, at once challenging the resistant model of the prim Valley housewife and that of the coiffed bimbo with her useless beach ball. Five years later, Brian Wilson’s “Surfer Girl” proposes that we “ride the surf together.” Sure, the guy in the song may still hold the key to the “woody” (!), but this is, very suddenly, a changing world. And soon, as other pop culture monuments would have it, manic Mondays will become the norm and, on Fridays, girls just wanna have fun. The world Gidget unwittingly foreshadows is just too much fun, so its heroine is — unsurprisingly — roped back into a respectable status quo, the film’s romantic plot twist masking the quiet anxiety of its denouement.
In the mid-’60s, this tension between a youth culture in full, disturbing emergence and the rearguard resistance of adults will again play out in the sand. In clear response to the success of Gidget, the seven-picture Beach Party cycle is American International Pictures going profitably mainstream after its ’50s low-budget horror and juvenile deliquency shockers. Led by Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, equally clean-cut white kids surf, sip Cokes, fall in love, break into song, and have madcap adventures in that last summer before adulthood. Gary Morris has written incisively about the films and their portrayal of the beach as America’s happy, healthy sandbox-refuge from a very unsettling reality of racial conflict, war, a dead President, nuclear threat, and beatniks not only morphing into hippies but multiplying. In this filmic universe, for example, surfing is presented less as marginal behavior than as a wholesome, outdoorsy alternative to boredom and deviance; planing off the slightly dangerous edge half-sharpened by the Kahuna, AIP thus anticipated such other forms of entertainment co-optation as the made-for-Top 40 surf music craze and TV’s Surfside Six. Morris aptly identifies the “schizoid air” of the films, one “typical of the period of social flux in which they were made.” For all the unbridled agitation they seem meant to portray, they in fact are about reassuring white middle-class America that the world was perfectly comprehensible and that its children were just having some good clean fun before getting on with the important stuff.
The movies are schizoid in another way as well. With their chaste lovers, systematic beatnik jokes, and retread adult actors direct from a well-worn parental past, they indeed send a comforting message to suburbia. Yet, despite pious intention, the form of the films says something else entirely. A weird non-linearity rules: “They are a patchwork quilt of motifs and formal strategies, alternately distanced and in-your-face, heavy with subplots and random songs, cartoon characterizations, slow-motion and speeded-up visual effects, and even blatant audience acknowledgments . . . structurally the films are practically anarchic.” Morris adds that the form of such 1965 wonders as Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini was “influenced by America’s social decline.” This is, if anything, an understatement. While one might easily recognize the zeitgeist in the films’ portrayals of the teen tribe’s resistance to rapacious adult developers or ad men, the zany harmlessness of the villains effectively erases any vaguely political implications. Not so for the off-the-wall structural and stylistic choices of the Beach Party franchise, where an arch, random surrealism, despite vast differences of tone and intention, is not without recalling “Desolation Row.” It is difficult to view the films today and not register somewhere in their genial mess the confused, rudderless society just offshore ready to storm that desperately happy strand. Only a year and a half after the last of the films, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in would hit the air. Counterculture seeping into culture, there was the same metaphor of the nonstop party and the strangely similar — but now fully knowing — comedy of wacky deconstruction.
Ride the Wild Surf is notable for name-checking the famous Hawaiian breaks and for some terrific early big wave footage, and the way it imitates the sport film’s formulaic Big Competition conclusion essentially established the model for the genre. Likewise for its wave mechanics pedagogy as our three surfers discover a calm day’s flat Waimea Bay, a landmark first lesson for the landlubber audience in what would become a long series of such sessions in subsequent surf films. Significant accomplishments, yes, but the rest does feel like pure commodity, with the studio-logic casting, mechanical swings between action and lame romance, and pseudo examination of personal motivations in the surfing life choice. Escape, self-discovery, alpha-male competition? Unsurprisingly for a lowest common denominator entertainment package, the answer seemed to be all of the above, or none, or something. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the script was cobbled together only after gathering the surfing footage. While the action shots, many starring Greg Noll, are spectacular — the team sent to Hawaii only six years after the first surfers dared Waimea hit a number of big days — the paddle-out and rear projection close-ups are astonishingly creaky, even by the time’s standards. Heads bobbing rhythmically, heavy James Mitchum glowers and our handsome watermen chat casually while coasting down twenty-footers. As Noll growled in Riding Giants, “Who can believe that shit?”
The Endless Summer is a movie for surfers by surfers; it’s not a Hollywood scriptmeister working up his daughter’s adventures or the writer/producer pair toiling for Desilu who, their finger to the cultural pulse, would just as easily turn out a hippie film five years after Ride the Wild Surf. Brown’s 95-minute documentary is shaped by a slim, seductive narrative conceit: two real surfers follow the summer around the world and really ride the wild surf they find en route. One of many pleasures of the film is striking up a casual acquaintance with its easygoing protagonists, Mike Hynson and — he of the name too good not to be true — Robert August. Brown, who knew everyone in the small Southern California surf elite, could have chosen a Corky Carroll, but then he would have made a different film. Classy surfers if virtual unknowns, all surf and no name, Hynson and August abruptly reversed the Fabian star formula. One blond, the other dark, one normal, the other a goofy-footer, both cute and anonymous, they were perfect blank slates on which to trace late ’60s dreams of freedom, mobility, and the heartfelt, not socially ordained, vocation.
Though in 1960 only 2 percent of Americans had ever taken an international flight, it was also a time when Jackie Kennedy was admired for speaking and dressing French and her husband created the Peace Corps. Not only a Cold War tool, the latter signified a nascent curiosity for things international after war and a decade and a half hunkering in the suburbs. Certainly, as of ’62 one vicarious frisson of the James Bond films was Pan Am touching down, all sophistication, in Istanbul or Rio. Brown’s shirtless travelogue addressed this interest from another, rootsier angle, one marked by sweet gee-whiz curiosity. The titles’ capitals note, touchingly, that the shots were “Filmed in ACTUAL LOCATIONS AROUND THE WORLD,” and one apparently unironic visual is a little animated map with the toy plane hopscotching across the globe. Producer, writer, director, narrator, Brown begins by presenting basic moves and lingo through a sequence of hot tubes, nosewalks, and wipeouts in Hawaii and California, an always companionable voice-over shifting easily from informative to goofy to quietly lyrical. But what if you could surf like this all year round, he wonders, sending his tousled American youth east from LAX to, successively, Sénégal, Ghana, Liberia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the North Shore of Oahu. As exotic as the catalogue of locales from “Surfin’ U.S.A.” was, this was something else, and you feel even now the stoke — and the apprehension — of paddling out in waters that had never seen a surfboard.
The duo’s on-site adventures come equipped with regularly interspersed “memories” of other surfing moments from Hawaii and California (like some remarkable footage of the Newport Beach Wedge, wave-heads the size of VW buses pile-driving body surfers into two inches of retreating water). Aside from letting Brown use good material gathered over the years, the systematic recourse to such narrative pauses suggests that discoveries in exotic climes can really be judged only by reference to a known American reality. And indeed, in the West African part of their journey — its most savory, troubling chapters — August and Hynson struggle in vain to persuade a taxi driver to strap their boards to the top of the car; as he heads off, planks jutting out of the trunk, Brown wonders how this would play on U.S. freeways. When it comes to ethnicity in what was then called the Third World, though, it’s apparent that Brown’s innocents have learned little from their own country’s history or its contemporary racial strife from Birmingham through Watts and beyond. The above incident comes just after these queries: “Would they find surf? Would they catch malaria? Would they be speared by a native?” The ensuing voice-over uses the word “primitive” at least five times. When the guys paddle out alongside a dugout of Ghanian fishermen, they hear “‘something like ‘Oomgawa mungy wango’ . . . . Mike smiled and said, ‘Yeah man, hang ten!’ They thought that was great. They went stroking out, chanting, ‘Hang ten, hang ten.'” If such can be imagined, an even more Tintin in the Congo moment occurs later near Durban. Wracked in fact by (totally unmentioned) apartheid, Brown’s South Africa is apparently populated only by friendly white surfers. In their sharky waters the appearance of dolphins is a good sign, for “sharks and porpoises have yet to integrate.”
While the blind spots are glaring today, they are perhaps understandable, coming as the film did just that side of the massive shifts in consciousness announced in Haight-Ashbury or the Pentagon Papers. The ’60s vibe of The Endless Summer is elsewhere, in a free, mobile open-endedness and a fresh, if inchoate, dream of universal community. Road movies, Walter Salles writes, by their very nature “challenge the culture of conformity” if only because they are “about experience . . . about the journey.” Combine that formula with tentatively searching out, then surfing tinglingly unfamiliar waters, and, for all the fun, we are probably talking about the something serious that Salles identifies as a “form of resistance” to convention and the status quo. The sheer rush of surfing, the unadulterated in-the-moment uselessness of the thing, is a large part of its meaning. Brown furthermore makes it clear that around the world others were simultaneously waking to the significance of subversively pure experience in the rhythmed unpredictability of wave sets. And willing to share these heightened, intensely personal moments across different cultures and histories, the heartening opposite of the foul localism that would come to mar the surfing life. Throughout their journey Hynson and August bond with local informants, little micro-coteries, neophytes who try their boards, and a South African who goes 2,000 miles out of his way to drive them from spot to spot.
That guy, by the way, leads them on a hunch to isolated, magic Cape St. Francis, where our pair stumbles across miles of dunes and onto the “perfect wave.” Watching Mike Hynson niched effortlessly in the curl on a matchless right — still on the same wave as Brown runs out of film, changes the reel, and starts shooting again — it suddenly dawns on the viewer that all the international bopping around was in fact a quest. Yet one, the film title coaches, that remains as endless as every summer moment it celebrates is fleeting. Over long sequences, tubes for once exactly the right metaphor, Brown’s narration insists on the “hundreds of years” that razor-traced perfection went unridden and “the thousands of waves that have gone to waste since.” Not waste as in unproductive, but as Eliot would have it: “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.” What comes in between is what counts, the “quick now, here, now always,” the redemptive afternoon of pure presentness where the quest’s ending is always its new beginning.
While Brown was an early practitioner of in-water shooting and on-board camerawork, it’s his standard mid-distance shots that carry the film. Set early morning or late afternoon (the best surfing windows because of wind conditions but also the most atmospherically lit and shadowed), they tell a simple, irresistible story of human energy and natural force, of figure and field in an always shifting, ever recorrecting dynamic. His camera can pan tightly in to focus on footwork or back to place a crowd of surfers and a pod of dolphins in suggestive parallel, but most shots are content to be long mid-distance takes with the surfer in constant adjustment to the break, there where the smooth water wall and its collapsed past meet. At that equally mobile and still point of the breaking world, Brown’s surfers for the first time showed a mass audience that surfing is simultaneously about full release and careful discipline, about complete freedom and a form of enslavement to those moments of freedom. The Kahuna had to talk about the surfing life (a finally arid message in the mouth of the stiff, landlocked Cliff Robertson). Through the loving attention of a cameraman calmly assured that the action can communicate everything it means by itself, Brown takes us visually to that cusp of order and flow, obsession and insouciance, discipline and the stoke that is surfing to the committed for whom the sport spills over into the life. His imagery establishing the terms, Brown enabled the waves of narrative surf films to follow.
Most obviously, no longer was it possible to fake the surfing scenes like before, with those bogus flat water close-ups and rear projection. To be sure, pro stand-ins would still get work, but the new semi-norm became actor-surfers comfortable enough in the small stuff to suspend viewer disbelief for the transition to bigger waves unsurprisingly out of their range: a couple of clean rides by the clearly identifiable actor, and the audience was on board. And the new techniques quickly followed, with submersible and embarked subjective camerawork complementing increasingly the can’t-fail straight-on shot. Creating the cinematic illusion of real surfing with its inherent tension and drama was vital, for the waves would no longer simply be a colorful backdrop to conventional romance but a space where the story takes hold, where its characters live most intensely and ask what matters about identity, personal values, and, as always, growing up. Within the genre, no film has framed the Big Issues more insistently than Big Wednesday, John Milius’s 1978 effort. Among other things, it sets firmly in place what would become the surf film’s near obsession with the theme of maturation under the looming pressure of adult limits and responsibilities, while simultaneously — and, it seems at first, paradoxically — confirming the sport’s powerful emotional links with the past and the notion of generational succession. Marked by such recurring story elements as the often distant or absent parental figure and the closing competition or big wave challenge, three decades of films will explore these dual emphases, from the ’80s North Shore and on to such recent films as Blue Crush, Soul Surfer, and Chasing Mavericks.
With all due respect for the genre’s ur-movie, the unsinkable Gidget, Big Wednesday is the first modern surfing film, and it remains by far the most ambitious. That ambition is its strength and weakness. Milius’s autobiographically flavored tale of three surfing buddies from carefree adolescence through the inevitable readjustments of adult life cleaves believably to the details and the feeling of a ’60s and early ’70s Southern California youth culture. While the three are predictably (cf. Ride the Wild Surf) schematic and representative in their differences — the gifted but troubled one, the wildman, the responsible guy — they come to life as characters with credibly different life trajectories. Where Milius goes wrong is in his repeated attempts to universalize and mythify the whole thing. This was the heroic era of the New Hollywood, when a fearless reach for scope in the genre film became a kind of norm. With his famous swap of a point for one in buddy George Lucas’s third film — some space cowboy adventure — Milius may have won big, but the same cannot be said of Big Wednesday. It clearly aims to be surfing’s American Graffiti, but unlike Lucas — or Coppola in The Godfather, Towne-Polanski in Chinatown, etc. — Milius seems unwilling to trust his core material to speak for itself. Trying to hoist it into the great, he finally limits the power of a solid central narrative and some good acting.
Milius follows his trio from 1962 through 1974 as they haltingly come of age in a jumble of surfing, pranks, chicks, and keggers. Along the way, his frequent sacrifice of narrative coherence and focus to the piquant moment jibes well enough with the confusions of adolescence and the mixed-up, tie-dyed intensities of the period. Character emerges from the action and the gab. There’s the local surf god Matt, his problems with alcohol, and the mostly refused duties great talent and minor fame impose; crazy Leroy “the Masochist,” played by Gary Busey and so almost as such derisively funny and self-destructive; and Jake who becomes the lifeguard shooing a burned-out Matt off the beach, then, again uniformed, heading reliably off to Viet Nam. In between the high-quality surfing scenes — most nicely managed by the three actors and seamlessly transitioned to others for the big waves — the guys party, hit Tijuana, split up, marry, father children, try to make sense of the changes, and all, again, periodically punctuated by their coming together, or not, to surf. Milius makes the parallel between personal and social metamorphoses very clear, especially in the war’s intrusion into his story. Their friend Waxer never comes back, and when Jake does, and the buddies meet for the first time in three years for a session at sunset, the end of more than one kind of innocence is writ large.
In a Hollywood landscape littered by flimsy entertainment products, it’s hard to knock generous ambition, but one feels Milius loved his highly personal material not wisely but too well. The first time we see the trio as such, they are descending to the beach through the visual frame of a columned neo-antique portico that appropriately underlines their identities — voiced over, typically, before demonstrated on screen — as the local “kings.” Fine, yet when as grown-ups they return to the same scene for the Great Swell and the climactic surfing sequence, the framing calls annoying attention to itself, the steps are weedy, and the architecture sprawls in extravagant ruin. And it’s not only the cinematic language that is italicized. When a waitress newly arrived in L.A. reflects that “back home being young was just something you did until you grew up; here it’s everything,” the lapidary formula evokes screenwriter self-satisfaction far more than real speech. In another register, so too for the prophetic verbal freight of the friends’ admired counselor, the board-shaper Bear: “You hear talk of a big day every now and then — it’ll be a swell so big and so strong it’ll wipe clean everything that went before it. That’s when this board will be ready. That’s when Matt, Jack, and Leroy can distinguish themselves. That’s the day they can draw the line.” Please.
Here much less would be more, especially since the core narrative by itself actually does the job, giving density to the sweet frivolity of the Gidget growing-up model while also widening its scope to treat more consciously and in more clearly realized detail those times that were a-changing. When Milius is not overdoing things, the beach in Big Wednesday is where its young protagonists return believably to center their friendship, look together for meaning and direction in their changing selves, and, finally, take a step over that line into adulthood. In his influential Playing and Reality, Donald Winnicott offers terms that can perhaps cast light on the function of this psycho-physical space in Big Wednesday and, more largely, the film genre it helped create. While Winnicott’s subject was early infancy, his conceptualization of “transitional space” and “transitional objects” resonates analogically when one considers these young individuals obsessively returning to the same place with toys that seem to prolong childhood but in fact help lead to its end. To master the board is progressively to achieve a certain self-mastery when faced with the sets — some calmly manageable, others ominously rising — that life rolls in from its inexhaustible depths. Riding waves is furthermore a formalized, structured encounter with raw pulses of physical energy, an energy clearly parallel to the raging hormonal forces throbbing within the adolescent self. Teenaged girls riding horses come to mind here as a similarly symbolic harnessing of brute natural force during this stretch of profound personal transition.
In the 1987 North Shore that pattern couldn’t be more clear: a naïve protagonist from the mainland leaves his struggling single mother for Hawaii, where luck and talent lead to the tutelage of the tenebrous Chandler, a (once again) bearded boardmaker whose rigorous idealism helps the young man learn what he wants from the waves and from himself. Less corny than this pitch version might indicate, William Phelps’s film is unpretentiously efficient in its dealings with the appealing narrative tension between innocence and experience. Launched as if by jet-ski, it opens the instant Rick Kane takes the Arizona State Surfing Championship (!?), and before minute five the cute tow-head has left pool-generated waves to test himself on Oahu’s eponymous North Shore. Some of the abundant implausibility washes off when, a few missteps and chance encounters later, lead Matt Adler shows that even wide-eyed he can hold his own on imposing Hawaiian breakers. The tabula rasa earnestness he lends the character sets Rick up for more than a few falls — most notably when he inadvertently crosses Vince, honcho in the local surf posse — but it also leads to the crucial relationship with the boardmaker Chandler. Rick’s an artist pressured by Mom to take a big scholarship back East, Chandler an artist forced to make a living selling to big name show-offs. Rick works to remake Chandler’s surfboard logo and in exchange learns from the master how to read waves and write the next chapter of his life.
The film’s most absorbing stretch are the central chapters when the successive improvements in Rick’s design parallel his surfing apprenticeship. Chandler offers him a rigorous education in literal and symbolic depth, beginning significantly with a dive to the reef — for “most surfers never look under the water” — then sequencing gravely through an imposing array of lined-up boards that visually represent the full tradition, from the skegless ancient koa wood 130-pounder to the most alert of the new short sticks. As Rick learns both to look at the world around him and to respect the past, his design efforts improve, from the first, all flash but “soulless,” through the image Chandler at last approves, a surfer emerging as if born from the curl. More than a necessary concession to commerce, the logo’s creation here enacts the trying quest to bring into meaningful accord surface and depth, signifier and signified, in a world that generally rewards their dissociation. There the stars are the Lance Burkharts — icily chiselled and self-regarding in his portrayal by Laird Hamilton — who “think a wave’s just for carving up, hot-dogging, imposing their own style.” Whereas, the shaper insists, “a pure surfer goes with the wave.” Chandler is attractively true to his name, the traditional artisan nurturing a guttering flame. In this decade of Gordon Gecko, he transmits his discomfort with competition and sponsorship, his sense of a moral dichotomy between old-school soul surfers and the facile shredders who score big on the circuit. The inevitable crisis of conscience follows when Rick’s developing wave skills win him a place in the Pipeline Open — “you want your picture in the surf magazines?,” growls Chandler — where, just as inevitably, he’ll make it through to the finals opposite Burkhart.
Versions of this Zen romantic breeze blow through what we might identify as all the “classic” surf films. In Big Wednesday and North Shore, in the animated Surf’s Up, in Blue Crush, Soul Surfer, and the most recent of the lot, Chasing Mavericks, the adolescent rite of passage concludes a carefully accompanied quest that runs down two paths so densely intertwined that they become one, the hesitantly growing ease of the waterman paralleling — becoming — the growing self’s hesitant progress toward confident maturity. A parody starring penguins, the 2007 Surf’s Up memorably condenses the tics of the grizzled veteran advisor into the Geek, a former champ and recluse boardmaker hilariously voiced by Jeff Bridges. The Geek Totally Abides. His counsel to Cody Mavericks, the promising young surfer from Antarctica’s Shiverpool, is virtually interchangeable with that of any of these cinematic mentors. Like, say, this from the wise counselor in Soul Surfer: “You know that moment between sets, the wave not yet formed, just energy surging through the water. Well, that’s the time to be patient. Listen to your instinct. Trust it. You’ll know.” You’ll know for in fact it’s the heart’s message that is counted out in the seconds between swells, and the call “Outside!” is to inner forces needed to face the darkening blue which is at that moment all the future that matters. The intense, inevitable final surfing scenes — far into the crucial competition or engaging that once-in-a-lifetime wave — are also the moment of deeply personal testing, with as resolution the return of threatened integrity or triumph over physical disability, recovery from emotional loss or the mastery of the self’s private demons. This moment of passage in the transitional space of surf and sand is generally the result of extensive preparation, and unsurprisingly scenes of arduous physical and psychological training are a required figure in most surf films. The most recent in the genre, Chasing Mavericks (2012), is in fact almost literally one long preparation sequence.
Chasing Mavericks follows the narrative contours of Jay Moriarity’s short life, from his Santa Cruz childhood as a surfing phenom through his obsession, finally achieved at 16, with riding the mythical Mavericks break just north near Half Moon Bay; Moriarity learned at the feet of Frosty Hesson, one of the early few to surf the huge waves that break only rarely under the spell of severe Pacific storms. Though as early as 1930 Carmel’s Robinson Jeffers may have sighted them in Novembers when “great waves awake and are drawn, / Like smoking mountains bright from the west,” up through the ’80s and early ’90s they were still considered more legend than fact. Largely directed by Curtis Hanson (until health issues forced his replacement for the last fortnight of principal photography), Chasing Mavericks resembles in some ways Eight Mile, with its empathy for the marginal teenager and, once more, “professional” and personal challenges so merged as to become one. As frequently elsewhere in the surf genre, the acolyte’s relationship with the guru — again bearded, gruff, finally lovable — powers the narrative. Abandoned by Jay’s military father, his single mom is a loser who can’t hold a job let alone look after her son; in the sweet, seemingly functional family next door, Frosty in fact has problems playing his own role as dad, such is his love for the ocean and dedication to his Mavericks secret. By turns shredder and long boarder, Jay is tops on the local curls, but after sneaking a view of Frosty on a day when Mavericks is firing, he won’t rest until he has gone out too. You’ve got to train me, he begs, and despite Frosty’s early hesitation and stern warnings, the spectator knows the rest.
That wave is the thing. The film opens to a voice over haunting shots of a form swimming underwater: “We all come from the sea but we are not all of the sea. We who are, we children of the tides, must return to it again and again.” Uncontextualized, winceworthy to put Milius to shame, these words are nevertheless eventually redeemed by the film’s quiet coda — commemorating Jay Moriarity’s tragic death in a diving accident seven years after the events of the film — but most of all their straining toward myth is validated by that wave. For against the brutal fact of the thing as framed by Hanson, no verbal lyricism, including the lines to follow, can weigh in as anything but understatement. The director clearly knew it was all about the break — thus the film’s title and the way he tactically limits our views of the great swell in action to the barest of minimums until the enormous closing scenes. It’s past twenty minutes in that Jay’s breath catches with his first sight of Mavericks, and until he actually suits up to surf it, they will have only one other brief moment together, when he gapes helplessly from the cliff at a wiped-out surfer swept alone into the rocky Boneyard, a near-drowning that effectively sets up the terminal sequence. The rest of the time it is an absence, a toxic vacuum filling gradually with dread and anticipation. For one thing, Mavericks simply doesn’t exist until the right — or wrong — storm conditions align. Throughout the film Jay obsesses about getting a specialist weather radio; when he does and it at last pronounces the magic wave intervals in his room’s teeming dark, it is the festishistic tribal object signifying that the moment of passage has come. Frosty had said of a quiet Maverick that “the lion sleeps.” The big wave board the young Masai receives from his chief is called, significantly, a “spear,” and, the chasing done, it’s time to slay the beast.
To get a sense of the beast, first know that it’s a forty-five-minute paddle just to make it out at Mavericks. Hanson communicates something of the size, alternating widely framed, sweeping helicopter shots with in-water camera work shooting up the wave’s vertiginous face and then toward the vast vista shoreward after the unfathomable mass of its ugly lead-green shoulder has passed. Most scores would lay it on at this point, but the sound people go instead for a hint of anticipatory martial percussion to prepare the ear for the real payoff, the series of textured vapor detonations as the curls contract and finally explode. Like Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” where among “the breakers and currents / I have seen . . . what men believed they saw,” huge motorcraft ferrying surfers into position reel and barely heave over the almost literally inconceivable incoming ridges. Jay’s pro forma antagonist — a low-rent surfer with a foul mouth and little narrative reason to exist — opts for the easier route out on one of those boats, but happily, after a minute of tension in the lineup, Hanson drops the Hollywoody duel one fears is coming. The moon-faced sixteen-year-old and his wave are more than enough duel.
When Moriarity at last paddles out through the ice-cold chop, it is to the break that would kill Mark Foo the first day the Hawaiian big wave elite turned up to surf the spot, and ninety-six hours after Jay’s real-life first drop. As Steve Pezman ranted in Riding Giants, Mavericks is “so gnarly and rocky and . . . violent, it’s just hateful, it’s hateful.” The kid somehow takes off on a wave a dozen times his height and, in live footage from the day integrated seamlessly into the film, his over-the-falls wipeout merits terrifyingly its rep as one of the worst ever witnessed. Of course — after minutes under, board tombstoning then finally snapped off the leash — Jay will conquer the wave. Because expected, and clearly a montage of several separate rides, the soaring representation of his triumph oddly lessens the effect. The older and younger man embrace, a hagiographic series of real surf magazine covers follows, then the news of Jay’s death, echoing with fresh meaning the film’s haunted undersea opening. But it’s all decline from the emotional oomph the masterful camerawork and discreetly stirring score elicit from the wave itself when its pure, foul, rearing hatefulness is still the protagonist’s future. In his Romantic masterpiece Howards End, Forster wrote about another remarkable life and death in terms of a “great wave.” What marks such a wave is that it strews at our feet “fragments torn from the unknown.”
Yet the surfing film can also take as its subject a world we know all too well. It may be a biopic — or at least “based on a true story” — but Chasing Mavericks ironically has a strange intemporality; its merged inward-outward focus, a troubled personal adolescence meeting a monumental natural force, speaks only incidentally to its times. In this, Hanson’s film is something of a rarity as surf movies have from the beginning implicitly reflected, and at times more directly commented upon, that world out there that is not the beach. Surfing is a niche activity set in a physically marginal space, but as California’s Jackson Browne reminds us, “the edge of my country, my back to the sea, looking east” can be a point of fertile perspective. All about puberty and sweet summer rebellion, Gidget and her Beach Party-ing chums in fact signalled fierce culture wars to follow. While The Endless Summer inadvertently underlined American global dominance — “Catch a wave / And you’re sittin’ on top of the world!” — Big Wednesday very advertently widened its scope to treat among other things a painful symptom of that dominance, the Vietnam War, and its seething cultural inflammation. With Apocalypse Now and Kilgore’s truism that “Charlie don’t surf,” six-foot peaks and great rights and lefts could never again be quite the theater of utter innocence they might have once seemed. Since then the continuing institutionalization of pro surfing and the simultaneous explosion of a big-money market for surf fashions and related products have certainly done little for any sense of lost purity and insouciance. Even Bear, the revered and archetypal spiritual guide from Milius’s film, morphs temporarily into a cigar-smoking, sweatshop-running surf brand magnate.
Her Gidget, of course, forced open that door, even if she and Jeffrey as quickly tried to close it. Yet, while a talented woman surfer passes unacknowledged in a shot in Big Wednesday, the place for women in early surf films is still generally the sand. Kiani, the love interest in North Shore, shows up there picturesquely as an earthy, natural force on horseback, like the Susan Hart character in Ride the Wild Surf, and her role is roughly the same, standing by her man and bringing out the best in him. Traditionally alluring and feminine with, literally, flowers in her hair, Kiani anticipates the film’s all-boxes-checked ending by simultaneously awakening Rick to the deep meaning of her Hawaiian culture — of which he later displays more understanding than the local hoods in a crucial fight scene — and encouraging him to knuckle down and accept his New York art school scholarship. His guru’s wife is a similarly nurturing figure who’ll slip in an occasional coaxing word when her idealistic husband misses the point but who leaves the waves to the men. In Blue Juice (1995) that traditional woman shows her other face, nagging the thirtyish hero to grow up, leave his childish surfing ways, and settle down. Notable only as a rare British contribution to the genre and as early work for such later A-listers as Ewan McGregor and Catherine Zeta-Jones, its hodgepodge of a story draws a clear gender line between men as active, irresponsible primates and women as staid homebodies. As such it feels like a rearguard throwback, especially given the female lead in Point Break four years earlier. Edgy, dangerous Tyler not only shreds with the best but teaches the ropes to the Keanu Reeves character. Remember, this was the decade of Baywatch, when, while shoehorned into that red tanksuit, Pamela Anderson nonetheless played a lifeguard. In any case, somewhere in those years, according to Dana Brown’s awkward backhand compliment from Step into Liquid, it became “no longer an insult to surf like a girl.”
And thus the film’s title, instead of the more usual sense of soul surfer, that centered individual seeking neither attention nor first place but harmony with the wave and the self. Revealingly, after the cute opening Super 8 footage of the little girl with surfing parents and saltwater in her veins, Bethany avows that “from my first wave I wanted to be a pro surfer.” Given surfing’s carefully cultivated mythology of countercultural spiritual purity, the tendency of other films in the genre — Surf’s Up, Blue Crush, Big Wednesday, North Shore, Surfer, Dude, etc. — has been to question the meaning and personal costs in the professional sport and the accompanying sell-out to commercial motives and interests. Not so Soul Surfer, which not only smilingly accepts as given Bethany’s career choice but is in itself a virtual orgy of product placement. One feels the film, like the surfer herself, was in large part sponsored by Rip Curl. But the name-checking goes far beyond this brand to others and finally to the jaw-dropping moment when preparation for a mission to aid Thai tsunami victims rewards us with a lingering full-screen shot of a pallet of Spam. Agreed, even one can of Spam is an inherently comic object, but the ripple of theater laughter was at least as much in response to the simple fact of the film’s insistent merchandising.
Despite such a moment, the central facts of the narrative are gripping, a girl who gets her arm bitten off, goes back in the ocean (amazing in itself), and then surfs again at an elite level. To make phases two and three of this narrative sequence — the subject matter of the film — work, the precipitating first event demands delicate treatment. About twenty-five minutes in, as Bethany and family friends wait tranquilly for the next wave, the literally out-of-the-blue shark attack occurs. This happens quickly, cleanly, almost abstractly, with no creepy pre-predation music and the minimum of graphic effects. Even Bruce at Universal Studios is scarier than this fakey maw that surges upward and disappears, and that, except for Dad’s later comparison of the scarred board to the now reassuringly deceased shark’s teeth, is essentially forgotten almost immediately after it occurs. To deemphasize the attack by hurrying through then erasing it afterward seems part of director Sean McNamara’s plans: focusing viewer attention intently on the protagonist’s recovery and necessary return to surfing, he does not want his audience to hear those notes from John Williams and get all Jaws-y anytime anybody goes near the water. The issue is in fact only addressed once, and this in order to be summarily dismissed. “Aren’t you afraid?,” asks a friend. “I’m more afraid of not surfing,” replies Bethany.
Well, who would be afraid with Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt as their loving, encouraging, longboarding, attractive, scripture-quoting, nonworking, endlessly available parents? Soul Surfer breaks the genre’s unwritten rule of the protagonist’s weak biological family links and subsequent adoption by the crusty but generous spiritual guide. Quaid’s empathetic counselor is, not surprisingly, also a boardmaker. When Bethany fails in her first comeback because she’s not able to get out one-handed through heavy surf, he devises an innovation for her board; and all along he’s there to train her and offer that kind of advice that applies equally to surfing and to life. In this film, however, the real mentor is the Great Boardmaker in the Sky. The religious apotheosis of Soul Surfer occurs before Bethany’s second competitive comeback when she accompanies her church group to Thailand to help those suffering, rather neatly, from a devastating wave. Seeking a larger purpose, she predictably encourages some understandably hesitant local children to enter the water and try surfing. In context, though, the scene comes suddenly to resemble an immersion baptism.
The effect is more than a slight malaise, as it is elsewhere when we hear quotations from Jeremiah or earnest spiritual counsel from Bethany’s youth minister. Often moving due to the exceptional biographical events on which it is based, certainly sincere, Soul Surfer nevertheless suffers from a goody-goody self-righteousness and a smug failure to question certain assumptions on which its film heroine stands. Like Rick in North Shore, Bethany wins, while technically losing, the final competition; “I didn’t come to win,” she reassures us, “I came to surf.” Okay, but this seemingly blithe disregard for fame and honors is in fact underlain by a fully developed mentality of sponsorship and merchandising. Soul Surfer is not unpleasant to watch despite the occasional wince, but its impossible-not-too-root-for comeback mechanics still come off as disagreeable when so insistently framed by Family Values and by a certain Christian Right’s unthinking fusion of free market capitalism and old-time religion.
A decade earlier, Blue Crush (2002) had taken us to the same perfect Hawaiian beaches, where another aspiring young blond pro surfer overcomes hardship to qualify in another big competition, which she again narrowly loses but in fact wins. Formulaic as it is, shamelessly echoing North Shore and Big Wednesday, Blue Crush nevertheless has an honest, scuffed contemporary zip that’s lacking in the pious certitudes of Soul Surfer. Commerce enters the sanctimonious white-bread world of the latter as an honored houseguest, whereas the protagonist in the former lives “on the other side of the island,” there where you struggle to pay your rent. God’s not on Anne-Marie’s side in Blue Crush — she’s just good, and she needs the sponsorship cash that a top performance in the Pipeline Open might bring in. The film was loosely inspired by Susan Orlean’s 1998 Women Outside profile on Maui girl surfers, most from poor single-parent families, together trying to get through the impact zone; what remains is its blend of near-trailer trash social realism with surfing’s perfect dream, and the sense of a hard-won, daily-threatened female community. Blue Crush is a teen entertainment product tracing the classic sports comeback trajectory, but it stands apart in the genre for the semi-ambitious way it entwines the heroine’s troubled surf quest with questions of social class, race, and gender.
Abandoned by her mother, who’s run off to the mainland with some guy, Anne-Marie shares run-down digs with two girlfriends and a kid sister on the edge of delinquency. The three friends hit the surf when they’re not working in neat little uniforms as housekeepers at a nearby luxury hotel or getting chewed out for driving Penny late to school. Anne-Marie’s the star, a local wild card invite to Pipe, with one week left to prepare — but also with, as the pre-credit sequence displays, nightmares due to a wipeout near-drowning. To this narrative complication then add the NFL team staying at the hotel and its absurdly handsome/nice quarterback; Matt crosses glances with Anne-Marie, asks for surfing lessons, and suddenly she’s choosing silk sheets and room service over training. As the protagonist yields to the attractions of fame, wealth, and afternoon massages, her little sister falls even more apart and her friends try to get her back on the board. Finally, following an unpleasant encounter with the team’s hot, nasty “wives and girlfriends,” Anne-Marie sorts out what’s important, surfing impressively after a rocky start, and scoring a Billabong sponsorship and closing hug with Mr. Right.
Fairy tale narrative arc and, yes, brand name placement, but overall the film communicates a credible sense of the serious financial need and social class barriers present even in paradise. For the tight household of girls in the film, surfing exists simultaneously as a state of pure being and pleasure into which they apparently fell at birth and as a way out of a pretty tough life landside. They are always struggling to make the rent; when let go by the hotel, they jump on the comparatively big dough in surf lessons for Matt and his rambunctious teammates. Interestingly, the film is quietly framed throughout by the ethnicity that often runs parallel with class in Hawaii . Even if a little blondie, Anne-Marie is a local, and her elaborately tattooed, similarly low-rent male friends are all ethnically Hawaiian. From the opening scenes, they act as enabling support for her ambitions, urging her out to Pipeline and “blocking” so she can select the best practice waves. But certain submerged resentments surface when they find their friend with her new beau at a secret break, picking a fight with him because, as they say, “we grew here, you flew here.” Back in North Shore Chandler had similarly addressed the mainlander’s problems of island integration, reminding the hero that we took their land, so naturally they want at least to hold on to their waves. Anne-Marie’s other close ethnically Hawaiian friend is Eden, her too-symbolically-named roommate and, in a nice twist on the motif, the film’s by now inevitable mentor figure. Yes, she’s also a surfboard shaper.
That Anne-Marie would head underwater at this moment of crisis is consistent with the film’s imagery, which, again, begins with an oft-repeated nightmare sequence of submerged, churning terror. Not unlike Chasing Mavericks, the claustrophobic underwater fears link surfing trauma with that of a life struggling to get to the surface. Another near-drowning will follow, and when she finally gets back to work and makes it through to round two at Pipe, Anne-Marie repeatedly refuses waves; and then at last taking off, it’s a hairy wipeout and another long beating. By the time she makes it back out, it’s too late to get the requisite number of waves to beat the real Keala Kennelly against whom she’s opposed. But Kennelly’s surprisingly willing to help, working on the psych-out and coaching Anne-Marie into position. Result: a perfect ten that turns loss into triumph and sponsorship. This, the film’s second feminine mentor figure, might cynically be seen as good PR for the real-life surfer in question, and in any case the competition was already essentially over when she started helping. Yet she may also be viewed as embodying an alternative model of behavior to that traditionally offered by men: when last sighted in North Shore, the Laird Hamilton bad guy is pulling the hero’s board leash so he can’t catch a winning wave. The kind of support Kennelly and other friends offer figures meaningfully into the film’s central concerns, for Blue Crush is about women getting by in a tough world and needing desperately to hang five together.
At first glance, the film seems like a way to make some change by putting real-life buds McConaughey and Harrelson together to brah’-talk each other, which they indeed do charmingly. Surfer, Dude is a little more than that, however, in the comic, easygoing social satire that quickly falls into place. Zarno needs Addington’s effortless cool to pull off what, over lush images of azure swells and bikinied chicks, the same media voice identifies as “the coolest reality show of the summer: the best surfers from around the world will be living in this house and partying with these girls!” Addington and Jack slip in and out of this house, negotiating, refusing to sign, and we soon get the picture: cameras everywhere, the cleavage and manufactured crises of reality TV, the “surfing” room where the technicians want Steve’s cooperation in fabricating his game avatar. “Wave porn,” mutters one of his Jeff Spicoli slacker buddies. The production design underlines the contrast central to the film, between reality and reality show, the dusty, shaggy edges of life and the smooth sheen of deceptive appearance. From the brushy Malibu hillsides through the leathered mugs of rumpled gurus Scott Glenn and Willie Nelson, warm earth tones predominate outside the house. Inside, it’s not beer sloshing in a plastic cup but vodka eased into crystal, ivory walls, silvers, greys, frigid cathode blues.
Heartfelt stuff and brief so as not to overstay its welcome, such sentiments pleasantly underlie the broad satire aimed at a contemporary commercial and entertainment infrastructure of facile image and manipulation. In the film, however, surfers themselves can also come in for a touch of good-natured, if not always fully intentional, satire. First, the title hints, as sweetheart stoner boneheads, yet also as stealth commercial players. The Addington-style surfer as Emersonian rustic has no truck with commerce, but isn’t it exactly that quality that makes him an attractive potential billboard? Zarno reminds McConaughey’s character that he was being paid not for surfing but for wearing certain shorts on a certain board; plus he’s called, isn’t he, the Add Man. Though we’re supposed to sigh knowingly when the evil producer evokes the “surfing industry,” is there a better term for the interlocking financial interests of competition organizers, clothes and gear manufacturers, the surfing elite, and the producers of subsidiary entertainment products, including this very film? How then to position the surfer protagonist appropriately in relation to this economic system — not fully enmeshed, of course, but close enough to be credible for an audience that wants to celebrate its stars and wasn’t born yesterday. According to certain patterns in, now, decades of films, this generally means, it seems, accepting need but not greed as motivation, and ambition but only insofar as it is framed by a wider could-give-a-shit soul surfer ethos. That line is thin and permeable, however. “They all come round eventually,” Zarno says, with a distressing perceptiveness. When Add does, only serious second thoughts and his new girlfriend’s company president of a father can resolve the problem. The bare feet of the latter in the closing sequence apparently mean he’s a cool dude, but am I the only one to see the irony in East Coast corporate cavalry saving the day for a legendary soul surfer?
At the multiplex, to be sure, most viewers will simply see the McConaughey figure as catching the kind of break he deserves. For in the surf film, accommodation with the business world or fame machine generally washes away like it never happened once the hero’s back on the board and immersed again in that surfing dream whose only requirements, we’re led to believe, are self- or wave-imposed. But the accommodation did happen, and it does happen in some way in virtually every surfing movie (even the largely innocent Chasing Mavericks, whose epilogue accords considerable space to Jay Moriarity’s later celebrity). One curious exception to this rule is the film that will conclude these remarks, Point Break (1991). Even twenty years later, Kathryn Bigelow’s fourth film remains a cult classic. At least in part, I would argue, this is because of its uncompromising portrayal of surfing as entry into an inviolable, resolutely pure spiritual and psychic state. This portrayal is not without its own special, and multiple, ironies, however. While there actually is a truly Manichean split between surfing purity and “society” in the film, the overall effect is more to dissolve lines of division than reinforce them. Beyond rebels, the surfers are outlaws, whereas social force is represented by nothing less than the FBI. Much of the interest of the movie lies in what it goes on to do with such apparently irreconcilable opposites. Point Break pretends to be an adrenaline action movie with the requisite good guys and bad guys, but in fact it’s all about moral nuance, the deceptiveness of appearance, and the inadequacy of simple categories.
The categories would certainly seem to be clear. The Keanu Reeves character is a young Bureau hotshot sent to LA to beef up a robbery division tortured by an unsolved series of bank jobs starring the “Ex-Presidents,” a highly professional gang trademarked by their LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and Carter masks. A few American male insult greetings into the narrative, Johnny Utah gains the respect of his cynical veteran partner, and together they pursue the latter’s hunch, based on tan lines and a precise heist calendar, that the robbers are surfers. To infiltrate the scene, Johnny learns to surf, which leads to romance with his tough-love coach Tyler and, more troublingly, to a mutual attraction with Bodhi, surfing high priest and, incidentally, bank robbing gang leader. Though she will almost immediately entwine their worlds, Bigelow takes pains at first to distinguish the star student-athlete whose family name Utah evokes a landlocked homegrown fundamentalism from the mystical waterman named for an Eastern wisdom beyond understanding. The memorable opening credits present the two figures in evocative opposition, with multiple abrupt cuts between the FBI agent on the training course, all staccato movement and jerkily repeated shots at bad-guy cardboard targets, and the supplely immersed camera view of a surfer, presumably Bodhi, whose every movement is fluidly one with the wave’s energy. Here aggression is methodically channelled, numerically evaluated, and tightly focused on decisive later action; there the surfer glides in graceful immersive adaptation to the liquid moment. Yet the complicated moral vision of Point Break is such that even as these terms set themselves apart, they also seem to merge — like the titles’ two words and the lead actors’ names, which first appear on opposing sides of the screen, then slide slowly across each other to take their final transposed positions on the other side. The training-day sequence with its targets gliding left and right visually echoes this movement as well as the horizontal sweeps of the surfer’s continuing relationship with the wave. The rain soaking Reeves as he shoots furthermore suggests a link between the two sequences and their central figures. Significantly, the visual last word goes to Bodhi, whose waves finally swamp the camera, in a sense submerging the screen and, by juxtaposition, the young agent who will soon be swept away by what they represent.
Surfers are “some kind of tribe,” we’re told, whose world is instinct and Dionysian bonfires on the open sand; the Bureau offices are a tight warren of cages where the discourse locksteps through statistics and “data-based analysis.” When Johnny moves to the beach, he leaves the indoor swimming pool and its sour agents fumbling blindfolded to pick up sunken bricks for the blind ecstasy of night surfing. “You don’t need to see the wave; just accept its energy,” Bodhi advises. Signalled by little giveaways like surf talk in the office or familiarity with a certain break, Johnny gradually goes native. For much of the film, he’s unaware that this band and its attractive guru are the criminals he’s seeking, so when that at last becomes apparent, his sense of duty is already wound tightly into a confusing web of affection and heady self-discovery. Such complication is the point in a narrative crafted to call into question conventional assumptions. These guys are bank robbers, but their Presidential disguises suggest a parallel, politically subversive agenda: “I am not a crook,” mimics the V-fingered Nixon figure before leaving with the cash. Or as Bodhi later says, no longer suggesting but underlining with a thick marker, “This was never about the money. It was us vs. the system, that system that kills the human spirit . . . . Those dead souls inching along in their car coffins — we show them that the human spirit is still alive.” Perhaps sincere, perhaps wildly self-justifying, such rage against the machine is in any case disconcertingly explicit, for Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi is far more convincing when he communicates in the quieter language of seduction and infectious enthusiasm — in other words, when talking and living surfing. Again, one of the reasons the film has stuck with viewers is its uncompromising faith in the ideal of surfing — the utter here- and now-ness, the otherworldly float — an ideal that by its very nature is more subversive than any political slogan. Bodhi speaks of “a state of mind — that place where you lose yourself and you find yourself.”
Another complicity just under the surface is, of course, the erotic tension between the Reeves and Swayze characters; palpable if never avowed, it contributes significantly to the film’s already mercurial atmosphere. The two men share the same girlfriend — “what’s mine is yours” — a Lori Petty coiffed for maximum androgyny and bearing the gender indeterminate name of Tyler. There’s mooning and wrestling and languorous looks. The great action pursuit through the backyards and kitchens of Venice ends with the two protagonists locked in each other’s gaze; finally refusing the shot, Johnny falls back, aims his revolver vertically, firing off a dozen stiff rounds to a monstrous groan of release. This list can go on and should, for a certain gay sexual tension is one more way Point Break explores the question of transgression and border crossing. Like this remarkable juxtaposition: the now wised-up Bodhi who says mysteriously, “I know exactly what to do with him,” then cut to a beefcake shot of a doe-eyed, shirtless Johnny gazing longingly up at the camera directly above his bed. When both figures, finally aware of the other’s true identity, play forward in their edgy game, the skydiving sequence offers a veritable festival of loaded language and action. “We gonna’ jump or jerk off?,” it begins, then “you want me so much, it’s like acid in your mouth.” Free falling, they hug in the air, urging each other to “pull it, pull it,” and when the pair finally hits the ground they are tangled in a chute that for all the world resembles a particularly energetic night’s bedclothes. In the epic final scene, when Johnny runs down his prey in Australia during the Fifty Year Storm, the love interest whose kidnapping was his ostensible motivation in much of the last part of film has completely vanished. What counts is that he “gets his guy.” He could slap the cuffs on normally but chooses instead to handcuff himself to Bodhi. It’s not surprising that you can go on YouTube and among the other parodies find a mash-up of such scenes entitled “Point Brokeback.”
Point Break is a genre and gender bender, and a total kick, but people don’t just remember it for the howlers. In its way parody is as sincere a form of flattery as imitation, imitation that, among other things, has already given us the apparently unending Fast and Furious franchise and will soon produce a Point Break remake — to be directed, surprise, by the cinematographer of The Fast and the Furious. There is clearly something in Bigelow’s film that arrests and fascinates, most likely its unsteady demarcation between good and evil, desire and duty, one kind of theft and another. Not surprisingly, the beach where Bodhi and Johnny tangle in affectionate aggression serves at least partially as disputed borderland in this fluid, continuing transaction between civilization and its discontents. Yet the surfline also means something entirely other, for behind the abundant half certitudes and contradictions that compose Point Break stands at least one uncompromising absolute, the redemptive heart truth of surfing: to glide as one with water, to walk on it, leads to a place so intensely of this world it lifts you beyond it. Every surf film seeks words and images to evoke this spot, but it has to be believed to be seen, and none seems to believe quite as intensely as Point Break. In waves where Johnny is born into a new self, Bodhi goes to complete a cycle as natural as the swell, wanting “the ultimate . . . and ready to pay the ultimate price.” Repeated at least twice elsewhere in the film, the adjective seems consciously to echo across the decades the squealed “It’s the ultimate!” and sheer animal delight of a certain Francie after her first life-changing ride on Moondoggie’s board. As Kahuna would find in August 2012, we all finally pay the ultimate price. What matters is that instant in that summer, that wave, that lift, that drop.
References
Brontë, Charlotte (1847), Jane Eyre
Casey, Susan (2010) The Wave, New York, Anchor Books.
Duane, Daniel (1996) Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, New York, North Point Press
Eliot, T. S. (1942), Four Quartets.
Forster, E. M. (1910) Howards End.
Jeffers, Robinson (1930), “November Surf”
Lisanti, Thomas (2005) Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959-69, Jefferson, NC, McFarland.
Morris, Gary (May 1998) “Beyond the Beach: AIP’s Beach Party Movies, Bright Lights Film Journal(21)
Orlean, Susan (September 1998) “Life’s Swell,” Women Outside
Rimbaud, Arthur (1871) “The Drunken Boat” (“Le bateau ivre,” translation John Engle)
Salles, Walter (November 11, 2007) “Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie,” New York Times
Whitman, Walt (1851), “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass
Winnicott, Donald (1971) Playing and Reality, London, Tavistock Pulications,
Woolf, Virginia (1927) To the Lighthouse
Films
Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) American International Pictures. Dir. William Asher. Perfs. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley
Beach Party (1963) American International Pictures. Dir. William Asher. Perfs. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello
Big Wednesday (1978) Warner Bros. Dir. John Milius. Perfs. Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, Gary Busey
BS! (2009) Volcom Stone. Dir. Ryan Thomas
Blue Crush (2002) Universal Pictures. Dir. John Stockwell. Perfs. Kate Bosworth, Matthew Davis, Michelle Rodriguez
Blue Juice (1995) Skreba Films. Dir. Carl Prechezer. Perfs. Sean Pertwee, Catherine Zeta-Jones
Brice de Nice (2005) Mandarin Films Dir. James Huth Perfs. Jean Dujardin, Clovis Cornillac
Chasing Mavericks (2012) Fox 2000 Pictures. Dir. Curtis Hanson, Michael Apted Perfs. Gerard Butler, Jonny Weston
Gidget (1959) Columbia Pictures. Dir. Paul Wendkos. Perfs. Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson
“Hawaiian Holiday” (1937) Walt Disney Productions
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) American International Pictures. Dir. William Asher. Perfs. Annette Funicello, Beverly Adams, Dwayne Hickman
Le Surfing: Sport national des iles Hawaii (1911) Pathé-Frères
North Shore (1987) Universal Pictures. Dir. William Phelps. Perfs. Matt Adler, Gregory Harrison, Nia Peeples
Point Break (1991) Largo Entertainment. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Perfs. Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, Lori Petty
Ride the Wild Surf (1964) Jana Film Enterprise. Dir. Don Taylor. Perfs. Fabian, Shelley Fabares, Tab Hunter, Barbara Eden, Peter Brown, Susan Hart
Riding Giants (2004) Agi Orsi Productions, Forever Films, Quicksilver Entertainment. Dir. Stacy Peralta. Narr. Stacy Peralta
Soul Surfer (2011) Mandalay Pictures. Dir. Sean McNamara Perfs. Anna Sophia Robb, Helen Hunt, Dennis Quaid
Step Into Liquid (2003) Gotham Group, New Visual Entertainment, Top Secret Productions. Dir. Dana Brown Narr. Dana Brown
Surfer, Dude (2008) Berk/Lane Entertainment, J.K. Livin Productions, Winchester Capital Partners. Dir. S.R. Bindler Perfs. Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Jeffrey Nordling
Surf’s Up (2007) Columbia Pictures. Dir. Ash Brannon, Chris Buck
The Endless Summer (1966) Bruce Brown Films. Dir. Bruce Brown. Narr. Bruce Brown. Perfs. Robert August, Mike Hynson
Music
August and Everything After (1993) Counting Crows
“Catch a Wave” (1963) the Beach Boys
“4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” (1973), Bruce Springsteen
“Heroes and Villains” (1967) the Beach Boys
“Looking East” (1996) Jackson Browne
“Surfer Girl” (1963) the Beach Boys
“Surfin’ Safari” (1962) the Beach Boys
“Surfin’ U.S.A.” (1963) the Beach Boys
