Todd Stephens | Gypsy 83 / 2001

going their own way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Stephens (screenplay, based on a story by Stephens and Tim Kaltenecker, and director) Gypsy 83 / 2001

 

Todd Stephens’ Gypsy 83 takes us into the teen goth subculture of the late 1990s and early years of our current century—at least as Stephens tells it; and I have a strong feeling that his vision of the Goth subculture is a bit limited, particularly since the hero of these young high school Goths is Stevie Nicks, hardly a performer I associate with the post-punk Gothic rock groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division or even the later the Birthday Party, Southern Death Cult, Specimen, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, and the Damned among others.

     It doesn’t matter since, as these young kids, Gypsy Vale (Sara Rue) and Clive Webb (Kett Turton), later reveal, they’re not fully up-to-date in their Sandusky, Ohio high school regarding either Goth music or Stevie Nicks for that matter.

      What this film did make clear for me was just how logical it was for certain teenage girls and boys, who might feel some sexual differences from their peers to align themselves instead with an outre music fetish. With Clive’s long jet black hair and Gypsy’s blond frizzy curls, along with their Goth jewelry and clothing, they are able sublimate their feelings of alienation in a manner that, if it made them no less of outsiders among their classmates than if Clive had hidden his gay sexuality and Gypsy had attempted to cover up her physical sexual maturity, it at least saved them from sexual bullying. If they are mocked for their attire and alien interests they can nevertheless deflect their sexual longings, even sometimes from themselves as Clive does—imagining at moments that although admitting he is gay he declares that is not “really into messy sex”—without setting off the hormonal and homophobic rage of so many of his peers.

     Despite their costumes and their musical preferences, their denigration of the world around them, and their fascination with death, Gypsy and Clive differ little from the standard gay boy and bestie female friend that kept a far straighter Steven Carter in Simon Shore’s Get Real and Eric in David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen on edge, both movies from only 4 years earlier.

    Although, given Gypsy and Clive’s self-awareness and their quite purposeful statements of alienation, we don’t quite have the same dynamics in the film as the other two about “coming out” (of which I’ve long argued Get Real and Edge of Seventeen and a couple of slightly earlier films stood as the models of the B version of that genre) we nonetheless do find ourselves in a similar situation in which the central characters both need to come to full terms with their sexuality, just as the two central figures of Shore’s 1998 work did. Instead of staying home and trying to come to terms with their parents, these two—discovering that there is a Stevie Nicks concert featuring a Night of a Thousand Stevies, encouraging would-be singers such as Gypsy to audition before a New York audience—take to the road.

      Clive’s family, who we never meet, seem to be a liberal somewhat well-to-do couple, while Gypsy lives alone with her father, who once performed in a band with his wife who has since disappeared or perhaps is dead, her father remaining vague about her long absence. Actually, we discover along with Gypsy as she and Clive finally dare to try out a new life, that her mother left her daughter and husband to pursue her own dream of becoming a singer, leaving her family cruelly behind.

      With her own car (she works in a drive-up photo shop in the days when films were still developed from negatives) and with Clive’s encouragement Gypsy and the young 17-year-old are soon on the road to self-discovery.

     Their first encounter, a washed-up popular singer named Bambi LeBleau (Karen Black) seems basically disconnected with the story and their own lives, being only tangentially related. Stopping by an Ohio roadside eatery made up of redneck hicks that almost make Lawrence Welk seem sheik, they find Bambi singing in the motel lounge. Gypsy, in particular, is amazed by the woman’s voice, despite her conservative repertoire, and both she and Clive wonder why she hasn’t had a career. Bambi assures them that almost made it big in New York, recording one record album, which she plays for them.

       True innocents, they attempt to convince her to join them on their voyage in order to resuscitate her own career. But in the bedroom of the house to which she’s invited them to stay the night, Gypsy discovers a full hideaway closet of the albums which have been paid for by Bambi herself. She has had no career in New York, but is, as they also quickly perceive, a middle-aged alcoholic who has used the two in an attempt to escape her life of performing in just such venues in which they discovered her. They drive off without her as soon as the sun  rises.

       Although they’ve justifiably left their scarecrow behind, a little further along their yellow brick road they encounter an even stranger figures, an Ohio Amish boy, Zechariah, hitchhiking in an attempted escape from his Amish life. Both Clive and Gypsy are attracted to the cute hunk, stopping along the way at a graveyard to have a picnic.

       Nearby they encounter yet another group of hidebound traditionalists, a bus of frat boys forcing their pledges to go through ridiculous maneuvers.

     Clive believes the young man might be attracted to him, but soon discovers, much to his disappointment, that Zechariah is not only straight but is very attracted to the zaftig bosom of Gypsy. Embarrassed for his presumption, Clive runs off as Gypsy and Zechariah try out the women’s room of a highway gas station plaza for a thoroughly lusty round of sex that might remind some older viewers of Tom Jones’ sexual encounter with Molly Seagrim in the Tony Richardson film of 1963.

        Clive doesn’t go unrewarded as one of the upperclassman frats sneaks away from the torture bus and catches Clive’s eye. These two try out a toilet stall of the men’s room with equally successful results, Clive suddenly discovering how wonderful sex is for the very first time as Stephens’ peeping tom camera now shifts from the floor of the ladies’ room to a stall in the men’s toilet to let us watch Clive’s deflowering.

       Although both sexual encounters are fulfilling, they also both end badly. Zechariah tells Gypsy that, although he loves her, he’s decided to return home to his pregnant wife. Like all the other men she’s met up with, it’s another case of “love ‘em and  leave ‘em.”

        Clive, hardly sensitive to her terrible disappointment, selfishly recounts his sexual pleasures. But soon after, meeting up again with the frat bus, they discover that the frat boys have written “queer” and “freaks” across both sides of their car and when Clive attempts to stand up against their stupid bigotry, he is beaten while his friend from the night before looks on through the bus window without a word.

        The Tin Man stuck in a life frozen in time and the Lion who is too meek to speak up are clearly not making the trip with them. The duo prefer to chance it alone. And before long the New York skyline looms up as it has for so many thousands of hopeful young men and women as a beacon that calls out for all who witness its Emerald City-like towers to enter and become everything they ever wanted to be.

        Further difficulties, however, face them. They’ve arrived too late for Gypsy to audition and win a place on the program. When she finally discovers someone who knew her mother, she discovers that her mother is dead, having committed suicide four years earlier. She also uncovers the fact that her mother has been sending her letters regularly, emphasizing her love of her daughter, but that her father has kept them from her.

         Meeting up with a couple of cute fellow Goth boys, Clive makes an unforgiveable faux pas of confusing a literary work with a new record, and is mocked for being a poseur—an outsider even in this world—whose relationship to them is mere pretense.

        The friend of Gypsy’s mother, however, goes to bat for the girl and gets her on the list. With Clive photographing the performance, Gypsy finally gives it her all, the audience in thrall of her performance.

       By film’s end, Gypsy has decided to stay on and, like her mother, to give a career a try; while Clive, who hasn’t stopped thinking about tomorrow, realizes he has to return home via Gypsy’s car, graduate, and move on to college—now with the realization, however, that he is gay and quite enjoys it.

     Gypsy visits her mother’s grave which appears to be in Queens, given the distant Manhattan skyline.       

        If Stephens’ fanciful tale of coming of age seems a bit too familiar and coy, it is nonetheless near perfect for the youthful audience for which it was spun. And it’s nice, for a change, to have the youthful figures face their own dilemmas without all the turmoil of adult parental shock, turmoil, and eventual acceptance. These figures make it down the road quite well, despite some bumpy moments, all by themselves.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).