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).
.png)