Just Do Something!: An analysis of Pump Up The Volume (1990)

"Quitting will not make you strong, living will'

Pump Up the Volume is a film starring a young Christian Slater as a new student and generally asocial bastard at a high school full of dark secrets who ends up in a toxic relationship with a goth girl who’s obsessed with him. The movie has overarching themes of teenage angst in a youth-hostile society, and it uses suicide as a major plot point to illustrate the ways in which the education system and society at large fails young people. It is strikingly similar to Heathers in those regards (it was also released just two years after Heathers), and I view it as a companion piece of sorts, one that I think has aged better and has more to say. This is a long post, so the structure is that I will lay out a plot summary, then dive into the subject of free speech, and then analyze the film's messages regarding the treatment of adolescents.

The story follows Mark Hunter (Slater), who dresses like a nerd and eats lunch alone. He isn't even bullied much, because nobody bothers to interact with him. When a girl, Nora, shows interest in him, he’s barely able to speak to her at all, avoiding her even though he he likes her back. He’s too shy. However, at 10 PM every night, he broadcasts his pirate radio station, under the persona of Happy Harry Hard-On. Happy Harry is equal parts DJ, therapist, performance artist, and prankster. A shock jock with a heart of gold. He has a sizable fanbase among other students at his school, and he has a PO box (rented under the fake name Chuck U. Farley) where they send him letters. One of them is from an anonymous student who says he’s going to commit suicide. Harry calls him up, and doesn’t try to talk him out of it. He doesn’t grasp the severity of the situation, gives him a couple platitudes, and then after the call jokes “Now I feel like killing myself, but luckily I’m too depressed to bother”. The student does kill himself, and it starts an uproar. From there, things spiral, as even though Harry attempts to apologize, his legend only grows, and the school begins falling into disorder (via the rowdiness of the students, some of which is encouraged by Harry). The hunt to catch Harry grows, but he’s able to outsmart the school, the police, and the FCC. Finally, he puts a mobile transmitter inside his mother’s car and drives around with Nora (the film’s love interest), making his final broadcast. His voice changer breaks, and he tells everyone to “Steal the air! It’s yours!” and says anyone can and should do what he did. The crowd cheers him on as he’s arrested, and the final scene is a bunch more kids starting their own pirate radio broadcasts.

There’s not a lot of teenage rebellion films where the ultimate villain is the Federal Communications Commission. As the internet is increasingly a walled garden, Harry’s story shows the power free speech still holds. I would like to clarify for a moment that when I say free speech I do not mean it in the modern conservative “It’s unconstitutional for social media to ban me for being racist” way. I am instead referring to the right to mock those in power, and the right to be a freak. Happy Harry demonstrates both of these in spades. He regularly mocks the school administration, simultaneously laughing at them and making salient points (they expel students constantly, but don’t we all have a right to an education?). At one point he even does a little investigative journalism, calling up the head guidance counselor and asking why he recommended a student be expelled for getting pregnant,. The guidance counselor, who moments ago was talking about his “comprehensive program of American values” sputters and denies it. He’s never been challenged this way before. He has no answer. It’s a seismic moment for the students listening, and bootleg tapes of the broadcast are made and sold to the students who didn’t listen live. Pirate radio here exemplifies the true promise of communications technology: The idea that anyone can confront those in power and demand answers. They are not invincible, they are people just like you. This is prohibitively offensive to the people who make the rules. They cannot be seen as merely flawed humans like the rest of us. The suicide is a convenient excuse to go after Harry, but this moment is shown to be what actually offends the administration. The fact that a student was empowered by anonymity to challenge authority. That challenge cannot go unpunished or the whole system crumbles. The FCC employee directly acknowledges this when he sees the students getting rowdy and declares “This is the problem with free speech” - it sure is, buddy! 

Now we come to the right to be a freak. Harry’s full DJ name is Happy Harry Hard-On. On the air, he presents himself as a sex-crazed maniac, even as we the viewer know this is all just performance art. He talks about prancing around nude in nothing but a cock ring, and then later admits to Nora that he’s never even seen one in real life. He pretends to masturbate on air, but all he’s doing is making over-the-top noises and describing it. It’s like some sort of reverse phone sex hotline. My initial instinct would be to over-analyze this scene. I could say he’s confronting people’s insecurities around masturbation/adolescent sexual awakening. I could say he’s satirizing the ways in which people (especially teenagers, assuming things were the same in 1990 as they were when I was a teenager) present themselves as sex experts even though nobody knows what they’re doing. I could say he’s doing it as a literalist representation of the concept of instant gratification, flipping a common critique leveled against young Gen Xers back on itself. But honestly? I think Harry was just trying to get a rise out of people. Make them react strongly, whether that was in laughter or disgust. He’s skewering contemporary morality by being absurd and shocking. He’s looking society in the eyes and saying “I don’t respect you, and nobody will by the time I’m done.” John Waters would be proud. It’s the ultimate act of teenage defiance, and for that, the adults cannot abide Harry’s existence.

On the topic of adults mistreating teenagers, the film has quite a bit to say regarding the ways in which adolescents are ignored, mistreated, and pathologized. At one point, Harry calls a gay student who wrote him a letter asking for advice after he was bullied and assaulted by three men. Harry has the boy tell his story on the air, without judging or making fun of him, showing him to be far more caring than the police, who hear about the story and make jokes about it, rather than doing anything about it. Harry responds with genuine empathy, saying the other boy is a stronger person than he thinks, even if he doesn’t have the answer to the boy’s problem. It’s notable that Harry is overtly compassionate towards a gay teenager when none of the adults in the film are. This is the core of the film, right here: Show up for the people who need it, especially when those in power won’t. Happy Harry, for all his edginess, has infinitely more backbone and morals than any adult in the film screeching about “public decency” and trying to get him shut down. He’s willing to say what’s right, even when it’s unpopular. By contrast, the adults prioritize the facade of happiness called “order” over any real improvement in the teenagers’ lives (more on this later).

In the same broadcast, responding to a listener who wrote a letter describing abuse at the hands of her brother, Harry delivers the most repetitive monologues of the film. “You’re not screwed up. You’re an un-screwed-up reaction to a screwed up situation. Feeling screwed up in a screwed up place in a screwed up time does not mean you are screwed up.” The letter is revealed to be fake, but his words resonate anyways. Harry, in his own way, is telling his listeners that they are over-pathologized. Many people, and especially many adolescents, end up “acting out” when they are thrust into horrible circumstances. Those responses themselves are then pathologized, and used as evidence that the real problem was the teenager themself the whole time, and the solution offered is some form of behavioral correction, rather than changing the material circumstances that the person is rationally responding to. A movie review isn’t the place to go long on this, so for now, I’ll say Harry’s words are reminiscent of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s classic line that “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The suburban community of this film certainly qualifies as a profoundly sick society, and all the teenagers know it. Nobody has their back but them. The only adult in the film who tries to have their back, an English teacher, is fired for questioning the principal. “Don’t rock the boat, especially when you’re on it,” a line used by several characters, turns out to be less advice and more of a threat. The film posits that the system cannot be changed from the inside. You will assimilate or you will be cast out. 

This theme of forcible assimilation into society is excellently explored in another scene I’d like to examine in-depth. There’s a PTA meeting where the principal engages in some managerial class HR speak, saying “I congratulate you for your concerns” - a statement perfectly calculated to sound reassuring but mean nothing. It’s a moment that would be solid satire if it was written today, showing how condescending the administration is to their own students. The parents and teachers believe that Happy Harry is solely responsible for all the problems of the school. Everything was perfect until he arrived, after all. Paige Woodward, a high-achieving student who caused an explosion in her microwave after Harry’s broadcast exhorting his listeners to rebel, shatters this when she gets up on the podium and explains that Harry is not at fault. The school was never perfect, everyone is terrified of expressing themselves. She was never perfect, she was just good at faking it. The adults do not believe her. They tell her she is wrong about her own thoughts and experiences. They say it must’ve been Harry. She leaves, realizing nobody is listening to her. Here we come to the truly incisive critique of the film: Adults do not listen to teenagers. Of course they don’t, everyone knows that. But think about that for a moment. If you’ve been a teenager at any point in the past couple decades, this scene has happened to you. If you had some kind of problem that couldn’t be solved with welbutrin, you’ve had an adult tell you you were wrong about your own experiences, as if they could ever know your thoughts better than you could. The thing to realize is that they don’t mean “you’re wrong” as in “you are factually incorrect.” They mean “you’re wrong” as in “I will not tolerate this behavior.” Adolescence in America functions as a window of time in which the individual is told to shut up and listen. There’s no point in speaking out about your concerns, nobody’s listening anyways, you are told. My mother once explained to me that even when she was wrong, she was right. I always thought this was a bit of an odd statement, but as an adult I see what she meant. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter if a child/adolescent is correct and an adult is wrong. The adult is the one who exercises power over the adolescent, and therefore who’s “right” doesn’t matter. The adult will get their way regardless. And those same adults will turn around and wonder why teenagers are all depressed these days. Why is teen suicide such an epidemic these days? A mystery indeed.

Once again, Harry has a better answer than any authority figure in the film. When Harry pontificates about suicide, he posits that rebellion is a preferable alternative. “Don’t you want to do something crazy? Then why not do it? Makes a hell of a lot more sense than blowing your fucking brains out.” Suicide takes you out of the world, but it doesn’t change anything. There is no nobility in suffering, nor is there any in suicide (which he also says, by way of explaining that “you shit your shorts” when you die). He advocates, in slightly less poetic language, taking arms against a sea of troubles. “I don’t care what, just do it!” he exclaims. He doesn’t have the answers, he’s not the savior, he’s not even special. Happy Harry, however, goes well beyond Howard Beale’s liberal futility in his famous monologue from Network (1976). He doesn’t want you to get mad, he wants you to fucking riot. Laugh in their faces when they try to stop you. A student makes a dance remix of the phone call Harry had with the guidance counselor, and two students wire into the PA system and blast it through the school. They start graffitiing. The administration is flummoxed and unsure of how to respond to such an unprecedented display of their own impotence in the face of a collective middle finger from the students. Interestingly, they also invite expelled students to come back. Once again, they take care of each other far better than anyone in a position of authority does. The film is quite optimistic towards the end, showing that teenagers are not completely powerless. They can fight, and they can win.

The scene with Paige that I mentioned earlier has one more piece to it. After Paige walks away, one teacher yells at her menacingly to come back, as another says they really want to hear what she has to say. This quick moment is such a perfect encapsulation of the way our society treats teenagers. They are not humans, they are animal to be controlled. The teacher saying they want to “hear what she has to say” is lying. Paige knows that. The carrot and the stick are deployed simultaneously, as if they don’t even see the contradiction of it. If they do, they don’t care. Morally, it is a crime for a teenager to lie to an adult, and that action is worthy of severe punishment. But an adult lying to a teenager? Entirely permissible. Adults have the power, and therefore it is not only tolerated but actively encouraged. As Paige walks out, she’s confronted by TV news presenters. They ask her only two questions. “Has this affected your grades at all” and “What do your parents think” - she isn’t a person to them either. She is an extension of her parents, who matter in a way she doesn’t. She has expectations placed upon her that she can either fulfill or not fulfill, and that is the only metric by which she will be judged. Maybe, if she sufficiently fulfills the expectations of her parents and shuts up and takes it for long enough, she can become a person. Maybe. 

The modern American teenager exists in a suffocating world. You’re told you can do anything, but that’s a lie. The adults with power over you will say they’re hearing your concerns, but they won’t ever address them. Teachers and parents (usually) don’t physically strike their students anymore, but discipline is still the only response they have. 

Pump Up the Volume, on some level, is a silly film about punk rock and teenage angst. However, if the past 2,000 words have had any impact on you, hopefully you’ll see why it’s so much more than that. It carries a message all of us could stand to hear, 34 years later. Everyone is worthy of dignity and respect, and it’s your job, as well as everyone else’s, to defend and extend that dignity, especially when those in power won’t.