The Valley Girl, Like, Totally Deserved Better
The Southern Californian archetype is mocked to this day. But four decades ago, a teen movie traded in sneers for sensitivity.
“She got a whole bunch of nothing in there,” Frank Zappa sings in “Valley Girl,” his 1982 novelty tune and the original source for a certain Southern Californian, well-to-do, teen-bimbo stereotype. Zappa, known for his satirical, experimental compositions, had been inspired to record the song with his kid, who imitated her private-school classmates on the recording. Referring to the region most associated with this vacuous figure, Zappa told David Letterman, “It’s perhaps one of the most disgusting places on the face of the Earth, and I wrote this song about the values of the people in the San Fernando Valley.” Such scorn remains a common reaction to the Valley-girl archetype. She no longer has to live in California or even be an adolescent, but she still represents a particular kind of frivolous suburbanite encouraged by a consumer society to do little more than shop, party, and tan. Other examples include Cher from Clueless, Elle from Legally Blonde, the Kardashians, and any number of Real Housewives. Yet the Valley girl has always been an overly easy target—and one film, released shortly after the Zappa single, understood that.
The 1983 romantic comedy Valley Girl, directed by Martha Coolidge, is a modern reimagining of Romeo and Juliet written by the film producers Andrew Lane and the late Wayne Crawford. Initially, they saw the film as a way of taking advantage of “what today you would call a ‘viral’ thing,” Lane told me. Yet even as the film drew on teen-girl tropes, it treated its characters with care rather than ire, taking its kids seriously. Valley Girl has always been known among its admirers for going deeper than it was expected to. It’s why this year—the film’s 40th anniversary—saw a string of screenings supported by filmmakers such as Karyn Kusama and Kevin Smith. It should also be recognized for refocusing the basic critique of youth materialism to a wider comment on societal materialism.
Valley Girl’s writers originally pitched it, in Lane’s words, as similar to Shakespeare’s classic tragedy but “without the death,” playing off long-standing tensions between surfers in L.A. and Valley interlopers. At the time, Lane said, the movie studio Atlantic Entertainment was getting squeezed out of the art-house market by bigger players and needed a new indie; it gave Lane and Crawford the green light and $350,000. The somewhat slapdash production values of Valley Girl are no doubt down to the relatively low budget (Coolidge was paid $5,000) and the fact that the movie was written in about 10 days, according to Lane. The team was in preproduction within mere weeks, and filming took place over a single month.
Lane had considered making Valley Girl his directorial debut, but he knew Coolidge through a mutual friend. “Putting my producer’s hat on, I sort of thought it might not be a bad idea to hire a woman,” Lane told me, adding, “clearly, it’s a woman’s story.” Coolidge had already directed 1976’s Not a Pretty Picture, based on a sexual assault she experienced as a teenager, and was known for being good with actors. Under her direction, there was limited flesh and fornication in Valley Girl, unlike a slew of other teen comedies at the time. “It isn’t actually the getting of the person that is hot on the screen,” Coolidge says in the film’s commentary track. “It’s the wanting.” As Lane put it, “We wanted ours to be more of a love story than a story of lust and overheated hormones.” Despite being named after an archetype, Valley Girl’s story was driven by humans, not caricatures. The original script had neither a falling-in-love nor a breakup scene—those were Coolidge’s ideas, and she helped with the rewrites. Zappa used his daughter’s playful mockery of her peers to disparage their vacuity, but Coolidge and the cast hung out at high schools in order to really understand girls like them. “I don’t like movies that are snooty toward their subjects,” she told The New York Times, “so we tried to get to the source.”
The film certainly embraces Valleyspeak. “He’s got the bod, but his brains are bad news,” is one of the first lines spoken by Julie (Valley Girl’s version of Shakespeare’s Juliet, played by Deborah Foreman). Yet the line also suggests that this sun-kissed babe shopping with her friends is not as superficial as one might think. Her hippie parents own a health-food store and encourage her individuality, so when she gets bored of her boyfriend, Tommy—despite her friends lauding him as “bitchin’”—it’s not a complete surprise. Julie wants something new—as Valley girls often do—and, as though the gods have heard her call, Randy (her Romeo, played by Nicolas Cage) emerges from the surf like a janky Poseidon, with his galumphing gait and spiky red hair. “You’ll see things that you’ve only read about in books,” one of Randy’s friends tells her when the two go on a first date. Just as in the film’s source material, the main characters end up together despite every demand not to.
Although Valley Girl is purportedly about its titular heroine, Randy commands every space. His outsize presence serves a purpose: It shows, over and over, that he and Julie aren’t so different; the movie refuses to define them solely by their milieus. Randy’s humor surfaces in Cage’s own comedic timing, as in the scene of him waiting for Julie in a narrow shower stall at a house party, his tall body folding in on itself, or in the montage of him popping up in various disguises around her after she has dumped him. But he also becomes a vehicle for Valley Girl’s class commentary: Julie and her wealthy peers sport crisp pastels and think Randy and his friend Fred, in their ratty, nightclub-ready somber colors, are “slumming it.” As the film progresses, the lovers’ outfits converge—Julie wears black leather; Randy wears powder blue—and the divide between them becomes less distinct. They have invaded each other’s lives and diluted the difference.
So when Julie dumps Randy for Tommy (really dumping him in order to keep her disapproving friends), Randy mocks her speech—“Fuck off, for sure, like, totally,” Cage ad-libbed—as a way of mocking her social circle rather than her specifically. Their breakup shows how materialistic class pressures can supplant people’s real desires. Those demands overshadow even the ostensibly happy ending of Valley Girl, in which Randy disrupts Julie’s prom and persuades her to choose him after all. In a callback to The Graduate, the couple sit side by side in a limo, the weight of having chosen each other over everyone else finally dawning on them. Still, by sacrificing her friendships—the teen version of family—the film legitimizes Julie’s evolution from a young woman defined by society to one who is free to define herself.
Valley Girl quickly recouped its money on opening weekend and went nationwide, ultimately earning more than $17 million. It met a generous critical reception too. “Coolidge hasn’t made a campy, condescending comedy, but a satiric romance, in which the background gags and caricatures contribute to a sense of significant conflicts and solid emotions,” Dave Kehr wrote at the Chicago Reader. “It’s irresistible.” The writers and director of Valley Girl chose authenticity over artifice, traded in a sneer for sensitivity, and the audience bought it. Viewers knew the problem was not the Valley girl but the world in which she found herself. And though even the film’s writers may have seen it as a woman’s story, it proved to be for everyone.