by James Hughes

Thirty years ago, leaving The Reject Shop under Mornington Safeway, I glanced at a basket of odds and ends. A $1 video caught my eye. The cover – a baby-faced Matt Dillon flanked by unknowns – had an orphaned, bygone air. Closer inspection revealed its birth year as 1979. But fashion had run so far from the denim flares they were all sporting, I may as well have been looking at The Beverly Hillbillies. Thinking it might be good for fifteen minutes, I took it home.

If I said I knew Over the Edge was great, first watch, I’d be yanking your chains. I knew it felt different. I knew it was potent. But soon enough I’d forgotten it.

In 2023, light years from any semblance of youth we might assume necessary to appreciate any story of youth gone wild, I searched online.

I learned that it has a cult following. I learned of a man who has watched it two hundred times and plans to watch it again soon. I discovered there are people who pilgrimage to the place in Colorado where it was made. Even better, I discovered that somebody at American Film Archive (thank-you Chris Quest) had recently uploaded it. Bingo. There they were, the kids of New Granada; miraculously untouched by time.

Where to start with this blisteringly brilliant, beautiful movie? The soulful total unknowns perfectly cast? The chemistry and camaraderie between characters they inhabit with such conviction? The fearlessly crude, era-specific, casually convincing lingo? Inspired use of light? How about every third shot knocking your eye out? How about a milieu explored with the kind of depth documentary-makers can only dream? Or maybe just the way it depicts first love, with sincerity and nuance, without sentimentality, and finally with majesty?

And from where did its makers conjure its lawless spirit?

At this point, some may be wondering: maybe just tell us what it’s about? As Sergeant Doberman tells New Granada’s parents, when the lights go out, “Relax. Please relax. I can ASSURE you everything is under control!” It would be slipshod of me to write on Over the Edge without violating a rule or two.

So, for now let’s skip the story’s skeleton and cinematic context and go straight to its lifeblood – its music. The songs in Over the Edge are quintessentially of its era, not so much enhancing as intoxicating the movie’s atmosphere. An early snatch of Cheap Trick’s Surrender draws the camera along young Carl Willat’s jeans and torso, as he lies listening on his headphones. Sidling along the adolescent’s body, Jonathan Kaplan’s camera doesn’t imply anything sexual, necessarily, but nor does it ignore the fact adolescents are sensual, intensely alive beings, brimming with feeling. Fusing the song’s rousing energy to the boy’s stillness is inspired. As the camera arrives at his face, the song, much louder now, seems to have him in its possession.

Or perhaps he’s only replaying his part in the exchange at the police station:

“You got some driving need to louse things up for yourself Carl?”

“I got a driving need to be left alone.”

Surrender is good, damn good: an incommunicable feeling communicated.

Five minutes later, a riff kicks in about as hard as any riff in any movie. Unlike Surrender, we’re not eased into it. We’re ambushed. We’re cast into the boy’s body, dressing for Friday night. We turn a slightly self-conscious 360 for the mirror. It’s The Ramones’ Teenage Lobotomy and once heard here, song and scene are synonymous.

The fun lasts just sixteen seconds, but it pumps so much juice it’s still circulating five or six scenes later, when things suddenly turn very dark, to very different music – an icy synth of some sort, mimicking shockwaves, seemingly mocking the boy’s suffering.

That sour, slithering, almost alien-sounding synth is one thing. But what really haunts Over the Edge is a gentle woodwind. Again and again, as the story takes a turn, we hear its mysterious sound. It’s some kind of flute or clarinet, maybe an oboe. It warns and laments, expresses longing, weaving in and out – not so much an instrument interposed as it is a natural fibre in the film’s fabric; one of its many voices, some of which are intensely ugly, others nicely familiar. One boy in the story never utters a word, but even he has a voice, of a kind.

It won’t give much away to say that there are moments in this movie that send tingles to your legs and spine.

There’s a trippy scene where the sound is just stopped, as if a plug’s been pulled, and we’re shown two faces, in disbelief, though what just happened, each had sensed might be coming all along. All the earlier rambunctious rock n roll noise is annulled. Behind the silence there seems another silence, a mysterious distillation of all that’s just been lost. And then one of those two figures turning, soles slapping grit; and that weird magic wand of woodwind.

And soon after, there’s a kiss as rich as any in cinema, at a fiery dawn window. Look at the boy’s palms pressed to the glass as she leaves, and the chance appearance of a bird beyond.

And a moment during a pay-phone call, a change of pitch in a teenager’s voice – suddenly the voice of a frightened child – on a three word question: a moment that put shivers into my skull, at the age of fifty.

And there are moments so perfectly simple it’s almost odd to see them in a movie. Like the sudden brightness in Carl’s face, spotting Cory, amid the surrounding sullenness of the assembly.

To some, it may sound absurd and even deranged to hear this film gushed over. A sensible detractor asks: how can anyone sympathise with kids with enough money for LSD and enough gall to groan when they’re told smoking will no longer be tolerated on school grounds?

Over the Edge is not too worried about our sympathising. It helps if we fall for Carl’s gallantry. Likely, we’re always going to fall for Cory, a character who, moments before losing her virginity (we think) confides that she wants to drive trucks for a job. And good luck disliking Richie White when he says, in response to a cop asking is there a reason he’s hiding, “Yeah. We heard you were horny, man.” Charm aside, one of the movie’s defining attributes is how little it seems to care whether you care for it.

This illusion of offhandedness puts a lot of people off the film before it’s even in stride. Initially, it seems little more than a jumble of loosely related scenes. It’s as if the film itself is turning a shoulder, spitting to one side at ‘plot’ or ‘structure.’ Non-sequiturs abound. (Any movie about kids without a few non-sequiturs has Pinocchio’s nose.) Even when the basic machinery of a plot emerges, there’s such disorder, it still seems to be muddling along, going nowhere. It’s all a cloak. Narrative seeds are planted, all the way. Dark developments are, if not foretold, slyly foreshadowed. Look at the way the boy in the first classroom scene is driving his pen into the desk over and over, for no sane reason. And the way Jerry Cole, one of the town’s money men jokes of his vintage car, “They’re gonna have to bury me in that old heap of mine.” Look at Richie’s posture in his mum’s Bronco, when she’s driving him home; arms extended, hands clasping the frame as if in manacles.

So then, what is it about? Teens pitted against adults in a badly planned estate empty at its heart, rolling away to nowhere?

Sure enough.

Or . . . we might say Over the Edge is about what happened when the drugs flooding American cities in the 1970s seeped into uncountable suburban pockets. Over the Edge is about America’s young taking to those drugs the way they took to JAWS and Alice Cooper. Why is Sergeant Doberman pursuing fourteen-year-olds? Because they might be holding drugs – yes but why? Because adults made the drugs accessible – yes but why? Because an adult somewhere needs a buck, just as the adults of New Granada need to make a buck from their plots of land. Over the Edge is about an aspirational class’s gravest fear: financial malfunction.

It’s about what happens when things don’t turn out to plan.

It’s about education pitted against an ever more belligerent rock n roll subculture.

It’s about how difficult it is be a high-school teacher once permissive parenting loses its way. And it’s about how easy it can be as a parent to get the boundaries muddled.

And Over the Edge is definitely about America’s infatuation with guns. How do they end up in the wrong hands? What are the right hands? “Hey Richie, who was that guy you were telling me about for guns and stuff?”

Someone say vandalism? Over the Edge might not be about the inexplicable affinity for defacing and smashing, but it’s always boiling away in the background. When the pot bubbles over, we’re shown how rebellion can curdle to rank conformity.

The movie doesn’t explain any of this; it just explores. “Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow,” sang David Bowie. New Granada’s pint-sized drug dealer wears a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. His name is Tip – tip of the iceberg? Even the playground is a place of danger and dealing and double-dealing.

None of which is to say New Granada is a microcosm of middle-America in 1979. There are no black or Hispanic or Puerto Rican kids. New Granada is a white problem. The point may be accidentally made, but it’s unmissable: black America can’t be blamed for this. The character Mark, seems to be the only kid with a more ethnic background. He’s not exactly an outsider, but he is a nasty piece of work. After battering and mugging a kid, he seethes into camera, “Just remember to keep your mouth shut faggot.” Over The Edge doesn’t seek its kicks in violence. When violence happens, it’s sicked upon us and it’s shown to be sick. Except for a couple of images at the end (Mark again), it’s never stylised.

Which brings us to an abnormal fact: The Warriors, the 1979 movie about New York gangs, was to blame for Over the Edge being pulled from cinemas days after release. Screenings of The Warriors (made by Paramount) had incited brawls between fired-up, wannabee rival warriors, in a dozen towns. Three people met their death. Presumably, a lot more than three met with a black eye. Orion Pictures somehow convinced themselves that Over the Edge would incite far worse.

That’s hard to comprehend. The two films are miles apart. The Warriors is a dystopian hallucination. At least, even if it paints a particular urban reality, it bears no resemblance to the kind of everyday life Over the Edge deals in.

Not that the kids in Over the Edge are above and beyond blurring make-believe with reality. It’s even a bit of a theme. The sublimely garish T-shirts say it best. They’re in thrall to Evil Knievel and JAWS and Starsky and Hutch and Rocky and Star Wars and The Incredible Hulk and Kiss. Richie, all of fourteen, says in the school corridor, “I’m an outlaw, Jack, them cops wanna deal with me, they best do it on the streets.” Another teen wonders if the blood Gene Simmons vomits is real. When things go haywire, another swathes himself in cords and cables, seemingly under the impression that he’s C3PO, or Skywalker. “C’mon,” he tells Cory, like she’s Princess Leia, “I’ll take you home.”

The kids, in other words, were not alright. A culture’s surfeit of brilliant fantasy – and other gear – had them more than a little edgy and strange. Worth remembering, Over the Edge came on the heels of The Omen and The Exorcist and other flicks of spiritually eccentric kids. Is that what Orion Pictures thought Over the Edge was trying to be? Carrie with guitars? Dawn of the Dead in double-denim? Posters and promotional kits – cult-like faces with infrared eyes and bloody mouths – suggests somebody at least wished that’s what it was.

Maybe the people charged with marketing it could be forgiven for being a bit confused. What was its genre? Who was its intended audience? How many teenagers wanted to see themselves this warts-and-all? Why, when you could have seen Meatballs or Moonraker? And how many adults wanted to see a movie about teenagers outthinking adults?

So, before it had image problems, it had its problems. And before it had a chance to roll, it rolled snake-eyes. A movie climaxing in a kind of cinematic black magic was blackballed by its own studio. Soon enough, slasher flicks would be all over screens. None would be pulled for fear they might adversely affect anyone. That fate was reserved for Over the Edge, a flag of flaming youth, a thing soaring with bittersweet pain.

James Hughes’ book of stories, Understanding Almost Nothing of the World, won in the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award and the 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. In 2022 he won the Glen Eira Short Story Contest and shortlisted in The Bridport Short Story Prize.
His articles have run with The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Australian Financial Review, Big Issue, Sunday Life, Good Weekend, Spectrum and The Weekend Australian. He has written on hiking, book-cover illustrations, Holocaust survivors living in Melbourne, superstition, retail crime in Australia, the use of silence in films, the use of others’ unwanted books, cemeteries, the forgotten genius of Joni Mitchell, cricket legend Dennis Lillie, DH Lawrence, German artist Otto Dix and hitch-hiking in Japan.
His last piece for FilmInk was on Brokeback Mountain
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