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R. L. Rutsky - Surfing The Other - Ideology On The Beach

Sobre surfing

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Salvador E Milán
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182 views12 pages

R. L. Rutsky - Surfing The Other - Ideology On The Beach

Sobre surfing

Uploaded by

Salvador E Milán
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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R.L. Rutsky Surfing the Other Ideology on the Beach Pmt le 19505 one mi 196062 wave of teen ‘surfing films washed over the screens of drive- ins and theaters across the United States, Ata time when many motion picture companies were struggling, these surfing or beach pictures were extremely popular with the increasingly youthful audiences for movies.! Films ‘such as Columbia Pictures’ Gidget series and Ameri- can International Pictures’ Beach Party films were de- signed to appeal to this youthful market, and they apparently did. Beach Party (1963) was a major hit, breaking box-office records in a number of locales; Bikini Beach (1964) was AIP’s biggest-grossing film ever? Annette Funicello was voted onto the exhibitors’ annual top ten list of new stars, as were Sandra Dee and James Darren, the stars of Gidget (1959)? ‘Yet the beach films were very different from the ‘melodramatic stories of troubled youth that had become the standard teen fare of the 50s. They were not teenage versions of the social problem film, built around such perceived dangers as hot-rodding, drugs, rock-and-roll, sexuality, and delinquency. Instead they featured, as Beach Party director William Asher once observed, “kids having a good time and not getting in trouble."* In most of the surfing films, audiences were presented with the comic and romantic escapades of white sub- urban teenagers having good clean fun at the beach. ‘Thomas Doherty has in fact described these kinds of films as examples of the “clean teenpic”: “Fulfilling the best hopes of the older generation, the clean teen- pics featured an aggressively normal, traditionally good- Jooking crew of fresh young faces, ‘good kids’ who preferred dates to drugs and crushes to crime.”5 Sim- ‘larly, writing of the characters in the AIP Beach Party films, Gary Morris observes that a (On the beach with Annette Funicello The delinquents {of previous AIP teen films] are reborn in the beach movies as well- groomed, “normal” middle-class, surfing, singing “clean teens”—based largely on the image of lily-white youngsters seen on televi- sion shows like Ozzie and Harriet and Amer- ican Bandstand and successful mainstream movies like Paul Wendkos’s 1958 Gidget. For both Doherty and Morris, the middle-class, clean-teen normality of the beach movies is evidence of not only their superticiality, but of their attempt to offer a reassuring conformity as an escape from the troubling social problems of the times. In contrast to the teen problem and juvenile delinquent films of the 50s and the anti-establishment youth films of the late 60s, these films often seem to exist in a kind of his- torical time warp, a perpetual summer where the sun always shines and the surf is always up.7 The turbulent social and political issues of the 60s never seemed to intrude upon the beach. As Morris notes, “The beach movies helped turn the beach into an exaggerated ver- sion of the suburban backyard.”* Even when these films did deal explicitly with issues of morality and respon- sibility, the resolution rarely seemed in question. No one could seriously doubt that Gidget would keep her virginity or that Moondoggie would return to college when the summer was over. Thave no quarrel with the way that Doherty and Morris characterize these films and their characters. In- deed, the idea that these films are conventional, white, and middle class, that their “normality” serves to deny social problems and to support ideological conformity, is hardly an astonishing revelation. What is more prob- lematic, however, is the all-too-common assumption that notions of conventionality, conformism, and nor- ‘ality, of reassurance and escapism, serve to “explain” these films and their appeal. Morris, for example, ex- plains the appeal of the Beach Party films by noting that their “subtext is reassurance” and observes, ‘The films deny the growing split in the social fabric—evident from the Cold War (fear of nu- clear holocaust), collapsing race relations, and

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