Pump Up the Volume (1990) vs Vision Quest (1985)

"My theory is that when it comes to important subjects there's only two ways a person can answer. Which way they choose tells you who that person is. For instance, there's only two kinds of people in the world: Beatles people and Elvis people. Now, Beatles people can like Elvis and Elvis people can like Beatles but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice and that choice tells you who you are." -- Mia Wallace, from a deleted Pulp Fiction scene 

It's reductive but it's a conversation starter so let's use it as a way to frame this. How you felt about high school can be determined by whether you're a Pump Up the Volume person or a Vision Quest person. The main characters, Mark Hunter/"Hard Harry" and Louden Swain, are complete opposites in many ways, among them attitude, lifestyle, aspirations and musical taste. Teenagers want to be or feel like Mark or they want to be or feel like Louden.
 

"Last week I turned 18. I wasn't ready for it. I haven't done anything yet. So I made this deal with myself: this is the year I make my mark." 

Louden wants to challenge Shute, the best wrestler in the state. To do that he has to lose 22 pounds, the last 10 in a matter of weeks. He goes on a 600 calorie a day diet, runs everywhere and works out "like a madman." This causes nose bleeds, fainting spells and the urge to smell Linda Fiorentino's panties. 

There's no antagonist. Every adult in his life (teacher, coach, family member, co-worker or transient artist) is supportive and in some way helpful (whether it's by imparting wisdom, offering him exercise tips or taking his cherry). A "vision quest" is defined as the "learning and initiation process of [an] apprentice under the guidance of .. elders." Their only concern is that he might be pushing himself too hard but whenever they tell him he can't do something he always wins them over (with John Waite or Journey playing in the background).

Even Shute encourages him to make the weight. He wants to compete against the best as much as Louden does. The whole movie is entirely positive about the high school experience. Louden loses the weight, loses his virginity (to an older woman) and wins the match with everyone important in his life watching.

" .. we're born to live and then to die and we've got to do it alone, each in his own way. And I guess that's why we've got to love those people who deserve it like there's no tomorrow. Because when you get right down to it, there isn't."

"You see, I never planned it like this. My dumb dad got me this shortwave radio set so I could just speak to my friends back east. But I couldn't reach anybody. So I just thought I was talkin' to nobody. I imagined nobody listening. Maybe I imagined that one person out there. Anyway, one day I woke up and I realized I was never gonna be normal. So I said 'Fuck it.' I said 'So be it.' And Happy Harry Hard-On was born." 

Mark wants to "[play] Ice-T and [talk] about his dick." To do that he has to start his own pirate radio station. He goes by a fake name and uses a voice disguiser so he can say everything he wants to but otherwise can't. This causes him to become a hero to his fellow students, all of whom are as confused, unhappy and disaffected as he is.

She may not look unhappy or disaffected but that's only because she's figured out Harry's identity

The adults are the antagonists. When the teenagers try to make themselves understood they're kicked out of school, asked if they're even trying and prevented from making profane, unlicensed broadcasts. "Pump[ing] up the volume" is defined by M|A|R|R|S as "put[ting] the needle on the record when the drum beats go like this" and that's what Mark does. Whenever he feels like he can't do something he puts on some Pixies and goes for a walk through a suburban wasteland.

But with the love of the coolest, most persistent writer of dirty poetry in school 

he's able to Talk Hard enough to bring about change. (As much change as the system will allow.) The whole movie is entirely negative about the high school experience. Yet still Mark sees the maggot puswad of a Principal suspended, gets a girlfriend and reveals himself at last to a school full of fans, half of whom will now gather around boom boxes (after asking) to listen to tapes of the other half coming on their own faces.

"It can't get any worse. It can only get better. I mean, high school is the bottom. Being a teenager sucks but that's the point. Surviving it is the whole point."

To say it's achievement vs. self-expression would be inaccurate. For Mark, self-expression is the achievement. Louden's more recognizably goal-oriented. Self-fulfillment vs. self-expression, maybe. Louden needs to prove something to himself before he gets out of high school. Mark just wants to get out of high school. 

To answer the question, I'm a Pump Up the Volume person. Of course I am. I have a blog. The democratization of media the movie calls for didn't happen with radio, it happened with the Internet. If there was a Pump Up the Volume remake Harry wouldn't be a pirate DJ. He'd have a podcast. 

(One reason there couldn't be a remake is today a HHH figure would be derided as "emo" and his classmates wouldn't put posters of his sayings up in the common area, they'd photoshop his Facebook picture to make it look like he was crying. This despite the following quote: 

"You see, there's nothing to do anymore. Everything decent's been done. All the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks. So, I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to." 

sounding more apt today than it did then, especially with its use of "like" as a discourse particle. Except for the "great themes as theme parks" idea. Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Self and Man vs. Technology, sure. But we still haven't seen amusement parks based on Man vs. Supernatural or Man vs. Man. I wouldn't want to go to those parks but they've yet to open them. Man vs. Society and Man vs. Destiny would be more difficult to represent in roller coaster form.) 

As much as I've always liked the movie, I've never been enthusiastic about what it advocates. I know, everyone has two faces. The one they show to the world 

and their true face. 

But when you give a lot of people a YouTube account you don't see their true faces. You see this: 

Look at that jackass. It's what he wants. "Check me out! Watch me dance! You hear my box? I'm listenin' to Bad Brains, bitches!" It's the worst aspects of Louden and Mark combined, where self-expression isn't used as a way to relate to other people, it's only a means of announcing how special you are (read "special" as superior and more interesting, not of equal value yet uniquely interesting) and how everyone should stop what they're doing and pay attention to you. 

The tagline shouldn't have been "Steal the Air." It should've been something like this: 

I was a Mark, not a Louden. This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie:

My Superlative for it would Most Realistic Depiction of What Happens When an Introvert Talks to a Girl in High School. I had that exact conversation (beat by beat, not word for word) many times (except for the cuteness concession at the end; I assume there was just the "no way" part). I feel like I can speak for Harry in saying that having someone shove a tape player in my face and kick up his heels three inches from where I was sitting (by myself reading a book), staring me down the whole time to make sure I didn't look away, isn't something I'd enjoy, let alone feel good at having inspired.

Adults usually aren't the main antagonists in your life when you're a teenager. Those would be other teenagers. They're the ones who don't treat you the way you'd like but other people don't treat them the way they'd like. Everyone wants something or someone different and even after the peasant revolt at the end of Pump Up the Volume that's not going to change. Pump is supposed to be the less romantic or sentimental of the two but it's the one that suggests that once we all start listening to Leonard Cohen it won't matter if we have different interests and personalities, everyone's going to get along. As much as Hard Harry mocks the lyrics of the hippie anthem "Get Together" ("C'mon people now / Smile on your brother / Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now"), it could easily be played over the end credits instead of "Stand" by Liquid Jesus (the worse song by far). 

Someone like Louden (a teenager who isn't negatively affected by his or her own feelings of insecurity) is rarely seen outside of fiction. People at that age are a mess, subject to any number of forces they don't understand. Why would we not expect them to mistreat one another? Louden's response is to decide what he wants to do and attempt to excel at it. Mark does the same, only what he wants is to talk on the radio. I'd prefer it if more teenagers tried to be like Louden than Harry. About the most you can hope to do as a "Harry" is articulate the manifold ways in which everyone and everything is "completely fucked up." Which is a drag to everyone besides other "Marks" if you succeed and if you don't you're just going to be "another asshole with a blog," and no one wants to be that person.

Notes and Unanswered Questions (Mixed) 

1. Margie tells Louden "I'm gonna give it to you straight. I think I love you." He immediately passes out and the subplot is never resolved.

Vision Quest is a Pump Up the Volume where Paige is the main character and she has no interest in pirate radio shows (she's too busy preparing for a gymnastics meet). Likewise, Pump is a Vision where Daphne Zuniga plays the lead and Louden blows up household appliances in solidarity with the credo of Crazy Clara Clitoris.

2. The school needs to be named after Hubert H. Humphrey to match Mark Hunter's pseudonym and as a hippie reference that only Mark's parents would get but it never seemed plausible that a high school in Arizona would be named after someone from Minnesota. Then I looked it up and saw that there's a Hubert H. Humphrey Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I wonder if there's a 9-year-old with his own show "representin' the A-B-Q" who sounds like this. 

3. I don't know if "You shit your shorts" is an effective argument against suicide. It is an effective argument against "suicide by trauma," where it's supposed to be much more likely to happen. The gun was a bad choice, Malcolm. 

4. Speaking of Malcolm, when his mother walks in to ask if he wants to come downstairs and watch television he has to turn Harry down so we never get to hear the end of the train of thought that started with the letter from "Screwed Up" claiming that her brother made her watch him masturbate. At first Harry makes the right noises about how she's not the one who's screwed up it's the situation that is but when he decides that she's lying after talking to her on the phone he says "It's too bad about that one, actually. You see, to me the real truth is always a bigger turn-on and it doesn't have to be a big deal. It could be anything .. " Malcolm turns him off before we find out if his phrasing was simply poor or he was disappointed that he didn't get the beat off material he was looking for to make that sixth time this hour special. 

5. "Hey, what's a cock ring? It sounds cool."  

"How should I know? Maybe it's, uh, a ring with a cock on it."

"But he said he was wearing it." 

Is a ring that looks like this what they have in mind? 

What's more, a naked guy wearing it, which would make it funnier. What doesn't make that wind-up toy funnier is the red coloring around the bottom edge. Wouldn't it detract from the "Aren't penis heads funny?" angle and make it look more like a John Wayne Bobbitt novelty item? 

6. Proof that I'm a Pump Up the Volume nerd: I bought the soundtrack. I still like it, even if it doesn't have my favorite song -- "David Deaver Speaking (the 'Who is This?' Remix)" by Seth Green's Teenage Mustache

on it. I also later bought How to Talk Dirty and Influence People and Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids and I have the two trailers from the VHS release, for Book of Love 

and Metropolitan, 

memorized. (Book of Love no Metropolitan. I recommend Whit Stillman's "Doomed Bourgeois in Love Trilogy," Metropolitan, Barcelona and Last Days of Disco. Jimmy and Des from Disco would take issue with Mazz's 

casual use of the term "yuppie.") I mention all of this not to look cool (too late, I realize) but as a further warning to Young Marks everywhere. 

7. When Nora tries to take Mark's pants down to check for the above-mentioned cock ring he says "What are you doing? I have neighbors. Stop." This is worth mentioning because sixty seconds earlier Nora was as naked from the waist up as he is and he didn't voice a similar objection then. 

8. Silliest moment in Pump Up the Volume: when the FCC representative shows up in a limousine. 

9. Worse career after, Allan Moyle (Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, Empire Records, Xchange with Stephen Baldwin, Say Nothing with William Baldwin and Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story) or Harold Becker (The Boost, Sea of Love, Malice, City Hall, Mercury Rising and Domestic Disturbance)? Has to be Allan Moyle, doesn't it? 

IMDb Keywords (Pump) 

Anomie 

Microwave Oven

Freedom of Speech

Jeep

Opposites Attract 

IMDb Keywords (Vision) 

Blood on Face

Male Anorexia 

Man Crying

Pizza 

Molestation