“He’s like tripendicular, ya know?”
Valley Girl is a cheeky send up of American consumerism, social pecking orders, and the latent optimism of the Reagan years. It never contrives to chart new terrain, indulging instead in its delightful inanity. It’s a bonfire of good taste, and you’re all invited. Valley Girl is saturated with all the tropes you’d expect, casting a playful eye on the materialistic impulses, generational conflicts, and social vapidity of west coast life.
Nicholas Cage sparkles, playing the punk rocker from the wrong side of the tracks trope to theatrical perfection. Playful and charming, the one dimensionality of the characters becomes itself something to believe in. Indeed, the sheer vacuity of our subjects is nothing short of mesmerizing. As a cult enthusiast, it’s always gratifying when the characters are enabled to exist on one plane, rather than being forced to act out a simulacrum of emotional range. Remember, in the world of eighties low camp: if it aint trite, it aint right!
Valley Girl pulls its weight, working to secure its campy credentials with dizzyingly overwrought performances and soul numbing dialogue. Valley Girl never over promises, never raises expectations. Nothing is demanded of us, no buried neuroses or metaphysical uncertainties are unearthed or exposed. We are complicit in seeking our own delight in the lowest common denominator. Theodor Adorno, in his critique of the culture industry, rallied against a cultural machinery that ‘produces work, that, through a mimesis of aestheticization, indict the spectator for failing to find gratification where there is none.’ In layman’s terms, Adorno would be posthumously cursing the spiritual vacuum of Valley Girl and its ilk, objecting to its aesthetics for aesthetics sake ethos. But Adorno, this time you’re wrong, we do find gratification in Valley Girl – lots of it!
Because, like, who needs, like, critical theory, in the Valley? Postmodernism and its cultural crusaders better wait at the door, because with this crew the packaging is the product. Someone call in the anthropologists. Valley Girl is effective in the first instance with its bubblegum flavoured surface appeal and outrageously rendered characterizations. But its final victory occurs on a structural front: Valley Girl is in on the joke; reveling in the inanity and playfulness of its subject and having, ultimately, the last laugh.
