Vision Quest

Having just turned 18, and obsessed with the idea of doing something significant with his life, high school wrestler Louden Swain decides to try to shed 20 pounds, dropping two full weight classes in a very short time, all so that he can take on the local defending state champion in that weight bracket. Unfortunately, that’s when he falls for the edgy and older Carla, a sexy drifter passing through town, who temporarily moves in with him and his dad.

It's been a long time since I've seen this film, probably nearly 40 years, and I had forgotten about a lot of it.

Journey back with us now to those bygone halcyon days of teen flicks from the early to mid 1980s. It was a time when cinematic high schools were clearly filled with 30 years olds, an age when a bevy of pre-plastic surgery boobs drove movie plots that mostly centered on date rape or peeping on naked teenagers–otherwise known as the Donald Trump Special–an era when even middle school girls all had PTA Mom hair, and looked like they were probably named Barbara and were the VP of Marketing at the local insurance company, while all the boys had floppy hair, and looked like they were probably named Chad, and were president of the Alpha Beta fraternity. And of course, all of the adults sitting in the stands at the local high school's sporting events were smoking like chimneys, while drinking 16 oz cans of Hamms from wrinkled paper bags. It's a world that by its every appearance heavily implies that Gordon Lightfoot is playing somewhere close by at all times.

This was a time when the teen sex comedy/drama dominated Hollywood in much the same way that Westerns and Musicals once did, and comic book movies would one day. It was during this time that Vision Quest, an attempt to mash ideas from Rocky, Flashdance, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (complete with a Forest Whitaker appearance) into a romantic coming of age sports drama, tried to stand out from the usual fare, and present it’s very familiar storylines and tropes in a new way.

It failed.

Clearly struggling with its weird tonal balance, as well as with finding its ending, not to mention having to split its focus between its big wrestling meet and one true love storylines, Vision Quest is a slog to sit through. Even at only an hour and forty seven minutes, it somehow manages to seem both ridiculously rushed, unfocused, and also clogged with superfluous tangents. And that's on top of the fact that films like this, mid-budget throwaway dramas and comedies from the late '70s and early '80s especially, seemed to focus on completely different kinds of story beats when they were telling their stories then movies do now. Watching some of these older films, it's almost as if they spoke a completely different narrative language altogether back then, and at a much different pace too.

But that's not the problem with this film. The problem is what it chooses to talk about, and what it doesn't. Like for instance... why does this kid suddenly want to take on the best wrestler in the state two weight classes below his own? Because he does. Sure, but what exactly was it that drove him to do this? He’s turning 18 and wants to make his mark. Yes, I’m aware of that, I heard the film specifically state this, but still, why is this a thing for him? What sparked this desire in him, whether it's to win the state wrestling championship at 168 pounds, or to simply "leave a mark" now that he's 18, why does he suddenly want this? The film mentions that he joined wrestling out of the blue the previous year, and also portrays him as an otherwise somewhat bookisk kid, so this indicates a sudden major life change.... Why? The film's answer seems to be… uh, that happened before the film started.

Okay, fine, why then does this kid want Carla so badly? That's easy, it's because she often doesn’t wear a bra, and sometimes she doesn’t wear any pants either. Plus, she’s right upstairs, sleeping in his bed. Okay, sure, that's fair, that one is easy enough to guess, at least. I can allow that.

But what’s not so easy to answer is why would Carla, this young woman who graduated high school three or four years ago, and who has now hitched across the continental United States, find this weird string bean dipshit giant baby-man of a highschooler even slightly attractive? Why would this woman want to be involved in any of his shit at all? The film’s answer here seems to be… Uh... because they’re in close proximity? And whether or not this simply is all due to the way they made these films in the late 70s, early 80s...

This all a big problem.

In comic books, whenever I complain about how the motivational or character defining plot points are sped past too quickly, I talk about how the comic book leaves a lot of the story to happen “between the panels.” This means that a comic will spend pages showing off a big fight, but then rush past the reason for, and the resolution to, the fight in just a few panels of art. Lesser comics, out of a fear of being called "too wordy," will rush characters into decisions based on very little explanation or incentives, or have them choose to do things that are important to the story, sure, and are not necessarily an unlikely thing for them to say or do, but still deserve more space to organically happen in, but unfortunately, the creators, the medium, the company, whomever, are simply unwilling to allow space for that. This seems to imply that the storytellers believe that you are not interested in why something is happening in a story as much as you're only interested in the results of those decisions, and that you're wiiling to fill in the gaps that lie between those handful of sequential art panels, in order to get to "the good stuff." In short, they think you're dumb, and only entertained by fireworks. This is the sign of a hack writer, because the reason they believe that shit about you, is because it's true about them.

On the other hand, there's the old story-telling adage "arrive late, leave early," which they definitely do here. But like pretty much all of the so-called "Rules of Writing" that adage is only true if it results in a well-told story, which is definitely not the case here.

And that’s this film.

Whether its training montages, or forging their relationships, or coming to a big life decision, or realizing their emotional truths, this film leaves most of the meat of the story to either happen between the panels, or somewhere before or after what the film shows us. Every character motivation and character arc resolution is treated like a given in the service of telling a story with a very obvious goal.

But in the movie's defense...

Despite its narrative failings, this film otherwise really feels like an accurate depiction of what things actually looked like in the early to mid 1980s. There’s no neon day-glo flamingo Saved By The Bell synthesizer bullshit. It’s nothing but the avocado green, yellow maize, and wood-paneled wreckage of 1950s home decor washing up on the gray shores of the 1960’s failed counterculture ideals, as the unlearned lessons of the gas crisis of the 1970s, and a slew of bigoted and cruel foreign policy debacles, all wrapped in the flag and carrying the Bible, lurches its way into a new decade of open greed, consumerism, and selfishness, a toxic time that ultimately landed us in the shitheap we live in now.

In short, Vision Quest is set in the beginning of the End of America, and what it shows us is an ugly place, where everyone’s dreams are small and sad, and yet still, most of them die unfulfilled.

And since it was filmed in Spokane, Washington, it’s also drizzling all the time.

“My name's Louden. Louden Swain. 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.”

Our narrator is a young man named Louden Swain. He’s a wrestler at Thompson High School who has just turned 18 years old. Because of this, he has decided that it is past time that he do something truly meaningful in his life. With this in mind, he decides on a mission, or as his buddy, Kuch, a young man who pretends to Native American, explains to him… his mission is a vision quest.

His mission is to drop two full weight classes on his wrestling team, from 189 pounds to 168 pounds, in order to challenge the area's toughest opponent, Brian Shute, a menacing three-time state champion from a rival high school. Shute has never been defeated in his entire high school career, but Louden is determined. Completely ignoring not only the advice of his father, his coach, and his friends, but also the disruption he causes amongst his teammates, Louden is going to do what he wants no matter what. On top of that, he starts getting nose bleeds all the time, and begins fainting.

Still, Louden perseveres.

Meanwhile, he and his father take on a boarder named Carla. She is a sexy drifter from Trenton, New Jersey, whose dreams of someday being an “artist” has led to her hitchhiking across the country. She was passing through Spokane on her way to San Francisco when her car broke down or something.

Louden falls in love with her, and begins to lose sight of his goals as a wrestler.

But even though Louden’s drastic weight loss continues to give him nosebleeds, which leads to him having to forfeit some matches, which Louden tries to dismiss as a lack of iron in his diet. Even though Louden is 18 and Carla is 23-ish. Even though Carla tells Louden that she thinks of him as a little brother at one point. Even though Carla catches Louden in the laundry room, enthusiastically sniffing her panties—which may have been recently washed or may have been still dirty—and not just sniff, sniff either, but his face fully buried, pressing the crotch of her underwear over his nose and mouth as he draws a deep breath, like a fireman had just rescued him from a burning house and had given him an oxygen mask because of the smoke inhalation, like he has a superpowered nose and he needs to track her across a swamp, just absolutely inhaling her scent to the bottom of his lungs, an action that for some reason she didn't seem to find to be insanely creepy...

Out of the blue, she tells him that she loves him, and then she makes love to this overgrown 12 year old child in what looks like a field of thistle.

Soon enough, Carla realizes she is distracting Louden from his goals, or maybe thats’ just what she tells him when she realizes that Louden is an unformed lump of stupid baby-man clay, and honestly it's kind of sad that she is basically now his live-in girlfriend. Either way, she finally moves out of Louden’s Dad’s house, with plans to continue on to San Francisco.

But first, she shows up and watches Louden's big match. He makes a dramatic comeback from losing, and ends up pinning Shute in the final seconds. And as Louden celebrates his victory, he monologues one final time to the audience:

"Kuch had it right. It was a vision quest. But all I ever settled for is that we're born to live... and to die... and we've each gotta do it alone... each in our own way. And I guess that's why ya gotta love those who deserve it like there's no tomorrow... because when you get right down to it... there isn't."

That ending monologue is absolute fucking nonsense.

Good lord. It's so plumb stupid, like a dumb guy who thinks he's deep. It's so completely full of horseshit, both in content and delivery, that for a moment, as the camera froze on Louden celebrating his win, I assumed the film would then reveal in the last moment that, the whole time, this story was actually being recounted by convicted serial killer Louden Swain to the Parole Board at the local prison. Then, after an awkward pause, one of the Parole Board members would clear their throat and say: “Ah, the question was whether or not you regret your crimes, Mr. Swain.” And then the film would end in a freeze frame as they stamped DENIED in big red letters over his parole request, while in the background, a red-faced and screaming Louden is dragged away.

That didn’t happen, of course, which is a shame.

Despite it’s obvious belief otherwise, Vision Quest is a pretty by-the-numbers teen sports/romance drama about a young man with a pair of dreams… To win both the state championship, and the love of a young woman. At the beginning of the film, both of these dreams seem far beyond his reach. After all, his rival on the wrestling mat regularly trains by carrying telephone poles on his shoulder up stadium steps, while Louden is a string bean, and the young woman in question is an adult, while Louden is vey much an entitled child. And yet… in the end, he gets them both. And this is despite the two leads also having almost no chemistry either.

Other than that, there’s a surprising amount of nosebleeds in this film, especially when it's for a plot point that sees no actual resolution. And while the good news is, at least as far as ’80s pop culture goes, there’s only a little bit of gay panic in the story, on the other hand, this is yet another 80's film that gets surprisingly rapey at one point. Even worse, it's brushed off as a “boys will be boys” moment. So, while I wouldn’t accuse this film of being deeply rooted in white supremacy, at least not any more than usual—except for Louden's friend Kuch, who pretends to be Native American by wearing a Mohawk with feathers, while mentioning “great spirit“ cliches—between the attempted sexual assault, then rewarding Louden with both the girl and the crown, despite his overall mediocrity, entitled behavior, and his wholly undeserved belief in himself, Vision Quest certainly makes its casual patriarchal bullshit pretty hard to ignore.

But then, that’s America, right?

If it's not blatantly racist, it's misogynistic as hell.

Anyway, like I was saying, save for maybe Louden’s wrestling goal, it’s not clear why anyone does anything in this film. Shit just kind of happens, and then just as suddenly, it’s over. Freeze frame. Run credits.

The best part of this film is a 25 year old Madonna, who appears as the singer in the bar band, where she sings “Crazy For You“ and “Gambler.” This sequence was filmed in November of 1983, when she was still basically a nobody, but the film wasn't released until 1985, the Year of Madonna, as it was post Like a Virgin, post her iconic “Boy Toy” performance at the 1984 MTV Awards, and only a couple of months before her first big American Tour, as well as the release of her more well-known early film, Desperately Seeking Susan. This sudden pop culture sea change that happened between filming and release led to Vision Quest being retitled in some countries as “Crazy For You,” while its posters were changed to prominently feature Madonna, even though she’s only in it for one scene, never speaks at all, let alone to either of the stars, and only performs two songs in the background.

It’s crazy seeing her so young though…

The thing that makes me wonder if there might be a longer, maybe better version of this film lying on some cutting room floor somewhere, is this character. And no, that's not Tracy Gold from Growing Pains, it's Daphne Zuniga from The Sure Thing, and also Space Balls.

I forget her character's name, the film may never even say it out loud, but she shows up in pretty much every high school hallway and classroom scene, and the whole time she’s on screen, she interacts with Louden as if she's a more important character in the story than she actually is, like she was either meant to be the girl best friend who may have a crush on Louden, or she was meant to be the more age appropriate girl that Louden ends up with at the prom, after Carla makes a man of him, before giving him the Casablanca speech and going on to San Francisco–but not with any flowers in her hair, obviously, as this is the 80s–but either way, in the film as it is now, this girl is just there... until she isn't.

That's not the weirdest part of the film though...

The weirdest part about this film is the way that high school band keeps playing “Yub Nub” during the wrestling meets. Was this a thing? I mean, I wasn’t in high school for another ten years or so, and our school was neither hip nor creative, as evidenced by how, in the early 90s, it still played “We Got The Beat” at every single sporting event and pep rally, but that said, it still never ever played “Yub Nub." So why does the high school band in this movie play it over and over? For those who don’t know, “Yub Nub” is the Ewok celebration song from the end of Return of the Jedi, of course. I get that in late 83-early 84, when this movie was filmed, literally everything from Return of the Jedi was popular. Trust me, I remember the time, I was there, and to paraphrase Madonna, I was crazy for Yoda, baby.

But still... I have a hard time seeing how “Yub Nub” would become a high school fight song standard. Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, this film isn’t bad, it’s just generally a mess, and doesn’t tell a very good story. After rewatching it, I assume the only reason it’s even remembered at all at this point is because of Madonna‘s cameo, which is basically a cinematic footnote, fodder for some bar trivia night when the teams are asked what Madonna's first movie was. Otherwise, all I see here is people’s rose colored glasses.

But on the other hand, the soundtrack is pretty awesome, so fuck it.