Movies: Hangin' tough.

The strongest teen flicks of the '80s have a clever formula that uses a two levels of dramatic conflict as a way of jazzing the plot without actually having to confront any genuine issues that might be downers for the rambunctious, but essentially comfortable middle class privileged youths that made up this genre's primary consumption demographic.

The formula works like this:

Step 1: Introduce bullshit crisis. "We're gonna win that dance contest. And we're going to win it our way!"

Step 2: Introduce a real problem. "Holy, crap fellas, this chick's the victim of a botched back alley abortion!"

Step 3: Remove real problem as quickly as possible. "So, of course, she must leave the summer camp immediately."

Step 4: Resolve real problem in a way that vaguely suggests that the two problems are somehow connected. "We won that dance contest our way! As a blow against the kind of world that botch our friend's abortion!"

I'm not enough of a film scholar to know, but I'm going to peg this particular "innovation" to Saturday Night Fever.

Prior to that, youth exploitation movies were all step 1, "We're going to win the surfing contest", and step 4, "We won the surf contest"! Missing link flicks, struggling to evolve the genre, nodded to a second conflict, but it was almost inevitably a bullshit conflict as well. "What, Commie spies want to steal my dad's formula for magic space fiberglass? A formula which, coincidentally, could be used to coat a surf board to make the surfers moves extra far out!"

But Saturday Night Fever, partially because of its intended cross-over appeal with post-teen set, locked in some shit for its step 2 and 3. Here's the breakdown:

Step 1: "I just want to disco."

Step 2: "You thuggish friends gang rapped me."

Step 3: "So I'm going away."

Step 4: "This life is just too much. My only escape is disco!"

That established the DNA of pretty much every 1980s teen movie worth its coral lens filters and highly-marketable sound track.

Can you guess the movie?

Step 1: "We're going to dance!"

Step 2: "Let's burn books!"

Step 3: "Hey, does anybody else think we look a bit, I dunno, Nazi-ish when we burn books?"

Step 4: "Hooray! All it took was a few dumb books, and now we can dance!"

The formula exploits Baudrillard's conception of the artificial synecdoche: By forcing two objects into proximity, no matter how dissimilar, you can force one of the objects to become the signifier of the other. For example, I take beautiful people making with the sexiness and slap my toothpaste next to it. I do this enough times, and you'll start thinking that the link between the two is arbitrary but significant - like the link between the word blog and the thing your reading - and you'll see my toothpaste as a signifier of sexiness. In theory, I guess, you could start seeing sexiness as a signifier of toothpaste, but then you're a Don DeLillo character and you've got bigger problems than learning what I think about horror films.

In the case of first example, the conditions of the botched abortion and the desire to dance "our way" really have crap all to do with one another. By forcing them into proximity, the viewer starts to make connections: "Clearly, the sort of society that doesn't let its youth dance in whatever manner pleases them would also much rather see a young woman die than let her have a safe abortion." That this is sometimes actually true (some restrictive societies frown both on a little bump and grind and dancing) does not mean the statement is logical. It partakes of the sort of comic book extreme characterization that Robert Warshow characterized as Mark Trail morality: "Anybody who would break the law to illegally fish off season must also be completely willing to attempt the murder of a park ranger." For example, just because you would prefer you daughter stay off the pole doesn't mean you're pro-life on the abortion issue.

More importantly, the trite way in which the issues are raised and dismissed show that the films don't really share the convictions of their characters or their audiences. They just hope to rob a little gravitas from the suffering of minor, disposable character. By putting some second string nobody through the wringer, your leads' desire to dance in a manner that simulates copulation will, if done right, be transformed from the natural outcome of trapping nubiles in a deadly dull family campground into a titanic struggle for personal liberation with seemingly life of death consequences.

That said, there is some artistic validity in it. It does mirror, in a emotionally effective way, the sort of manic intensity of a young person's inner life. As stupid as it seems, there's a time when prom was a question of justice and honor and freedom. By giving these emotions their operatic intensity, while simultaneously confining them to their own egomaniacal sphere, such film speak a subjective, but real truth about teen life.

Which brings us to the most interesting thing about Sean Cunningham's post-Friday teensploiter The New Kids, a 1985 teen drama co-written by Stephen "father of Mags and Jake" Gyllenhaal and starring absurdly young versions of James Spader (who would later be in a movie where he spanks the screenwriter's daughter), Eric Stoltz, and Lori "Becky Katsopolis" Loughlin. The New Kids is a barely tolerable flick that is interesting mainly for the fact that, fairly early in the project, the filmmakers decided that step 2 and 3 were far more interesting than step 1 and 4 and just let the creepy, screwed up problem run amok all over their otherwise forgettable teen flick.

In The New Kids, the formula becomes:

Step 1: Hey sis, let's help our uncle fix up this old amusement park.

Step 2: What's this creepy clan of redneck coke heads doing harassing my sister?

Step 3: Holy crap, they just tried to rape my sister, dowse her in lighter fluid, and set her on fire!

Step 4: And now they've shot my uncle and are going to kill us all by setting their bloodthirsty pit bull on us!

The best reason for this intentional derailment is that fact that Spader, already playing the kind of sleazy predator that he'd make his career, has a million times the screen presence of our male hero, the game but ultimately forgettable Shannon Presby (a young TV actor who pretty much vanished off the face of the Earth after this flick). Spader plays weirdly dandified the head of our swamp-bred, dogfighting, coke snorting baddies, and most of the pleasure this flick has to offer is in watching him and his Lost Boys by way of Deliverance gang circle and then strike at the heroes.

It's there genuinely menacing presence, coupled with the sense that the filmmakers have strayed off script, that, more than any actual plotting or thematic suspense, gives the film its tension. You want to see what happens just to see how far the filmmakers are willing to go in violating their squeaky clean heroes.

The answer is, sadly, not quite far enough. The flick always pulls its punch before veering into the sort of crazed ugliness of, say, Class of 1984 and it isn't ready or willing to truly scar up the good looks of its leads.

Shame really. 'Cause it was threatening to get really interesting there for a moment.

Movies: Iffy pop?

Digitally-empowered fandom favors the group. Author and journalist Caleb Crain once described the rise to dominance of a mode of reading that he dubbed "groupiness." In the context of groupiness, readers approach works not for entertainment or information, but rather for the purpose of belonging to the network of communities that will grow up around such works. The consequence is that art becomes something that exists mainly to be discussed. It's primary function is to be talked about. It's a milieu in which a book gets read because the reader knows an important TV adaptation of it is coming out and they don't want to be left out of the water-color talk about the televised version.

(Crain and others go on to argue that this has imposed a specific, mass cult, one-sized fits all style on art. I don't know that I buy that. Cults and congeal around just about anything. Few authors get the kind of groupiness going that Robert Bolano does, and you'd have to work extra hard to prove he panders to his audience.)

One of the stranger effects of the culture of groupiness is that, on occasion, the chatter is genuinely more interesting than the object being discussed. For example, the utterly forgettable Captivity will be justly remembered not for anything within the film itself, but for its cultural position as the straw that broke the torture porn subgenre's back. Critical reaction to that film actually became the most important and interesting thing about it.

On a similar note, the 2009 remake of Last House on the Left might be better remembered not for anything director Dennis Iliadis or producers Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham put up on screen, but rather as a trench in the generational conflict between Gen X horror fans and their vastly more numerous Millennial replacements. The film, with a little assist by a dismissive review by Roger Ebert, became a touchstone for older critics who bemoaned the state of modern horror. Kids these days, they aren't creative, they don't know their history, they just want mindless violence. No respect, I tell you. Meanwhile the vast horde of the young answered with votes: On imdb, you'll notice that the remake actually scores higher than the original.

As far as controversies go, the generational conflict was the biggest, but hardly the most interesting. The remake, from both a technical and narrative standpoint, is simply a stronger film. Krug and his gang go from comic book baddies to something more like the highway men of the source material. The transformation of the film's lead family is more gradual, desperate, and genuine. The role of the daughter is bulked up and she becomes heroic in her desperate struggle to survive rather then a semi-disposable casus belli. The conflict between Krug and his own son is emphasized, bringing the tribal conflict aspect to the fore. One famous online essay suggests that the original Left carried traces of the original folk tale's conflict between Christian and Jewish identities in the Dark Ages - but this strikes me as a misrepresentation of the cultural context of the original story. The conflict in Europe's northern countries was not over converting Jews (a nearly insignificant demographic in the north), but rather a conflict over converting pre-Christian pagan cultures. The heart of the tale was about what happens when you ask Norsemen to turn the other cheek. The new film captures this sense of subsurface, reluctant, unavoidable barbarism better than the old one did. Finally, while the film lost its vibrant low-fi look, it is gracefully shot and achieves moments real visual power. The new kids were right.

The more interesting controversy was the bizarre undercard battle about whether or not your head would explode if it was put in a doorless microwave. I kid you not.

The "money shot" of the flick depicts the embattled patriarch of the Collingwood clan delivering death to Krug through the overly elaborate process of surgically rendering him paralyzed from the neck down and then sticking his noggin in a microwave oven that's had it's door broken away. It is, admittedly, the goofiest part of the new film. A self-conscious nod to the McGuyver-ish trap making of the parents in the original, it is uncharacteristic of the remake's Collingwood and feels like an add on. That said, would a dude's head actually explode?

Sadly, this is a proposition I can't test directly. Not because I don't want to, but rather because I do not own a microwave oven. Faced with that limitation, we'll have to just reason our way through this.

Here's your standard microwave oven set up.

Simplified, a microwave's magnetron (which should be a transforming robot, but isn't) takes high voltage electricity from your wall and makes microwave radiation. The use of the word "radiation" summons up visions of nuclear radiation, but you're conceptually closer to the heart of the matter if you think of the magnetron as a radio wave broadcaster; the magnetron sends out radio waves at a frequency of 2450 megahertz. The specifics don't matter so much as the fact that these waves can't pass through the body of the oven and they are absorbed by fats, water, and sugar. The process of absorbing this energy excites the molecules and causes them to move, This, in turn, causes friction. That, in turn, causes heat. This is why plastic won't heat up in your microwave, but a potato or a small cat will. (When you warm up leftovers and your Tupperware container is hot to the touch, it's because the food inside was heated up and this, in turn, heated up the Tupperware. The microwaves bounced off the container itself.)

So, the magnetron makes these waves and they are contained and directed by a wave guide: an empty channel in your oven that directs the flow of the waves. The waves then hit a mode stirrer which scatters them. This is meant to distribute the waves around the oven cavity, so you don't have one intense hot spot right below the wave guide.

This explains how, even with the door off, something in a microwave is going to get zapped. Unlike a conventional oven, a microwave isn't cooking objects by concentrating heat in a closed area. It's bombarding the cooking object with radio waves. The containment helps the process by reflecting stray waves back at the object, but it could be done without any sort of containment.

Without a doubt, Collingwood could cook Krug's head. By jamming the lock of the microwave oven with any ol' object, he could bypass the standard safety features that shut off the magnetron when the oven door opens. Then, placing Krug's head within the oven, our villain would be exposed to the magnetron's waves. These would excite the particles of sugar, water, and fat in his head. Heat would be generated and Krug would cook. The effect would probably slightly diminished because waves that miss Krug's head might bounce off the cavity and escape the oven, but this wouldn't alter the outcome.

But would his head explode?

That's a different matter. Because of the way microwaves cook things, they can sometimes cause a phenomenon called superboiling. When this happens, the liquid in the oven is hot enough to boil, but the lack of gasses in the liquid means that there's no steam or motion happening. You've got a really hot liquid that is just sitting there. This phenomenon is pretty rare because, usually, impurities in the liquids you're cooking (like maybe you're reheating a soup made up of several ingredients of different densities) react to the microwave differently and cause the release of "seed bubbles": gasses that kickstart the standard boiling process.

In a superboiling state, a liquid is basically waiting to explode. Mixing another substance with it or agitating it can cause it to go from a superboiled state to a slightly cooler, but now really active normal boiling state. Though what we're actually seeing is something cooling down to an agitated state, what it looks like is a still, calm liquid suddenly going ape. It looks like an explosion.

In theory, elements within Krug's head could reach a superboiled state and then, because of a shift in his position or a glitch in the power of the oven, go boiling and appear to suddenly explode. But this is extremely unlikely. The human head, like a goat's head stew, is one of those heterogenous environments that would have no problem venting gasses to adjust for boiling. There's a chance that individual elements might react with localized superboiling (his eyes might pop, for example), but this would be a real outside chance. Furthermore, it takes awhile for something to reach a superboiled state. In all likelihood, long before his head blew up, Krug would be dead from the lethal heat the agitated cells in his head were creating.

Preliminary conclusion: Krug would definitely die, but his head wouldn't explode.

And that's my two cents on what was clearly the single most significant film debate of the first decade of the 21st century.

Music: In praise of gimmicks, cheese, insincerity, and everything else that makes rock great.

Something seems vaguely unfair about The Horrors. They look like a Brit version of The Gruesomes, play a sort of simplistic retro-punk that's so sloppy one imagines The Ramones would shake their heads, and they smacked of indie press approval well before they even had an EP out. Their rep was such that they even managed to lure Chris Cunningham out of semi-retirement to handle their first video – not bad for a band that, at that point, only had a single to their name.

Although all of it is instantly suspect, ain't it? Bands that seem to spring, fully grown, out of the club scene and into instant celebrity, like some rock Athena popping fully-armored out of the head of some PR Zeus, seem to have their backlash built in. And if any band was asking for it, The Horror's seem to be. The look, a sort of mod by way of Edward Gorey shtick, flirts with being a novelty gimmick. Their overly-conscious rejection of musicianship and their choice of materials - the B-side to their first hit was a cover of Screamin' Lord Sutch's "Jack the Ripper" - almost seems calculated to tick-off a musical culture that has even managed to buff even punk rock until it has a sanitized mall-ready Blink 182 shine to it. It all seems fake, too ready-for-prime-time, too pre-counter programmed.

And that, dear readers, is how I like it.

Authenticity is the biggest sham. I like my bands to dress in matching outfits. They want to pretend they're rock and roll morticians or robots sent back from the future or hard rocking 18th century French aristos, all the freakin' better. Rather than the endless rants against the state of the world or self-indulgent art pretensions, bands that show up wearing flower pots on their heads send a clear, honest, and unmistakable message. They say, "We're here to make some music you hopefully will enjoy." End of story.

A bunch of dudes in powdered wigs or factory worker uniforms aren't going to lecture you about world poverty and then hop their private jet to their next show. They aren't going to wank away on some 20-minute prog rock sonic circle jerk and then demand you "understand" their aural sploogings. Nope. When a group shows up wearing Mexican wrestling masks and announcing that they plan to, musically speaking, give your sorry ass the atomic drop – well, now we're talking. They're here to get the freakin' job done! That's admirable, in my twisted and limited view of things.

The Horrors are a bunch of dandied-up, insincere, fakers. And that makes them a-okay in my book.

Here's what Cunningham cranked out for them, the video for their first single: "Sheena Was a Parasite."