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The following is my original, unedited article written in March, 2017.
The following is my original, unedited article written in March, 2017.
Plus some pictures for added pizzazz.
The final, finished & edited version can be found in found in the Moviejawn zine
(Vol. 3, #7) which may be available here in the Moviejawn shop.
(Vol. 3, #7) which may be available here in the Moviejawn shop.
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Moviejawn: Parties in Movies
by Hunter Bush, June 2017
It’s party time this month here at Moviejawn! So grab your conical hats and noisemakers, load a paper plate with snacks and ladle yourself something from the punch bowl. Now, let me bend your ear for a second about parties in movies. A party makes excellent film fodder because almost everything about them can be tweaked or exploited to get a story moving along.
For adults, they’re perfect storms of stress, drugs & alcohol and forced social interaction. What better time for uncomfortable truths to surface, like in THE CELEBRATION where a family patriarch’s 60th birthday is the setting for revelation after slanderous revelation or DON’T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER’S DEAD where the web of increasingly more complicated lies Christina Applegate’s Sue Ellen (“Swell”) has concocted quickly unravels. For teens and young adults, parties are just as stressful and uncomfortable, but seem a lot more desirable. Movies like SUPERBAD and 200 CIGARETTES show the lengths some people will go to just to make sure they get to the party while flicks like CAN’T HARDLY WAIT show why it just might have been worth all the trouble.
Allow me to freshen that drink for you. As I was saying:
Once the party is underway, anything can happen. Partygoers might get picked off one by one like in SCREAM or a known mafioso might be tied up in the den as in SUICIDE KINGS. The wealth of different characters adds dynamism to things as huge as the end of the world like in THIS IS THE END or as small as getting high with the titular grandma in GRANDMA’S BOY.
Sometimes the party itself serves as an important goal, like raising enough money to save The Pit in PCU, or sticking it to the Bomont city council and proving youthful independence through the joy of dance in FOOTLOOSE. Sometimes the party isn’t exactly what it seems, like when an otherwise innocuous dinner party is revealed to be an impromptu wedding in BEETLEJUICE or when the party crasher finds out just what kind of party he crashed in MURDER PARTY.
These hors d’oeuvres are delicious by the way, you should try some. Anyway, where was I? Oh right:
Movies like ANIMAL HOUSE and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW are filled with people for whom life is one big party and give the audience glimpses of what that might be like, while movies like DAZED AND CONFUSED show us that life can actually be better than the party, that sometimes the journey is as important as the destination. VELVET GOLDMINE even takes the macro view, presenting the entire lifecycle of “The Party” (in this case glam rock stardom in particular) from desirable destination to completely come and gone.
There are as many different uses for a party in a film as there are kinds of films and I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I don’t want to monopolize your time. You should go and mingle.
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