Dangerous Boys: Point Break (1991)
Himbos, cops, surf-thieves, Keanu Reeves, destructive mutual desire, and macho childhood.
Two of my roommates, giggling, forced the rest of us to watch Point Break (1991) in our darkened living room. It was projected on the wall, and the edge bled onto the brick of our chimney, so parts of each shot were a little cut off and fuzzy. I had eaten an edible and was very stoned.
In Point Break, Keanu Reeves’ character, Johnny Utah, is an affectingly stupid, hot-blooded young cop assigned to work bank robberies in Los Angeles. He is paired with an older cop who is thoroughly jaded. The two cops, young and old, are confronted with a problem: there is a gang of bank robbers who dress as ex-presidents in rubber masks and, each summer, steal a great deal of money. The old cop, who is detested by the rest of his department, is convinced that these men are surfers, because of their conspicuous tan and surfboard glue found on the scene, though he has no further proof and also no leads. He persuades young, hard-bodied Johnny to learn to surf to infiltrate the surfing community and locate the robbers. Johnny almost drowns; a girl saves him and he falls in love with her; she turns out to be in a community adjacent to the bank robber surfer gang. Johnny infiltrates, and is quickly seduced. The surf gang, unlike the cops, are good at almost everything they do, and pursue a religion of the senses--of adrenaline, the high of danger. They surf at night, after throwing ragers on the beach. This is why they are bank robbers. They lock in on Johnny and attempt to make him one of them with ever-greater scary surf and skydiving feats and fighting other gangs of mean surfers on the beach over whose surf territory it is. The surf-thieves’ leader, a white guy named Bodhi, delivers some strange monologues about how their life of crime represents a kind of macho libertarian ethos about standing up to the man, preserving a way of life that is under threat. Johnny begins to feel a brotherhood with them, but then they kidnap his girlfriend and force him to rob a bank with them. They shoot the old cop, severing Johnny’s ties to respectable society.
Bodhi is a compelling blond sociopath; he mocks Johnny for his ineffectiveness and goads him into proving his endurance, and Johnny falls for the bit. At last, Johnny is forced to jump from another helicopter to save his girlfriend, who the surfers have taken to Mexico. The movie decides to insist more clearly that Bodhi’s erotic possessiveness over his surf gang is malicious and harmful: Bodhi shoves one of the remaining surf bros, who is grievously injured, into a skydiving vest and tosses him out of the plane. Johnny’s gotta get out of there! He does, after sexily grappling with Bodhi as they cling to each other and both fall about a mile out of a plane; he crawls bloody through the desert and finds his girl, who presumably has forgiven him for lying to her about being a cop. But this perfunctory rescue lasts only a moment: we flash forward, and Johnny has pursued Bodhi still further. The girlfriend is nowhere in sight. It’s a year later, and Bodhi wants to surf enormous waves in a fifty-year storm off the coast of Australia. Johnny comes because he knows Bodhi will be there. He grapples with Bodhi, then brings the cops--he’s still employed-- but then he allows Bodhi to swim out to the surf, and watches him die in the great waves.
Throughout this movie, I was unsure about what was supposed to be funny and what was unintentionally so; I was left feeling, uneasily, that I simply did not understand the genre, much like a straight girl at a trans karaoke. These men are oddly tan, oddly defined, oddly pink and blond and hard in a style that is now deeply unpopular; the film lingers on their bodies’ shapes and their bro-social interactions seductively, as if this fetish of the blond Braveheart surfer is what we are here for.
Others have noted that Point Break is a film about doomed gay romance buried beneath a macho exterior. Bodhi says to Johnny, “you want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth” before leaping from a helicopter. This line is supposedly about Johnny’s desire to bring Bodhi to justice, but it isn’t delivered that way, and it doesn’t scan that way; my straight guy roommates confirmed that it sounded gay to them, too. There are various “us against the world” lines in Bodhi’s monologues. Meanwhile, all of Johnny’s lust and concern is pointed at the surf leader, and it’s not really clear that it’s out of desire to put him in jail. Johnny’s buddy-cop partner, who in a movie like this usually would be the wise father figure, is stupid, and is summarily executed and then forgotten by the plot. Meanwhile, there are an awful lot of moments between bros that seem like they are just about sex. The girl who is supposedly his love interest vanishes from the movie after a while except at moments when she is in mortal danger, and when Johnny gets the girl, the story seems relieved that it can conclusively drop her arc.
Is putting someone in jail like orgasm? If so, Johnny is denied his consummation; at the end, he lets Bodhi go swim out to sea. Perhaps this is because Johnny, being a noble little man, only appears to turn away from his loyalty to the law. Perhaps it is because he recognizes that Bodhi, like the eponymous whale in Free Willy, would be ruined by captivity. Or perhaps it is because lust and desire between these men is consummated only by ruining each other, and he recognizes that he can only take possession of Bodhi if Bodhi is dead. Before he allows him to die, Johnny watches Bodhi embrace his younger surf-bro like they were lovers fighting in World War One together as the smaller surfer bleeds out after a bank robbery gone wrong. Bodhi weeps with the tears of a beloved as his “little brother” gasps in pain in a way that reminds me of times I’ve sobbed after a beating that I invited. It’s really hot.
It is the one moment in the movie where the sociopathic Bodhi scans as a human with an emotional interior, a man who has tried hard to protect the wellbeing of his friends and failed (even as it is his own risk-junkie nature that got his smaller surf bro shot). Does Johnny want to have that moment of release with the object of his own pursuit, where he tends/kills Bodhi? Can he express understanding of Bodhi only by allowing him to kill himself? Can you only express love for someone when they are dying? Blah blah, toxic masculinity only allows vulnerability during moments of grief and violence. But as stupid as this movie is, I still find these moments stirring; they are the most emotionally honest parts of a movie that is about the desire to feel something, and the desire to hurt or undo people we are obsessed with, who are our doubles, or who desire similar sensation.
What really intrigues me is the leaps this gay action movie makes between comedy and hard-bodied action film, satire and straight one-two. It is a horror, a cult movie; it is a romance; it is a buddy cop comedy with a really poorly-developed buddy cop and zero reverence for law and order. And it is serious. I am not sure who, in the movie, is laughing or not laughing at their own lines; I don’t know whether the strange and erotic and undoubtedly very expensive skydiving scene, where the criminal gang holds hands with the cop as they all leap surreally towards Earth was meant to be a moment of meditation or building hysteria. I think probably something of both-- but the effect of the movie is to dive, earnestly and tongue-first, into the brotherhood of the adrenaline high. It’s childlike. Which brings me to my next point.
My initial impulse is to say that I am outside this, looking in, much as the masc gay cis man I once dated was outside looking in when me and my trans friend/lover launched into a reflection on the erotic fanfiction community focused on Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. Except that’s not true. I could say that I have never had Johnny Utah’s kind of excitement around extreme acts of stupidity and violence and chaotic bravery, except that I certainly had it when I was a child. Then, I was a menace. Few adults checked me in my early years, when I had a pageboy bob and pink glasses. I read Calvin and Hobbes, and grew hard, in the truest childish way, for the steep drops of Calvin’s wagon off the 90 degree precipice of an Ohio hill. Before sex, what is there for thrills but danger? And what is danger if nobody is watching? I regularly leapt out of trees or climbed over high fences, but mainly if other small boys or tomboys were observing me; I have a bump on my skull from a time I leapt off a kitchen stool and then faceplanted into the floor in an effort to impress my babysitter. In third grade I willingly endured vicious beatings by my small lesbian best friend, and goaded her so she would battle me more. I also would provoke my frightening, slightly insane uncle into rough physical play with air rifles, bats, or his bare hands.
Like Bodhi and Johnny Utah, when I wanted attention, or to be admired for my engagement with danger, I was unable to assess the actual risk involved in the situation. Once, jumping up and down on my bed, I dared my six-year-old sister to push me off of the mattress, sure she would be unable to do it. Or was I sure? She was stronger than she looked, and had a lower center of gravity; I fell disastrously against the corner of my dresser, tearing a ghastly, bloody, five-inch-long deep scrape in the flesh of my shoulderblade. I had thought that I might fall, but the pain was unexpected and the wound frightening. My parents rushed in and got terrifically mad at her, and I found myself torn: should I explain that I had invited violence against myself, that I had dared her, or embrace the fact I had been hurt, and blame her for what she had done to me? She preempted me in any case, screaming that I had told her to push me. The next day, I was offered another opportunity to twist the narrative when my friend expressed shock at the scar I displayed to her proudly, and I realized that she believed my sister was a terrifying little villain, instead of a six year old with a six year old’s poor sense of cause and effect. I reluctantly defended my sister’s honor. But this happened over and over: I would put myself in a situation where I could be hurt, and then get hurt more badly than I had expected. And then I would have to claim responsibility or pin the blame on someone else.
My (white) girlhood enabled me, several times, to blame boys for hurting me in games I had initiated, and be believed; once, after escalating a fight with my gay little best friend until, as usual, it came to blows, I grew frightened and told my mother tearfully that she had hit me and that I was scared to go to school, without providing context. At the same time, I mostly decided against telling my parents that my uncle or other boys sometimes hurt me in ways I didn’t like, because it would mean admitting that I had initiated roughhousing games my parents had told me not to play; I learned that I would be punished for getting hurt doing things I wasn’t supposed to do. The desire that initiated my flirtation with danger never faded. But it became more and more unacceptable to claim that I had chosen to initiate something dangerous.
Unlike Johnny Utah, or the boys in my grade who became soldiers just out of high school, my violent self in the world got more unnatural the longer it lingered; my lack of concern for my own injury became more obvious as a risk to others, and was more horrifying because I did not appear to be a boy. As my body changed in ways I disliked, I became more gender-nonconforming, more socially awkward, something ugly and uncomfortable, rather like the child from Hereditary. When I kicked a boy after he screamed the word vagina at me after fifth-grade sex ed, my teacher was much more shocked at me than at him; when later that year I challenged another boy to a duel and threatened to eat his heart, he duly told the recess minder, who--I thanked god--just made me sit against the wall and did not call my parents, as perhaps she should have. After my best friend learned self control, nobody except my uncle used brutality to connect to me, and once, when I finally did get another little boy to properly play-fight me just before I turned eleven, he pulled down my pants, groped my crotch, and put his hands up my shirt. Glumly, I sublimated all my gory longing for danger into private fantasies about vampires, brutal battles, and abjection/grisly demise/horrible bonds of blood. And I gradually discovered that in order to have my pain taken seriously, I would need to prove that I was the innocent party, that I had not done anything to put myself in danger.
Which isn’t always true.
Tune in next time as I take these themes to Lost Boys (1987)!