Under Childhood is a column on children’s cinema—movies about and for kids.
In 1983, a characteristically intense Dennis Hopper remarked to the New York Times: “Most of the people I knew in my 20's are dead. [...] Forty-year-olds are survivors.” Fatefully Hopper’s punk bildungsroman Out of the Blue (1980) has found new life at 40 thanks to a crowd-funded 4K restoration. Formerly available mostly through faded reels and VHS rips, the film’s difficult but enduring passage through history repeats its story’s own narrative, though rescued from its hopeless end. In the film, sixteen-year-old Cindy “CeBe” Barnes (the matchless Linda Manz, who died last August) undergoes sexual abuse by her alcoholic father (Dennis Hopper) and the neglect of her heroin-addicted mother (Sharon Farrell). Faced with what feels like the dead end of her short life, she chooses to leave the world behind in an act of self-immolation, taking both parents with her. As the Neil Young song that gives the film its title (“My My, Hey Hey [Out of the Blue]”) goes: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” And so she does. Because it opts for staunchly explicit and seething rage rather than tepid gloom, Out of the Blue became a cult classic.
Though initially hired only to act as CeBe’s father Don, Dennis Hopper took over the project after seeing hours of unusable rushes by first-time director Leonard Yakir. The film was then known as CeBe, and it was meant to be a Canadian tax shelter film about a psychiatrist who undertakes the rehabilitation of a troubled teenager. To save the production from collapse, the screenplay was rewritten over the course of a weekend and the film was shot in four weeks and two days. In Yakir and co-writer Brenda Nielson’s screenplay, CeBe is a devotee of Elvis Presley. Hopper adds two others to the trinity: Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. Together they supersede the faults of her father and embolden her to blurt out maxims like “Disco sucks!” and “Kill all hippies!” Thus the family friendly CeBe became Out of the Blue, a portrait of child abuse as an allegory for the intergenerational strife between former hippies and their punk offspring. Because of Hopper’s nationality, and because he removed so many scenes featuring Canadian actor Raymond Burr (who plays the psychiatrist), financiers disqualified Out of the Blue as a Canadian film. It was subsequently shelved after a limited release in the United States.
With little ambiguity, Out of the Blue presents childhood as an extremely vulnerable state under constant threat of harm by adults. A teasing question from a drunken Don to CeBe opens the film: “Am I as sexy as Elvis?” She says yes, and they exchange a kiss on the lips. Don then accidentally rams his truck into a school bus full of kids. While Don serves a five-year jail sentence, CeBe’s mother Kathy occupies herself with heroin and other men, including Don’s equally loathsome best friend Charlie (Don Gordon). Just as Terrence Malick was so won over by Manz that he used her unscripted voiceover as the anchor of Days of Heaven (1978), Hopper focuses on the pure vivacity of Manz’s improvisation to ground Out of the Blue. Manz’s spirited movements project CeBe’s anarchist streak with the forceful precision and grace of punk rock drumming. After seeing Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) with her friends, CeBe barges into a bar and orders a rum and coke with a straight face. A similar situation in Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918) concludes with the downtrodden Tramp being thrown into the curb, then scurrying away from the bar. When CeBe’s kicked out, she responds by threatening to punch the bartender. Manz’s nonchalance as CeBe resembles Sue Lyon’s demeanor in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). Both performances distill an unflinching flatness that might be mistaken for maturity, but this is in fact a survival mechanism. Despite the desire to be grown sometimes the body reverts to its juvenile habits. In a crisis CeBe rarely sheds a tear, but instead she absentmindedly sucks her thumb and reaches for her teddy bear.
The aforementioned psychiatrist only appears twice in Out of the Blue. In each instance he unsuccessfully probes and receives no response to the observation that CeBe is hiding something.She carries her secret around Vancouver, scowling and strutting in a Canadian tuxedo that blends into the city’s drab blue. There are few sites of safety for CeBe and her friends. Old men like Charlie prey on teenage girls at the bowling alley, in parking lots, during taxi rides. Home isn’t any better. After Don returns from prison CeBe’s life narrows under his control. Dresses and skirts reappear in her wardrobe, which she wears with palpable discomfort. Drunk again, her father shows up at her school and suggests the two run off together. “Then I wouldn’t have to go to school no more,” CeBe says, elated. Manz modeled her performance after James Dean’s Jim in Rebel without a Cause (1956), but the real antecedent of Don and CeBe’s relationship is that of Judy (Natalie Wood) and her father in Nicholas Ray’s film. The father’s suppressed sexual feelings manifest as resentment towards Judy for becoming a young adult—wearing lipstick, dating boys her own age. Judy responds to his hostility with unwavering affection, demonstrating the hold that her father continues to have on her.
CeBe’s only real comrades in this life are the thrashing punks downtown, who even invite her to play drums onstage at a concert. In her room she mimes drumming so as to not disrupt her fighting parents. As Don overstays his welcome, CeBe’s adoration of her father starts to falter. Hopper does not expose the full extent of the sexual abuse until the last twenty minutes of Out of the Blue. One night Don, Charlie, and Kathy drunkenly decide that Charlie should rape CeBe as a “surprise” to make sure that CeBe is not a lesbian. Don kicks open CeBe’s door. The three adults are stunned to find CeBe in Elvis drag, draped in Don’s leather jacket and wearing a floral-printed nightgown, with plum lipstick, black sideburns, and hair slicked back. Don sneers at the figures—Public Enemy, The Subhumans, Teenage Head—on her wall with the disdain of a man who no longer sees himself in the present. The attack destroys and casts shame upon an intimate moment of queer becoming. The seeming impossibility of escape dashes CeBe’s dream of a future self. At the same time, CeBe realizes that she really, truly, hates her father, a formerly unspeakable feeling that now frees CeBe to acknowledge the harrowing reality of her circumstances. Taking matters into her own hands she murders Don, then sets herself and Kathy on fire in his old truck.
Out of the Blue takes CeBe’s perspective rather than that of the psychiatrist, and what CeBe sees is everything closing in with no way out and no one to hear her. Hopper notes to Mustard that “you even suggest tackling [incest] and they'll show you the door.” His defiant insistence on making the film’s depiction of incest and child sexual abuse (CSA) extremely obvious and with plain condemnation can be seen as a response to the evolving conversation around CSA at the time. Out of the Blue was completed in 1979, following a decade of efforts to include CSA and incest in feminist activism as political issues requiring institutional solutions. The misconception that CSA (and especially incest) was rare persisted in the mainstream, perhaps inspiring Hopper’s exasperated statement to the New York Times: “People who say all this doesn't exist in this country, where have they been?”
In her book The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State, sociologist Nancy Whittier describes the proliferation of workshops, curricula, and self-help texts about CSA from the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Out of the Blue is none of the above, and yet Hopper’s serious convictions about the fall of the American family make it an important resource, in addition to it being a profoundly moving work of art about the loneliness of growing up. Unlike educational material like No More Secrets (1981), a short film funded by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, Out of the Blue does not focus on preventative steps or solutions, like saying no or reporting to another adult. Instead Hopper introduces a series of signs—a kiss, a rub—that wobble between being appropriate and inappropriate, and follows CeBe as she gradually recognizes a pattern of abuse, placing greater emphasis on internal shifts in perception. And because it was not designed for in-class discussions or parental co-viewing, Out of the Blue is more honest about the culpability of the school in making children feel unprotected. “I thought you were supposed to help me,” CeBe tells a teacher who sends her to the principal’s office for tardiness. She slams the door and leaves. No one comes after her, and she brushes it off with that winning smirk.
Described by Hopper as “maybe my best film,” Out of the Blue premiered at Cannes with neither an accompanying flag nor a national anthem playing on the red carpet. Indicative of a vicious fight between the filmmaker, producers, and financiers, this lack of attribution now stands as its own honor, a fitting emblem of the parentlessness on display in the film. Manz likewise treasured Out of the Blue, even claiming to remember all her lines. Producer Elizbaeth Karr describes seeing a “shrine to Out of the Blue in [Manz’s] den [with] the poster, photos from Cannes and mementos,” much like the walls of CeBe’s room. It was Manz’s favorite place to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee, in the company of a fellow rebel.