Johnny Utah and Bodhi Forever

Normally for a 13th episode, we’d look at something spooky - like a horror movie franchise or something. But someone wrote something mean about the 1991 cult classic Point Break, and so naturally we altered all our plans. This week we’re looking at the greatest love story every told, and asking “Will our hair ever be as good as Patrick Swayze’s?”

Visit the website for episode notes and a full transcript: www.popcultureboner.com

Visit the website for episode notes and a full transcript: www.popcultureboner.com

Transcript

Once a year, usually around Valentine’s Day, I watch the greatest love story ever told. Now, you’re probably thinking, “What could that be, Alex? Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 classic, Romeo and Juliet, starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio at his most beautiful? Or perhaps something iconic, like When Harry Met Sally, a movie which proves that beautiful women almost exclusively date deeply average looking funny men? Or something left of field, like Shape of Water? Because you’re, frankly, a bit of a weirdo and that movie is definitely about fucking a fish monster?” And look, you’re not wrong. I do love the movie about making sweet, sweet love to the fish monster in a flooded bathroom, not least of all because it bravely goes where no movie about monster-boinking has gone before and explains how the fish monster penis works. But you are, tragically incorrect. 

The movie I am thinking of has everything – bank robbery, rubber presidential masks, base jumping, mullets, vague spirituality, rival surf gangs, a valiant attempt to get extreme sports people to act, Patrick Swayze and, of course, deep and unbreakable love. That’s right. The greatest love story ever told is the 1991 cult classic, Point Break starring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. The second greatest love story ever told is its remake, also called Point Break, which came out in 2015, starring Luke Bracey and Edgar Ramirez. If I were yelling this at you over a glass of wine, this would be the point where I would say, “No, I will not be elaborating any further!” and then dramatically swish off to the bar, thus censoring myself and allowing our friendship to live another day, untainted by my overly forceful opinions on action films circa 1991. 

But if I were to give into this impulse here, there wouldn’t be a podcast. So it’s time to ruin our friendship.

I’m Alex – this is Pop Culture Boner, the podcast edition – and today, I’m thinking about Point Break. 

Now, normally I have a live and let live approach to popular culture. My opinions are bad, and my media consumption habits border on the unhinged. I just watched 14 seasons of Criminal Minds uninterrupted and without irony over the course of like, two weeks. Which might actually be stepping over fully into unhinged territory, if I’m being honest with myself. It’s probably something to bring up in therapy. Anyway, point is – I’m not really in any position to judge. You like the things you like. I like the things I like. We stay in our respective lanes. Everyone is happy. But every now and then people who are paid to write reviews for things get it so phenomenally wrong, I feel compelled to stick my head above the parapet and be like “Hey dude. What the fuck?” 

Now, rightfully beloved cult classic, Point Break, turns thirty-one this year, and to honour this auspicious occasion, Malcolm Knox, an author, journalist and columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote a travesty with the headline, “The only thing worse than Point Break? Keanu Reeves’ acting in it”. Now, realistically, I don’t have to write an impassioned defence of Point Break – Malcolm has already been righteously ripped to shreds on Twitter, and the film has scores of defenders from all sides. So, I’m not really arguing an embattled position here. The headline alone, aside from being grammatically clunky, is enough to have you tried for internet crimes against everyone’s favourite Nice Man, Keanu Reeves. But the content of the article points to such a profound misunderstanding of the actual joys of Point Break, that I am worried that Malcolm may not have watched the same film. Like perhaps he tried to support his remaining local DVD rental shop, and when he got home and didn’t notice that they’d put in the DVD of like… someone’s home footage of the Rip Curl Pro or something. Basically, I’m unsure how you could miss the point so badly. 

While I have already done my annual re-watch of both the original and the remake this year (on Valentine’s Day, as per my usual very sexy schedule – date me, I’m worth it), I thought I could blend the unnecessary defence I have brewing in my furious little fingers with an exploration of the genius that is the 1991 classic and its critically panned 2015 counterpart. Why all the love for one and not the other? Is it as awful as its 11% Rotten Tomatoes rating would indicate? Can anyone ever top Patrick Swayze’s hair or Keanu’s beautiful nipples? How does Kathryn Bigelow make surfing so erotic? I am, as always, asking only the biggest and most pressing questions on this podcast. 

It occurs to me that some of you may not have seen either iteration of Point Break, to which I say, please do yourself a favour, pause me, take 90 minutes, watch the 1991 version, thank me later. But assuming you’re listening to this while walking your dog or like… pretending to fill in boxes on an Excel spreadsheet at work, I will give you a synopsis. In the 1991 version, Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, a college football star who joins the FBI and is immediately assigned to Los Angeles to work bank robberies. He’s paired with Angelo Pappas, played by Gary Busey, and assigned to track the Ex-Presidents, a gang of bank robbers so-called because they perform their heists in rubber masks of former presidents. Some detective work involving tan lines later and Keanu has to infiltrate a band of local surfers, led by Bodhi, a spiritual thrill seeker, played in golden-maned glory by Patrick Swayze. As love of the surf draws Bodhi and Johnny closer together, Johnny has to decide what side of the law he wants to be on. It’s directed by Kathryn Bigelow (who directed Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) and for something as righteously silly as I’ve just described, it has no business being as good as it is. 

The 2015 version takes a different, and admittedly less good approach. Johnny Utah (played by Australian Luke Bracey) is now a retired extreme poly-athlete (which is a fancy way of saying “extreme sports guy who likes more than one flavour of death wish”), who joins the FBI after accidentally convincing his friend to plunge to his death on a dirt bike. While examining a string of heists in which the robbers have used their unusual extreme sports skills to rain down money on the world’s poorest people, Johnny discovers that the gang are completing the Ozaki Eight – a series of extreme sports conquests designed to highlight the environmental issues surrounding each area of the trials, and bring the athlete closer to spiritual enlightenment. Some detective work later, and Johnny infiltrates the gang, led by Bodhi (played by Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez). Johnny is drawn to their world and to Bodhi, by the lure of Nirvana through near-death experiences, and ultimately must choose between their two worlds. Credit where credit is due, the stunts on the film are impeccable, and despite the poor reviews, it has some shining moments. I think it’s probably suffering at the hands of its beautiful, perfect source material, rather than being objectively bad film. But I’ll get to that later.

First, I want to tackle the crimes of Malcolm Knox. One of Point Break’s unshakeable flaws, in Knox’s mind, is the performances, which he believes are at best, an incongruent stylistic mish-mash, and at worst, just plain bad. Specifically, he hates Keanu Reeves – who, just to reiterate, is almost universally beloved – with such vehement passion that he somehow manages to call him a sell out while also accusing him of having no talent to sell out. I’ll read you a quote just to show you the level of commitment Malcolm has to this hole he’s insisting on digging. Of Keanu’s performance he says: 

“He’s so earnest in his hopelessness in this movie, you almost want to hug him and whisper in his ear that he can be a beautiful schoolteacher and friend and father, instead of allowing his extraordinary good looks to drag him into a profession he’s no good at and towards ambitions he can never fulfil.”

Now look, no one is winning any Best Performance awards for their role in a movie about bank-robbing surf rats and the FBI agents who love them. But whenever I think about performances and criticism, I always think about a lecturer I had at uni, who taught a unit called From Silent to Sound Cinema. She had this intense and abiding interest in Nicole Kidman’s performance in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Keeping in mind I graduated from my undergraduate degree almost 10 years ago, and that I am definitely bastardising this – Kidman’s performance had been critically panned as wooden, but she saw it as a work of magnificent camp that referenced a long cinematic history. Her logic, simplified so that it could be explained to a group on 19-year-old idiots, was that Kidman was too talented an actor for it not to have been a stylistic choice. 

That’s not necessarily my defence of Keanu’s performance in this instance – the thing that I have always loved about Keanu Reeves is that he always looks like he enjoys the movies he makes, and that’s true of his appeal in Point Break. But the idea of a deliberate, but critically misinterpreted performance did make me think about the casting choices in Point Break. Kathryn Bigelow’s films deal with themes of violence, gender and genre in really specific ways, often by subverting viewer expectations of how we should be viewing or reacting to scenes or characters. Consider that prior to his role in Point Break Keanu had played mostly loveable and hapless stoners – most famously (and excellently) Ted Logan in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. In 1991, that was the role that made him recognisable to the audience. And Patrick Swayze’s most recognisable role then, and forever into the future if we’re being honest, was Dirty Dancing. I think both of previous histories have some bearing of how we interpret the characters of Johnny Utah and Bodhi. To quote Caitlin Benson-Allott, this cultural context gives Reeves’ performance the air of a “surfer undercover as an FBI agent undercover as a surfer” and serves to align Swayze’s masculine stunt work in the surf and in his skydiving with the beauty of choreography. Benson-Allott says that this “highlights their androgynous grace and celebrity power over their realism as actors”. 

To put it another way, I think that by adding these layers, Bigelow is creating a referential and ultimately pretty camp space for these performances to unfold. And in doing so, it allows her to focus on the homoerotic mechanism that drives most action films. Yeah, I’m back on my “everything is a bit gay” shit – but a) in fairness to me, action movies are really gay, and b) more importantly, you can’t stop me. Anyway, after visually linking their bodies in the opening scenes – Keanu on the shooting range in his wet t-shirt in the pouring rain, and Swayze soaked and gliding effortlessly through the surf – Bigelow forges a scenario where the bristling and silly masculinity of their roles drives them closer and closer together, finally reaching a sexy, sexy fever pitch. Malcolm Knox thinks this pitch is when Johnny throws himself out of a plane without a chute to cling fully to Bodhi’s tumbling body as Bodhi screams that they can either die in each other’s embrace or Johnny can drop his gun and pull the rip cord. And look, when I put it that way, the way it’s supposed to be put, it does sound pretty gay, but Malcolm thinks it’s the homoerotic peak because their bodies are pressed against each other and he’s wrong. 

The actual homoerotic peak is the culmination of the film’s beautifully shot chase scene. Johnny tracks Bodhi, in tuxedo and Ronald Reagan mask through Los Angeles. After dodging and diving through homes, kitchens and alleyways, Johnny has finally tracked Bodhi to the Los Angeles River but in the final leap onto the concrete, the dud knee that ended his football career fails him and he topples to the ground. He drags himself to the river’s edge in relentless pursuit of his man. Bodhi turns, halfway to escape and caught in Johnny’s crosshairs. They make lingering eye contact, the camera pulling ever closer in on Bodhi’s baby blues and the barrel of Johnny’s gun. Understanding that Johnny won’t shoot him, Bodhi turns and scales the fence to make his escape. Johnny, confronted by his inability to adhere to the letter of the law and his desire for Bodhi...’s free-spirited lifestyle, empties his clip into the air and screams in frustration. It’s this scene that supports Swayze’s final taunt as he slips away from Johnny into the desert – “You want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth.” It’s so perfectly set up, so sensual and so camp that it cannot be anything other than deliberate. Which means that Keanu, in all of his glory, is actually giving the perfect performance. 

Now, Malcolm doesn’t really delve into the 2015 remake of Point Break, other than to call it stale, though I suspect he hasn’t actually seen it. But much of the criticism that surrounded its release was levelled at the fact that it lacked the artistry of Kathryn Bigelow’s original. And it would be foolish of me to try to assert that this is anything other than absolutely correct. Kathryn Bigelow is an Oscar-winning auteur with a consistent and interesting body of work. The remake was directed by Ericson Core whose most notable works are as a cinematographer on films like The Fast and The Furious and the 2003 version of Daredevil. Point Break is the third film he’s directed and shot. None of this is a criticism, not every film maker is an artist, and not every artist is a cinematographer. But rather than approaching this iteration with the critical eye of someone viewing an attempt to modernise the unique perfection of its original, we have to approach it from the perspective of something new and separate.

How do these versions of Johnny Utah and Bodhi navigate the complex masculinities of the surf? Well for one thing, they’re less concerned with the surf.  While surfing, and especially big wave surfing, is very cool, in 2015 it lacks the same countercultural sensibility it brought to the screen in the 1990s. The extreme sports circuit on the other hand, offers a whole different range of brand of adrenaline junky.  A scene populated by people who will surf big waves, snowboard down mountains, free climb and base jump is much more likely to exist outside of the social mainstream – there’s only so long you can explain your philosophy of near-death experience as spiritual enlightenment before people start backing away slowly. Rather robbing banks to chase their endless summer, they’re pulling off heists to thank Mother Nature for letting them live another day. 

With this new scene comes a new Johnny, a man who has stepped back from the world of extreme sports to hide from himself in the FBI. Bodhi sees a broken man, who can be put back together by the powerful combination of mountain climbing and base jumping. Where Kathryn Bigelow is doing something complex and abstract with the film to convey the pull and the closeness, Ericson Core is doing what he does best as a cinematographer – making shit look fucking cool. There are a series of notable extreme sports scenes throughout the film – a big wave surf, a wingsuit flying sequence through the Swiss Alps, a snowboarding sequence and a free climbing sequence. These were filmed on location in 11 countries, using actual extreme sportsmen.  And it has a similar effect – beyond looking authentic, the commitment to realism gives the audience a taste of the adrenaline that comes with being tossed like a ragdoll by the ocean, or zooming at a 145 miles per hour through a Swiss mountain range wearing the aesthetic equivalent of a sleeping bag. Which in turn allows you to understand the pull that Bodhi has over Johnny. When they press their foreheads together in the cold mountain air having essentially achieved flight in a way that whichever God you pray to never intended for man, you can understand that need for physical closeness. If you’d just played Icarus and gotten away with it, would you not also seek out the nearest warm body to confirm that you did indeed still have a pulse? Horniness and death are inextricably linked – hundreds of years of French poetry and this 2015 extreme sports film both think so. 

While it lacks the mastery of Kathryn Bigelow’s vision of action and violence, I think if you give the 2015 Point Break a chance to stand on its own, it’s actually a pretty fun film. In fact I think you discover that its main flaw is that the bad guys are a bit right, and that in the face of a warming planet and relentless mining of the earth’s resources, maybe it is actually fine to blow up a gold mine in some remote mountain range. The original wasn’t nearly as message-driven, but that’s part of the remake’s unique charm. 

Anyway – all this has been to say that the 1991 version of Point Break is actually the greatest love story ever told. Johnny Utah is drawn to Bodhi like a moth to a flame, and Bodhi is ready to risk it all to show him the world. Neither you, nor Malcolm Knox can convince me otherwise. 

Well, that was essentially my extended “LEAVE KEANU ALONE!” moment. I honestly don’t know what would compel someone to write a hit piece on one of Keanu Reeves’ most iconic roles to go the paper on a Saturday, of all days. He’s asking for a hit piece to be written on him. I bet Malcolm doesn’t like Speed. Or The Matrix. Foolish. If you would like to join me in shooting our (metaphorical) guns into the air and going ‘AHHH!’ hit me up next time you see me at the pub! Peace!