“Fair is fair!”
Recently, I saw the award-winning stage adaptation of The Outsiders at Oklahoma City’s Civic Center Music Hall. I’m a fan of both the book and the movie — but not the panned 1990s TV show — but I didn’t expect to love the musical as much as I did.
But what I really identified with was the Oklahoma-based “movie” reality. Sure, I haven’t been involved in a “rumble” for some time, but The Outsiders reignites the classic S.E. Hinton world of the Greasers, Socs and other undesirables, and makes them cinematically real, theatrically dangerous and, more to the point, literately bold.
That being said, these filmic outliers (who might be considered the lesser spawn of Oklahoma/Arkansas/Texas white trash) and their criminal foibles started with The Outsiders, with Hinton adaptations of Rumble Fish and Tex at the top of the list.
Which brings me to 1985’s The Legend of Billie Jean, a Texas-based trailer park statement of class warfare where a vandalized dirt bike is the catalyst for a Corpus Christi-set act of justifiable retribution through teenage heroics, innocence lost and telling the world that, to be certain, “fair is fair.”
One summer’s day, teen siblings Billie Jean (Helen Slater) and Binx (Christian Slater) are having a lazy afternoon at the lake when a bunch of well-to-do bullies steal and vandalize his beloved scooter. When Billlie Jean wants restitution for the damaged bike, the bully’s dad, Mr. Pyatt (Richard Bradford), tries to rape her, which ultimately leads to Binx shooting the worn asshole.
With Mr. Pyatt claiming Binx tried to murder him, they go on the run with a fellow classmate (Martha Gehman), as well as the very whiny girl from The Simpsons (Yeardley Smith). Looking for a place to lie low, they break into a U.S. senator’s house, with mask-maker son (Keith Gordon) falling in love with Billie Jean and agreeing to act as her hostage. Going back to Corpus, they take on an abusive father, have a simulated shoot-out with the cops, and and ditches Lisa Simpson when she gets her period because Billie Jean decided she has had enough.
It all cumulates with Binx getting mortally wounded and Mr. Pyatt’s roadside shop of Billie Jean merch gets vandalized, with every person taking up her cause, touting her trademarked “Fair is fair!” for the fairground(?) area, all while Pat Benatar’s hit “Invincible (Theme from The Legend of Billie Jean)” plays out as her effigy burns.
Sure, it’s not based on Hinton’s work, but the bare bones of a young adult novel is there … if there ever was one. Surely a Hinton novelization was put out during that year’s Scholastic Book Fair, right?
Either way, between destined-for-HBO fare like Supergirl, The Secret of My Success and mostly this, Helen Slater really turned my budding hormones in classist overdrive, with Billie Jean’s punk-rock redux making her a real relatable, impressive heroine and a tarnished sex symbol who still musses my hair with the dirty lake water.
Sure, it’s not a great movie, but it was one of favorites growing up in South and Central Texas, and a real turning point in my countercultural adolescence. It was a movie where, hey, all I had to do was pull out an oversized gun, rock a butch haircut and come up with a catchphrase to unite most of Texas in my cause. —Louis Fowler