As cinema reckons with the #MeToo movement and conversations about sexual assault, perhaps no genre has aged worse than the teen sex comedy. A staple of the 1980s, films like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds portrayed male entitlement as a charming character trait and female consent as a narrative obstacle. The genre both described a prevailing chauvinist attitude while also modeling behavior for young viewers. While Reagan’s America placed wealth and status as ideal goals, the teen sex comedy insidiously wove chauvinism into this neoliberal value system. In these films, sexual misconduct was not an aberration but an integral part of male coming-of-age in the United States.
Like the teen audiences watching 1980s sex comedies, Paul Brickman’s Risky Business is hyperfocused on the horny and horrific depictions of American universities. Filmed in 1983, Risky Business is positioned just before the impending wave of sex comedies like Joysticks or the later Porky’s films. And while its high school characters are eager for that culture moment, the film itself eyes the genre with dread and contempt. Risky Business is often lumped in with teen sex comedies, but the film subverts the genre and is a grim satire about the chauvinist fantasies in 1980s America and how they will inform the decade’s patriarchy.
The plot of Risky Business lays a seemingly standard teenage tension between following the expectations of one’s parents and achieving your rebellious desires. Given a weekend without parents, suburban teen Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise) embarks on a sexual escapade that climaxes with him hosting a brothel in his parents’ home. But Brickman’s ingenious script crafts a much more pessimistic movie than the typical ribald teen comedy. While most 80s teen comedies insist on the pure joy of juvenile delinquency (see Ferris Bueler’s Day Off or Revenge of the Nerds), Risky Business delves into the consequences of wish fulfillment. While first appearing as an escape from his conformist upbringing, Joel’s fantasies of chauvinist sexual power only reinforce the American patriarchy he superficially rejects.
From its opening moments, Risky Business is a film intimately concerned with the formation of fantasies and the metaphors and implications contained within them. “The dream is always the same,” Cruise tells the audience as he recounts a dream of entering a steamy shower with a naked woman before his dream abruptly shifts to Joel sitting at a school desk in the middle of a college entrance exam. For Joel Goodson, his fantasies are indecisive and incomplete, offering temptation without satisfaction. This scene can be taken as a Freudean layout of the film’s conflict – will Joel achieve his fantasies or conform to expectations?
Joel’s shower-classroom fantasy indicates a central indecisiveness. Practically wet with teen yearning, Joel has no object of his fantasies. He knows he has desires but does not know what he desires. His friends prove no help in determining this desire, only goading him to act on these fantasies and find new sexual experiences but Joel cannot act on a desire that has no object. Like Joel, the other suburban teenagers are virgins unsure of their own desires and beyond a toxic attitude of sexual conquest, none of them seems to want anything in particular. “What the fuck,” one of Joel’s friend tells before delivering an aimless speech on the linkage between Joel’s freedom, opportunity, and future. The speech means nothing, however, and is merely a string of platitudes intended to lend Joel’s teen yearnings some greater significance. Joel’s friends arrange for an escort to visit him, setting in motion a story that will see Joel’s own desires and life direction taken over by the patriarchal currents surrounding him.
When Joel loses his virginity to the escort, Lana (Rebecca de Mornay), the Brickman imbues the scene with a sense of magical realism. Wind blows open the doors of Joel’s home and the film’s Tangerine Dream score soars as though some massive but imperceptible sea change has occurred. But rather than empowering Joel, it is at this moment he becomes an entirely reactive character in the plot of Risky Business. Lana steals his mother’s prized Steuben glass egg, and Joel must venture into the city to reclaim it — only to then ruin his father’s Porsche, which forces him to open a brothel with Lana to pay for the car repairs. Joel first let his friends direct and dictate his fantasies and he now surrenders his narrative agency to the consequences of that decision.
In the film’s third act, when Joel opens his suburban brothel, the film launches into a ferocious satire of suburban social decorum, particularly around the competition of college admissions. Joel deploys the techniques of his “junior entrepreneurs” club to market his pop-up brothel to the other teenage boys in his town. Initially shown as a dorky extracurricular and played for comedic relief, the entrepreneurship club enables Joel to promote and manage his brothel. Classmates pay for their sexual favors with investment bonds provided by their parents. Like their Reaganite stockbroker parents, Joel’s classmates have transformed the tools of economic stewardship into vehicles for hedonistic pursuits. The site of a brothel located in a manicured suburban home is not an aberration to the expectations around Joel, but rather a result of those values and upbringing compounding with each other.
But this tacit approval will become explicit by the end of the film. Joel’s parents arrange for a Yale admissions interview at his home on the same night as his brothel is operating. Believing that his chances at Yale are sunk, Joel is surprised to learn that the interviewer himself hired an escort and will recommend Joel to Yale admissions. “Yale could use a man like Joel,” the interviewer tells Joel’s father. In the precise language of Brickman’s dialogue, we can see the future that Joel has in front of him. “Use” implies that Joel will not be at the head of the elite in American patriarchy, nor will be subverting or challenging their assumptions from within. Instead, Joel’s future is one of compliance and conformity. “What the heck,” Joel’s father remarks, echoing the same meaningless advice that Joel’s friends gave him. Both Joel’s peers and his stern father are mouth-pieces for the same sense of male entitlement. If we revisit the dream sequence that opened the film, Joel was stuck between fulfilling his raw teen desire and the expectations of his parents to get into college. This conclusion negates the initial tension of Joel’s dream, as his sexual fantasy and the wishes of his parents prove to be perfectly compatible.
There is perhaps no better metaphor for Joel’s predicament than the film’s frenzied climax, in which Lana’s pimp has broken inside his home and stolen all of his parents’ possessions. With just mere hours before his parents return, Joel must spend all of the profits from his brothel to purchase back the belongings from the pimp. In doing so, Joel is now buying his parents’ lifestyle. Whatever he has earned from his weekend of transgressions is now being fed into the same consumerist model of respectability that alienated him at the film’s beginning. The rebellious sexual fantasies of Joel offer no escapism at all but in fact undergird the patriarchal suburban environment he was raised in.
When watching a poorly-aged sex comedies today, you may laugh at the zany and outlandish scenarios but feel a profound disgust at the retrograde politics running throughout the film. Risky Business revels in that unease by satirizing a distinctly male and distinctively American toxicity. The film intimately portrays a hormonal and privileged teenager while sustaining a vantage point just outside Joel’s headspace. Just as chauvinism haunted the American cinema and reality of the 1980s, so too does it inflict real damage on the public today, both as audience members and as people. With the hope of one day purging the deeply held misogyny of American conservatism, Risky Business is an artwork we can enjoy and enlighten ourselves with.
