She was underage, and he did in fact rape her (I think you’re talking about the frat party scene, where Pinto takes Clorette Depasto up to his room while she is drunk, and a devil on one shoulder ends up dispatching the angel on the other shoulder). We know this because she later introduces Pinto to her parents (her father is the Mayor) as the boy who molested her, and says “we have to get married”, implying that she’s now pregnant.
But talking about TLAV as an “incel” movie basically ignores the fact that “incel” is really a step in teenage development that pretty much all guys go through. Once you start noticing girls, and get really self-conscious, and notice that you, yourself pretty much has all the looks and grace of a chimpanzee, and try to figure out how you, with all your handicaps, can compete with the cool bros (most of whom were in your stage a year or so ago) for the affections or even just the attention of girls - yeah, it’s hard not to go all incel-ish.
The key is to treat that phase as a phase, and get yourself (or someone you know) through it to the point that you can relate to women as people rather than as potential partners - even the ones you have some serious attraction towards.
TLAV ends with “Just Once” playing as the protagonist is driving away, his infatuation over. Does he generalize his experience to “all women are this way”? Or is this his step to realizing that there are a lot of fish in the sea and she’s not the one for him?
In Fast Times, Mike Damone gets Stacy Hamilton pregnant, but it’s her brother Brad who takes her to the clinic. Mark Ratner is pining for Stacy through the movie, and he does get mad at Damone for sleeping with Stacy and eventually “gets the girl” in the end - though, according to the postscript, they still haven’t “gone all the way yet.”
- SunUp, who watched entirely too many teen movies while growing up.
He does not rape her at the party: the angel (“I’m proud of you, Lawrence”) dispatches the devil (“You homo!”), then he leaves her at the mayor’s doorstep passed out in a shopping trolley. However, later we see them making out on the football field: “Before we go any further, there’s something I have to tell you. I lied to you. I’ve never done this before. — You never made out with a girl before? — No, I mean I’ve never done what I think we’re going to do in a minute. I sort of did once, but — That’s okay, Larry, neither have I. And, besides, I lied to you too. — Oh, yeah? What about? — I’m only thirteen.”
The Israeli movie was actually released a few months before Animal House, in Israel, at least. I have seen it, but am not sure how well it did in the U.S. market.
Ohmygod, I made it twenty seconds into that video. How could any director/casting professional/actor choose to have the creeper just stare unmoving, with his eyes and mouth open uncomfortably, at a schoolgirl.
And, get this, she doesn’t run away, and doesn’t spend the rest of the movie avoiding him when he keeps staring at her in school.
I keep seeing his slack, awkward, pervie expression…
I’m not going to get to sleep tonight.
[eta: I was so squicked out that I posted this immediately after I saw the beginning of that video, without watching the movie… which IS, after all, the POINT of this thread (read the title). But I didn’t know the movie had been discussed here…]
Yeah, that could be the fault of whoever put together the music video. I don’t know whether he comes across that way in the movie itself (and I don’t intend to watch it and find out).
I haven’t seen TLAV, but I have seen the Israeli film (it’s considered a classic here, for some reason), and the main character really is a bit of an incel.
The girl isn’t attracted to him. She’s attracted to his best friend, the handsome jock, which is why she has sex with him and not with the “hero”. But the main character thinks that if he’s nice to her, and consoles her, and does things for her, he’ll “win her over” and she’ll fall in love with him. And indeed, the girl is grateful, and does, in fact, sleep with him, but in the end, she just isn’t that into him, and goes back to his friend.
One interesting fact is that the Israeli original is a period piece, set 20 years earlier in the 1950s, while the American remake was set in the then-present day. I don’t know why they changed that.
