The year was 1990. The set­ting; a reg­u­lar Amer­i­can sub­ur­ban high school, and the char­ac­ters? Well just about all the cliché pop­u­lar, geeky, loner, jocks and straight-cut teach­ers you could wave a stick at. So what made this any dif­fer­ent from an abun­dance of late 80’s, early 90’s barely post-pubescent flicks?

It said some­thing, it asked ques­tions, it dared to think.

The 80’s; a time of big hair, bad music (for the most part) and brick cell­phones. The dawn of the 90’s had not come yet and in my belief, times needed to change. Social changes, to be exact. Too long had the younger gen­er­a­tions been allowed to rebel and do what­ever they wanted on mass scales with­out respon­si­bil­ity or con­se­quence. Tat­toos were painted, hair was sprayed, music was made, riots were fought and in the end the bub­ble burst when the 90’s turned up.

In my view, all of a sud­den the chil­dren to their par­ents realised that when the vol­ume was turned down, no-one was lis­ten­ing. The con­tin­u­ous allowance of wild free­dom caused a whiplash effect. Every­one wanted to have fun whilst their par­ents ignored them and turned a blind eye for the most part, but when that same every­one wanted to actu­ally express a seri­ous feel­ing or emo­tion, to ask for help or ques­tion the world, the same par­ents were still ignor­ing them. For many par­ents the only answer was of two thing: put it down to ‘going through a stage’ and ignore it, or cure with medications.

I think Pump up the Vol­ume was the first real film to express this desire to speak for the unheard voices, to say that they are not mere whines or cries, but solid ver­sions of per­cep­tion and valid ques­tions of any­thing and every­thing substantial.

Pump up the Volume’s name and taglines (“Steal the air” / “The voice of a gen­er­a­tion”) were per­fect for its mes­sage: find your voice, take the micro­phone and make them listen.

Mark Hunter (Chris­t­ian Slater) is quite sim­ply the new boy in school. Mov­ing from one crappy sub­urb to a new one, he is lit­er­ally done with it all. His father, a new hire for the very high school he attends is as apa­thetic as they come. Mov­ing from sup­port to igno­rance in a sec­ond, and his mother no bet­ter. We see this typ­i­cal teen angst played by Slater in a few scenes but when his finds his place in his room, before a pirate-radio set-up, he becomes some­one alto­gether more substantial.

Speak­ing to the masses and a very pow­er­ful voice to a recep­tive choir, Slater por­trays him­self well as some­one just as con­fused, though slightly more aware than those lis­ten­ing. Those lis­ten­ing are of course, are the stu­dents of Hubert Humphrey High. Those lost in their own worlds of pity and self hate, or those suf­fer­ing from believ­ing in what they are told they are find some­thing, some­one, to believe in. They lis­ten, because he lis­tens — some­thing that none of the ‘grown ups’ are doing.

This is the basic premise of the film. There are no slasher moments or ques­tion­able plot points but just the mes­sage. In a time where things are chang­ing, the younger gen­er­a­tions need to be heard. Slater’s char­ac­ter finds a decent part­ner­ship with Nora Diniro (Saman­tha Mathis) who draws his real per­sona out of its shell and gives some pres­ence to the Mark Hunter of the real world.

Together they cli­max the film in push­ing every­thing to its lim­its. The school board, which has decided to deal with the ado­les­cents and Hunter him­self by silenc­ing them all with false, blind coun­selling and harsh pun­ish­ments (again instead of actu­ally lis­ten­ing) never con­cede to the fact of the mat­ter, or the voices of its stu­dents. A rebel­lion — or rev­o­lu­tion of sorts — is the only even­tual out­come. Because when you keep ignor­ing the voices, they just get louder.

There may not be a detailed part-by-part descrip­tion of what actu­ally hap­pens in Pump up the Vol­ume, but that’s because it should be watched for what it’s say­ing, not where this act is in rela­tion to that act or the fast cars or explosions.

This isn’t a film so much as a mes­sage, and in a day and age of high school shoot­ings and mass polit­i­cal turnout amongst the younger gen­er­a­tions, it’s a mes­sage we still need to con­vey. Every day. Watch it because just like the voices in it, it shouldn’t be ignored.

Steal the air!