“Risky Business” Remains One of the Most Daring Films of the ’80s | Features

There’s a long-held belief about Hollywood history that, from basically the moment “Heaven’s Gate” nearly bankrupted United Artists in 1980 to the moment “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” kicked off the indie boom of the ‘90s, studio executives had an almost pathological aversion to any movie with artistic ambition. There’s at least some truth to this, and seminal texts like Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls have cooked those kernels of truth into a full-blown mythologizing of ‘70s and ‘90s Hollywood, while the ‘80s remain largely dismissed as a creative wasteland.

The Criterion Collection has tacitly supported this version of film history, with precious few studio films from the 1980s included among their more than 1,200 releases. So when 1983’s “Risky Business”—the movie that made Tom Cruise a star—received a Criterion release last month, it felt like a choice worth a deeper consideration. Why this movie? When I first saw “Risky Business” as a teenager in the ’90s, it struck me as just another teen sex comedy (and one without many jokes, at that). But now, seeing it for the first time as an adult, I was floored by a masterpiece of American cinema that has just as much artistry and insight about its cultural and political moment as films by Robert Altman, Alan J. Pakula, and Hal Ashby had a decade earlier. 

1983’s “Risky Business” is the third major ‘80s teen movie released by the Criterion Collection, following 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and 1985’s “The Breakfast Club.” And like those other two, “Risky Business” feels almost more like a documentary of American teenage malaise in the Reagan Era than it does any other kind of film. And the Reagan Era is all over “Risky Business,” as the characters are each initially defined purely by their ability to shill a product, and contribute to the insatiable death march of American Capitalism. 

“Risky Business” was to be the second film from David Geffen’s new production company, following Robert Towne’s “Personal Best,” which was a notorious commercial flop the year before. So to help the film’s commercial prospects, Geffen candidly demanded the lead role of Joel Goodson be given “to someone I’d want to fuck.” Enter Tom Cruise, who had gained some notice in 1981’s “Taps” and was in the middle of filming Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders” in Oklahoma when he was hired for the role that changed his life forever. Joel Goodson, a high school senior from an affluent Chicago suburb, is left alone when his parents leave town for the week, and his friend Miles tries to hire a prostitute for him. “Sometimes, you just gotta say ‘What the fuck,’” Miles tells Joel (a line that becomes a recurring motif in the film). 

Joel is initially resistant, preferring to use his week of freedom to immortally dance in his underwear while rocking out to Bob Seger. But he finds he can’t shake the idea that’s been planted in his head, and temptation gets the better of him. Enter Lana (Rebecca De Mornay), a call girl who rocks Joel’s world even more than Bob Seger and then promptly steals his mother’s most valuable possession (a large glass egg) when Joel doesn’t have enough cash on hand to pay her. Some hijinks ensue, there’s a chase with Guido the Killer Pimp while Joel is driving his dad’s Porsche, and eventually the Porsche (which Joel was explicitly told not to touch while his parents were gone) ends up in Lake Michigan. How does Joel get the money to fix the car? By teaming up with Lana and her friends to become a pimp himself, and use his house as a brothel for the entire high school. 

One of the subplots writer/director Paul Brickman wove into the film was Joel’s membership in his school’s “Future Enterprisers” club, and his need to develop a product that he could sell and report profits on. (The best he and his friends could come up with was a notepad that lights up when there’s an important message). Joel’s presumed success as a Future Enterpriser would, in turn, help get him into Princeton, and his father has already set up an interview with a local alum. Of course that interview ends up happening on brothel night, and the alum has such a memorable evening that he reports back with the words “Princeton could use a guy like Joel.”

For most teen sex movies, the sex is almost always about the seemingly insurmountable achievement of a teenage boy getting laid. But there’s no achievement in paying for something with your parents’ money, and “Risky Business” doesn’t pretend otherwise. Rather, “Risky Business” treats its sex as transactional—and a rare case where the woman also gets what she wants out of the deal (unlike nearly every other teen sex movie)—but also as an act of actual pleasure. To that end, the film’s two sex scenes are crafted with even more overt eroticism than an Adrian Lyne movie.

In the first one, our introduction to Lana is played to near mythic proportions. Joel wakes up from a dream state as Lana walks in the room and asks if he’s ready for her. And what ensues may not rip any bodices, but it sure does blow some French doors open. Then for the second scene, which takes place on the Chicago El, Paul Brickman edgelords us through Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” building the sexual tension and longing as Joel and Lana patiently wait for the train to empty, one passenger at a time, before getting down to (risky) business. 

The real MVP of these two sequences (other than Brickman’s sublime direction) is the German electronic band Tangerine Dream, who composed the score for the film (as well as classic scores for other great films, like Michael Mann’s “Thief” and William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer”). It’s unfortunate that the film is so widely remembered for that “Old Time Rock & Roll” needle drop, because Tangerine Dream crafted one of the best and most sumptuous film scores of the ‘80s—particularly on “Lana,” which soundtracks the first sex scene.

“Risky Business” was Paul Brickman’s directorial debut (after writing a few films in the late ‘70s, including the first “Bad News Bears” sequel), and it should have launched a major filmmaking career. Instead, Brickman only ever directed one more feature, 1990’s “Men Don’t Leave.” Several things likely contributed to him leaving Hollywood behind, including the financial failure and critical drubbing of 1983’s “Deal of the Century,” which Brickman wrote and William Friedkin directed. But it seems like the biggest factor may be how he was forced to compromise on the end of “Risky Business,” a historical wrong that Criterion’s new edition of the film finally makes right. 

In the film’s theatrical ending, which was mandated by the studio, Joel is headed off to his Princeton destiny, but he and Lana talk about still seeing each other in the meantime, and they joke about negotiating a price for another night together while walking through the park. But in Brickman’s original ending, included as a bonus on the Criterion release, Joel and Lana speculate over their future as the film ends on a pensive shot of the two in a melancholic embrace, knowing those futures won’t involve each other. 

The difference between these two final images is night and day, like imagining “The Graduate” without the final shot of Benjamin and Elaine on the bus. That particular ennui—of achieving your dream and being thrust into the future you strove for—is the entire point. And it had been telegraphed from the film’s first moments, as we hear Joel, in voiceover, saying “The dream is always the same,” and describing a panic dream about meeting a beautiful woman and then being unable to hang onto her, as he hopelessly navigates the fog of an endless path that he can’t deviate from. That, in a way, is the ultimate fear of all the main characters in the three ‘80s teen movies in the Criterion Collection. 

The metaphors in “Risky Business” don’t require much dissection; participation in Reaganomics makes pimps and hookers of us all, and some of us turn out to be preternaturally gifted at said pimping and hooking. But the way Brickman’s story strips these themes down to their core is almost breathtaking in its economy. The tacit currency of the Reagan Era was who you screwed and how well you screwed them. In “Risky Business,” screwing is the literal currency, and Joel Goodson proves to be so good at facilitating it that it propels him all the way to the Ivy League. (That Joel is recognized and rewarded for this while Lana is left behind is made more obvious in Brickman’s original ending.) 

“Risky Business” turned Tom Cruise into an overnight star, and the reductive version of that story is that the underwear dance is what did it. Of course there’s some truth to that, but that scene doesn’t matter if the movie isn’t a ubiquitous hit, and the movie isn’t a hit if Cruise isn’t perfect for every other aspect of playing Joel Goodson, too. Brickman found Cruise at an ideal crossroads moment, when he still possessed the vulnerability and hesitancy of a normal human, but was learning how to tap into a particular swinging-dick energy that he made his own. Cruise quickly carried that persona to megastardom, while Brickman and De Mornay never really enjoyed the careers they should have—an outcome that feels almost too on the nose.

As the film ends, we see other members of Joel’s Future Enterprisers club deliver their final presentations, telling us how much their product cost and how many hundreds of dollars in profit they made over the course of the semester. Then, over the final shot of Joel and Lana, we hear Joel in voiceover: “My name is Joel Goodson. I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night.” It’s the perfect note to end not just one of Hollywood’s greatest films of the 1980s, but also one of its greatest films about that oft-maligned decade. You are the product you deal in, and your worth is the profit you generate. Well, as long as you’re the affluent kid who looks and acts like Tom Cruise.