ALTERED IMAGES: “Sentimental”

(c/w “Dead Pop Stars” 7", Epic, 1981)

A little more about Gregory’s Girl: “It’s a tricky time for me,” Gregory tells his football coach, who’s demanding goals. The movie has only just begun, and already we’ve watched Gregory and his friends admire, through a window, a nurse removing her “brassiere.” The next day, Gregory’s team loses its eighth game in a row. The coach demotes Gregory from striker to goalie, and replaces him with the only viable option an open tryout produces: Dorothy—a “lass,” a “dear”—who’s far more skilled a footballer than all the boys she competes against.

A fourth-year student—a bit older than I was the first time I watched the movie, the same year my Under-14 soccer team, the Barons, won the championship—Gregory offered me some uncomfortable parallels. He, like me, was tall and gangly; he played soccer; he felt too shy to ask out girls; he played drums (I was learning the bass); he’d thumbtacked posters (Rush, the Specials, the Jam, Patti Smith) across his bedroom wall. Music, soccer, girls: a holy trinity for us both, the negotiations among them inevitably tricky.

Later in the film, talking to his friend Steve, Gregory grumbles, “Look, pal, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I’m going through a crisis.” Gregory’s crisis is that of every teen desperate to belong—he cheerfully betrays his friend Andy to retain his own endangered place on the team; he has a crush on Dorothy, a girl Steve’s called “unattainable,” but no idea how to attain her. And though his complaint’s rhetorical, Gregory does believe his friend hasn’t noticed. He’s clumsy, vulnerable, confident and insecure in the manner of most teenage boys. Late for school one morning, he trots in evasive patterns across the empty football field, and, in a modified version of the film’s first scene, two teachers watch him from the faculty lounge window: “He must think he’s invisible,” one says, laughing. Of course he did. Few boys that age are wise enough to know that everyone else generally feels as out-of-place and overlooked as they do; few can observe the world’s machinations. I wasn’t; I couldn’t.

Dorothy was unattainable—so devoted to her training that while the other characters are busy being teenagers and dreaming about each other, she’s running laps around town in the darkness. Though everyone’s infatuated with her—both her own team and the opposing team mob and kiss her when she scores a goal; in the boys’ bathroom, there’s a thriving trade in photos of her—she never seemed as intriguing to me as her lab partner, Susan, who wore an in-her-eyes Louise Brooks haircut, a beret, and lots of eyeshadow.

My own desperation to belong sometimes endowed even the simplest, most banal events with import I felt but didn’t understand. My mother, late to pick up a friend and me from afternoon soccer practice at the nearby community college’s athletic field, gifted us that many more minutes to kick a ball between us, then gossip about classmates as we took off our shin guards and lounged on the clipped grass. He was our team’s goalie, I the center fullback, and we hung out at practice, in school, and on weekends. We slipped into a not-uncomfortable silence. The things at which I’d excelled in grade school—drawing, kickball, running fast, making up stories—had lost all currency in junior high, and so these idle moments helped me reinvent myself with my friends and the people I hoped would be my friends.

Squinting into the low sun, I watched a boy and a girl about my own age stroll across the field and through a gap in the chain-link fence on its far side. I couldn’t see their faces, but felt convinced that they were girlfriend and boyfriend by the close-but-casual postures of their bodies. The moment meant nothing—two kids walking across a soccer field late some October afternoon—but I managed to idealize it: this brief vision haunted me, suggesting, though I couldn’t have explained it then, their obliviousness to everything but each other, their ease with another person that I’d yet to feel—and, I realized later, that my own hyper self-awareness prevented me from feeling. When would I be so at ease, unwitting part of someone else’s imagined narrative, participant instead of observer?

Madeleine, Gregory’s younger and far wiser sister, accompanies him to the mall to help him pick out new clothes. She gives him sensible advice: buy Italian trousers, take an interest in himself if he expects anyone else to do so, don’t script conversations for his dates. After shopping, they sit down at a café, where Madeleine orders “ginger beer and lime juice, with ice cream, please, but don’t stir it”—unlike her brother, she asks for exactly what she wants. “The nicest part,” Madeleine tells him when the drink arrives, “is just before you taste it. Your mouth goes all tingly, but that can’t go on forever….”

If we experience adolescence through its perpetual delay, its apparently endless liminality, Madeleine’s line offers perhaps the most crucial of the film’s many reassuring lessons: the anxiety of anticipation happens interminably and confusingly, and life’s nicest moments are fleeting. So are its worst, we can infer, even if it never seems that way. When Gregory finally does end up on a date—if not the one he expected—he has to be instructed several times to loosen up: “You can’t enjoy yourself if you don’t relax!” But who can relax when the world seems to postpone what we want most? One of the movie’s most painful (and painfully funny) scenes occurs when Gregory, in a borrowed white jacket that doesn’t fit him, stands beneath a massive ticking clock awaiting his date’s arrival, rehearsing his greeting, sniffing his armpits, and checking his wristwatch.

Like many comedies (but especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which the characters read for school, and which the film’s events sometimes mirror), Gregory’s Girl involves delay, misdirection, and crossed purposes. Even if Gregory feels brief hope—as when Dorothy sends a friend to ask Gregory to meet her—it turns out that she only wants a goalie to help her practice shots. “I just wanted to know what you’re up to at lunchtime,” she says, when he arrives at the break room the cool kids occupy. His answer nails teenage resignation: “Oh, nothing that can’t wait a million years.”

Gregory’s even dorkier, more hapless friends, Andy and Charlie, resolve early on in the film to stop waiting: “Look, Charlie, we’ve got to get some girls. We’ve got to make a move. Even Gregory’s at it now. We’re falling behind. I don’t think there’s any advantage in putting it off any longer. Besides, it’s making me depressed.” When it’s unclear why what seems deferred for you has been fast-tracked for everyone else, falling behind becomes your primary concern, and the couple making out in the hallway behind Andy and Charlie only reinforces that anxiety—for them, and for the falling-behind eighth-grade viewer watching at home alone some Friday night when the movie ran on the USA Network.

Our far-flung soccer games took place Saturday mornings in the fall, and our parents drove us through early fog along hilly back roads until we located a field surrounded by old maples at the edge of some small town, or fresh chalk stripes drawn across a sandy baseball diamond where someone had assembled two opposing goals and narrow wooden benches along the sidelines. Often we’d meet at some obvious location and caravan to the game so no one got lost. One morning, as we waited for stragglers in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot so we could head forty-five minutes north, my friend the goalie asked if I wanted to ride with his mother. I assumed he meant with him and his mother, but when I accepted the offer, he hopped into another teammate’s car, and as we all pulled out of the Dunkin’ Donuts lot, I sat buckled in the front seat of his mother’s Chevette, alone with her, wiping my palms on my shorts and wondering what I should say. A single-mom graduate student who grew hot peppers on her windowsill, who insisted I call her by her first name (as her son did—and as Gregory called his father), and whose boyfriend looked like a cross between John Lennon and Joey Ramone, she always unnerved me. She wore her spiked hair short, seemed younger than everyone else’s mom, rented out space in her sprawling, ramshackle house to other students, and had filled her living room with books and LPs I loved to look through whenever I had the chance. I found her both cool and very intimidating—in part because she never spoke to me as if I were a dumb fourteen-year-old.

But when I was fourteen, the world was only just losing its power to intimidate me. At the end of practice after a rousing victory halfway through our season, Coach Barton called us together while he gathered balls into mesh bags. We’d begun the season not unlike the hapless losers on Gregory’s team. In the mid-’8os, soccer was not televised, so we probably knew the intricacies of Australian Rules Football—which ESPN used to broadcast early weekend mornings—better than those of the beautiful game. Our hometown of 165,000 people afforded us barely enough thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds to field a team of eleven with a few reserves. We understood the terms slide tackle and bicycle kick, but had few skills to execute either. Coach Barton had to explain how our defense could run the offsides trap, or the difference between direct and indirect free kicks. Now that we’d embarked on a winning streak, he ran his hand through his short gray hair, spun the whistle he kept on a lanyard, and singled out some of us for praise. “Josh,” he told me, “you used to be Timmy Timid, but lately you’ve turned into Thunderfoot.”

Thunderfoot? Thankfully the nickname didn’t last as long as the boost in my self-esteem. After the speech, Coach Barton had me take all of our team’s goal kicks, and some of our corner kicks—though, given my height, he also began putting me in front of goal on our corners, so I could try to score on a header. After the drive with my friend’s mother, during which I realized that I felt happier being asked serious questions about myself than sitting crammed in a backseat punching and joking with my teammates, I received my first yellow card of the season, for an aggressive challenge.

Susan, the character in the film who does notice Gregory—“He’s got a nice laugh,” she says to Dorothy—is played by Clare Grogan, whose band Altered Images put out their debut single, “Dead Pop Stars,” a month before the release of Gregory’s Girl in 1981. “Dead Pop Stars” skidded through the bottom of the UK singles chart for two weeks, but had vanished by the film’s opening night. Altered Images, circa 1981, played a poppy post-punk they’d adapted from elder contemporaries such as Siouxsie and the Banshees: echoing, minor-key guitars create a tenebrous mood, but Grogan’s breathy, girly voice brightens the gloom.

My fondness for Gregory’s Girl inspired me to seek out Altered Images. The lyrics to the vaguely gothic “Dead Pop Stars”—“And now I’ve had my fifteen minutes / I’m just another memory, / An embarrassing part of your youth”—suggest that Grogan was already realistic about her own career’s potential longevity, but I didn’t care about the vagaries of the pop star life when I was fourteen. Selfish like Gregory, I wanted music to cover my own youthful embarrassments, to validate my own invented crises: what use was a pop song if it didn’t sound cool, didn’t lend some of that coolness to its listener, didn’t also function as a mirror? “Sentimental,” the B-side, reminded me of the early U2 records I liked so much then: insistent drums, repetitive bass, delayed and flanged guitar, and lyrics that expressed teenage confusion. “Enter the vast arena,” Grogan sings. “Where do you, where do you, where do you go from here? / Can’t you see, don’t you know, don’t you know the way? / Forget the past and it’ll go away.” “Sentimental” had just enough post-punk energy and just enough winsome new wave chirpiness to appeal to me, and its naïve introspection made my naïve self want to replay it.

I could have construed Clare Grogan’s call to “enter the vast arena” as denoting the band’s ambition—naming the place they wanted, like U2, to end up playing—or as a reference to the soccer fields where I was handicapped by rules and boundaries I’d yet to master, but I heard it as an allusion to the unknown, perilous site into which I was stepping, where, my mistakes and successes visible before some audience that could vote on my fate, I might or might not survive. The time for choosing was ending. “Enter” was an invitation, but also a command.

At my vulnerable age, I felt welcomed by even the most minor affirmations. A song whose enthusiastic bluster and jumbled lyrics I could make bear my immature, inarticulable feelings, and a film whose characters endured my own worries—both helped usher me into the vast arena of adolescence. Both encouraged me to stop waiting and to accept the world’s messiness as it was, and as it remains. Still, plenty of other bands and movies had represented teenage bewilderment in ways that spoke to me. In Gregory’s Girl, the welcome I found wasn’t the fact that Gregory turns out to have an admirer, and that, through Susan’s elaborate ruse, he finally realizes it: no, that story only reinforced the basic boy-meets-girl tropes; even though the boy who gets the girl is a dork, he does get the girl, and, at the end of the film, we last see him lying in bed in his borrowed white jacket, flower between his teeth, at peace with himself and his world.

Halfway through the film, in class one day, Andy reads aloud a passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and quotes Puck: “My mistress with a monster is in love.” Although, in the play, Bottom has an admirer, he’s still a monster with an ass’s head dressed in “hempen home-spuns,” which describes pretty well how I felt as a hormone-fueled fourteen-year-old boy without the right clothes, right knowledge, right tastes. Didn’t we all secretly fear that some aspect of our appearance—or our souls—was monstrous, and that that fact explained why our crushes failed to recognize us? “Why do they run away?” Bottom wonders, when his friends first see him transformed—a question I might have asked my teenaged self.

Andy and his sidekick Charlie—who, throughout the entire film, never opens his mouth to speak, only to stuff food into it—fill the role of foolish monsters: their idea of picking up girls in the cafeteria is to join them uninvited, and then explain such “well-known facts” as the velocity with which a sneeze exits one’s nose, or the method of veal production. And as their desperation not to fall behind increases—particularly when they see Gregory with three different girls on a single night—they try to hitchhike to Venezuela, where Andy has researched the ratio of women to men (eight to one, he believes). In darkness dissolved only by passing headlights, Andy holds a handlettered sign reading “CARACUS,” until Charlie finally breaks his silence to tell Andy that he’s misspelled the name and they should go home. “There’s some nice girls in third year,” Charlie says, as they depart. “They always go for the older guys. At least, the nice ones do. There’s even a couple of beauties in second year…. Andy. I think everything’s going to be all right.”

Everything’s going to be all right: here was my affirmation, because clearly everything wasn’t all right with Andy and Charlie as they slouched into the darkness. If such a sad case could admit this delusional hope to another equally sad case, then possibly I might be okay. And as I pondered such questions, the camera caught one last sight of Dorothy, in her tracksuit, running through the night: Exeunt.

Charlie’s optimism seemed a fantasy, if a compelling one I wanted to believe. As in the midsummer Athenian woods, dreams and darkness obscure and transform the passions in Cumbernauld, the drab Scottish New Town where Gregory’s Girl takes place, and a dream admits the presence of another in “Sentimental.” “What a dream,” Gregory sighs to Andy, the first time he notices Dorothy. Later, Madeleine asks Gregory whether he’s dreamed about Dorothy, because “that means you really love her. It’s the one you have the dreams about that counts.” Twice during the film, Andy tells Charlie that he’s “had that dream again last night”—and though we never learn the precise nature of this dream, we can imagine it. And, near the end of “Sentimental,” the drums and bass drop out for a few measures, and Grogan sings, “In my head, I have a dream / A dream for you, for me / It’s a nice dream, you’d like it.”

John Peel, the famous Radio One DJ, claimed that, even into late middle age, he wept whenever he heard his favorite song, the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks.” “A teenage dream’s so hard to beat,” Feargal Sharkey sings in that song’s first line, and from the perspective of adulthood, it’s easy to hear what Peel recognized in those words, and in the song. (Per his wishes, the lyric was chiseled onto Peel’s gravestone.) Teenage dreams are so impassioned, and so meager: our most fervent adolescent yearnings so often involve little more than being noticed and appreciated.

As a teenager, I didn’t yet realize how banal and absurd so many of my dreams were, nor how achievable, but I still treasured them, and many mornings when I awoke in the muddle of my narrow twin bed, those already departing visions seemed more real—and far more interesting—than the life I abided. In the film, it’s crucial that we see Gregory alone in his bedroom, pensive for a moment after bashing his drum kit—and that we see Susan alone in hers, curled up in bed reading Shakespeare, but still attentive to the night-noises through her window. Given the performative nature of adolescence, the constant need to define oneself for others to avoid the risk of being defined by them, my bedroom offered me a retreat where I could consider both the person I hoped to become as well as the person I feared I was. Of course, the bedroom is also where we dream about that becoming. Maybe I needed only to see characters to whom I could relate have their dreams both met and frustrated in order to believe in my own. Madeleine had told Gregory how to realize what we love, and so within a year I’d quit soccer for the greater challenges of music and girls, the things I then dreamed about. Gregory’s Girl and “Sentimental” both imply more than they state, and those occasional ambiguities felt true to my desires—confused and shifting, impossible to pin down.