The 1980 film The Blue Lagoon holds a peculiar place in popular culture, particularly for those of us old enough to remember when it came out (hello again, fellow Gen-Xers).
Disclaimer: I was only ten at the time, not quite old enough to see it in theaters. But I had older cousins, and they all talked about it a lot. Heck, I may have even caught part of it on the Sony Trinitron TV in their basement, sitting on that purple shag carpet surrounded by faux-wood paneling that was ubiquitous in those days.
Based on a 1908 novel, it’s a classic of the shipwreck/desert island genre. Two kids, boy and girl cousins aged seven and nine, are stranded on an island sometime in the late Victorian era after their sailing vessel goes down somewhere in the South Pacific. Clearly privileged for the time—one of their dads is traveling with them from Boston to San Francisco—they’re likewise a little sheltered and naïve. Marooned on the island with a crew-member and fellow survivor (who’s definitely not in the same social class) he soon dies of what looks to be an overdose of binge drinking. They’re left to fend for themselves—with only their childlike sensibilities, and what he taught them, to go on.
Spoiler alert for the uninitiated: they grow into adolescence, discover they have feelings for one another, and somehow, through a combination of old photographs and watching nature around them, figure out how to have sex. They have a baby, and—through a misadventure—are finally rescued…but may or may not have lived long enough to see it. The ending is ambiguous.
Paradise‘s controversies
The movie was both groundbreaking and controversial. Coming near the end of filmdom’s movie brat era—when a then-new crop of film school-trained directors took on Hollywood, and reinvented it for the modern age—it features startlingly frank depictions of teenage sexuality and exploration. But what made it particularly hot-button was the ages of the actors themselves: Christopher Atkins was a barely-legal eighteen, and Brooke Shields was—yikes—fifteen. They used body doubles for some racier scenes, and even glued her long hair to her chest so as not to reveal too much. This is years before Oprah, decades before #MeToo (and Shields’ own coming forward about a later sexual assault). With all we’ve learned about exploitation of kid actors, the mistreatment of women in Hollywood and other industries, and the rise of child porn and human trafficking, it seems almost more shocking to us nowadays. Perhaps we, as an audience, have had our own fall from innocence in the intervening decades.
Then again, what it’s depicting, at least romantically, isn’t totally out there. Plenty of fifteen-year-olds have sex for the first time, often with kids slightly older than they—and if stats are to be believed, in greater numbers during the liberated Seventies than today. Teen parentage isn’t all that unknown either—particularly for the time period the movie depicts.
If anything, the movie’s greatest unrealism is far more workaday: how did these two youngsters keep hair and teeth perfectly groomed across a decade of life in the wild? How did the cannibalistic natives—itself a politically problematic depiction—remain unaware of the kids’ existence on a tiny island over all those years? How did they miraculously discover all the mechanics of sex—then, subsequently, deliver a healthy baby just like that? Then again, lots of stories demand suspension of disbelief, so maybe we just go with it as something of a fantasy.
The production values help: it’s gorgeously shot, mostly on an island in Fiji, by renowned cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Sophie’s Choice); stirring music accompanies the visuals, composed by Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October). Watching it in sharp 4K streaming on Max, you wouldn’t be off-base for thinking it was made last month. Randal Kleiser, its director, went to USC, and was housemates with George Lucas.
It’s not all perfect, though: the beautiful production is undercut by so-so acting; I’m not sure if Kleiser was deliberately going for his leads mimicking childlike behavior, but whatever the reason, they come across like performers in a junior high play. A respectable box-office success at the time, it was largely panned by critics; while it was a star-maker for its leads, Brooke Shields doesn’t exactly count it as a high point in her career.
All that by way of saying: in an era before streaming, it would have been largely forgotten, a relic of the sex-and-drugs 1970s, available on late-night television, and maybe as a worn-out VHS tape at Blockbuster.
Paradise (and mythology) re-found
For me, though, the movie’s long held an odd emotional tug. Maybe some of it was the tropical island setting—magic for a kid growing up in snowy Eastern Canada. More likely, it’s because I was only starting to understand sexuality back then, and the scandal of it all shocked me; like so many deeply-closeted kids, then and now, I was simultaneously openly uptight about, yet secretly fascinated by, sex and sexuality. It‘s been on my endlessly-long streaming watchlist for awhile—and one recent night, in the middle of folding some laundry, I screened the whole thing from beginning to end.
And…Holy. Effing. Moly.
I think everyone has a small subset of themes, images, sounds and motifs that trigger strong emotional associations. Like really strong, shake-you-to-your-core strong. As an alienated, nerdy kid, I gravitated toward movies like Star Wars and Superman. When, in my adolescence, director Steven Spielberg brought his sensibility to a sobering wartime epic set in the same place and time where my Dad had grown up, I felt those feelings again. That time it even influenced my career direction. Years later, having come out but still never having found real, abiding romance, I had that emotional reaction once more, to—of all things—James Cameron’s Titanic. I doubtless wasn’t the only young-ish gay man at the time swept up in Leomania.
In later years, with my (straight) siblings and peers starting to have kids—and with my now-husband and I aiming to do the same—movies about coming of age, of childlike wonder under threat, ring my emotional bells. Some standouts from the past decade: Arrival, Room, and Interstellar. I find the second of those so hard to watch that I haven’t seen it since it first came out. With a kid of my own now, I wonder if I could sit through any of it.
Paradise different
Here’s where The Blue Lagoon ties in on a level I think many have missed. In the tradition of those film theorists formerly-closeted me spurned, I’m going to offer up a theory I haven’t encountered on the interwebs.
The Blue Lagoon is a metaphor for fantasized queer experience. What it almost never was at the time, what many thought would never come to pass, and what it has (sort of) become today.
First off, the obvious: its director, Randal Kleiser, is openly gay. In fact, he made a quasi-autobiographical movie some fifteen years later about a gay man dying of AIDS who throws one final goodbye party. It was one of the first LGBTQ movies I saw, part of the crop of mid-nineties films that slowly, tentatively, introduced queer life to those of us still struggling with it.
Second, and also obvious: those flirtations with taboo. Underage actors, childlike sensibilities about adult experiences, the fact that the two main characters are cousins (though this was also something not entirely unknown in the 19th century).
I think Kleiser wasn’t that innocent, and was totally aware of the taboos and their significance. The novel it’s based on was said to be an old favorite of his. The scandal, the unrealism, the mystical, fantastical nature of it all…it reads to me like something of a queer fantasy.
I don’t know Kleiser’s coming-out story, but given his times and generation, I have little doubt that he didn’t dream of living an open gay life like that of his straight contemporaries: feeling first flush of love as a teen; discovering the pleasures and connections of sexual awakening; birthing a child, and starting a family. These are fundamental, primal things that for so long were utterly unthinkable to LGBTQ folks unless they wanted to live their lives as a lie (aside: that story is the subject of an outstanding recent mini-series).
Predictably, scenes of young parenthood got me the most. There I was, sitting on my bed with a snoozing cat, piles of folded laundry, watching the two main characters onscreen nursing and raising their baby, teaching it to walk and swim…and I was losing it. Like, totally bawling. The story sat with me for a long time until it hit me what it was really about. If these clearly naïve, isolated survivors could build a beautiful, loving life for themselves in an oft-harsh but beautiful world…then maybe we queers can, too. The ending—where it’s unclear if this nascent nuclear family survives discovery by the so-called civilized world—is doubly poignant as a result.
While the controversies about the film’s production are significant, and should not be ignored or overlooked, I hope the movie also gets credit for what shines through in subtext: a paean to the purity of unconventional love, of family forged under unlikely circumstances, and all the possibilities that may bring.
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