Thank You For Being A. Friend
Put Smooth Talk on your spooky season watchlist
Lately, literary icon Joyce Carol Oates has been In the News once again. It’s so funny when a famous, successful author insists on also being publicly weird…like, you could free yourself from the shackles of social media, hang out in peace, and subsist on the royalties you get from your short stories being consistently published in every college literature anthology. But no, luckily for us, Joyce Carol Oates insists on being herself out loud, specifically on Twitter.
The most recent thing people are talking about is, of course, the new, widely panned Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde, which is based on her book (which I haven’t read, because it’s quite long). Frankly, I prefer this controversy to the time she shared a horrific picture of her foot. That was the moment I rethought my relationship with Twitter. I thought about what Mary Oliver said: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver had a few options in that poem (kneel in the grass, stroll through the fields,~*~ just Mary Oliver things~*~), and not a one of them was “look at pictures of literary icon Joyce Carol Oates’s blister-covered foot.”
But I digress! The point is, there was a time not so long ago when JCO was known primarily for her non-tweet writing. As a creative writing major, I’m very familiar with her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” Studying that story in a creative writing class is sort of like playing “Hey Ya” at a wedding: you know it’s gonna get everyone on the floor. Everyone loves this story, and for good reason. I love slowly increasing dread of it, the small but perfect details (who names a character Arnold Friend, knowing that it will somehow come across as the creepiest name ever? Only JCO!). It’s as iconic as JCO’s tweet about Halloween decorations.
It was my love of the story that made me want to watch the 1986 film Smooth Talk, which is based on WAYGWHYB (kind of a rough acronym). It stars Laura Dern, Treat Williams, and Mary Kay Place, and it’s directed by Joyce Chopra (wow, imagine a movie being made today where two of the women involved are named Joyce! Two significant Joyces! What a time!). It is, in a word, spectacular.
Of course you could watch the movie without reading the story, but I don’t know why you would. The story’s short and it’s easily available online because it’s on basically every creative writing syllabus. I’ll wait here while you go read (or reread) it.
Okay, so now all of us reading this are well acquainted with the story and ready to roll! Although the story was published in 1966, the film wisely sets it in the 1980s, which is immediately clear from the clothing (a lot of off-the-shoulder tops), hair, neon eyeshadow, and, that bastion of 1980s teen cinema, the mall.
Laura Dern plays Connie, a teenager who spends her long summer break days going to the mall with two girlfriends. Sometimes they actually walk around the mall, hitting on doofy looking teenage boys, and sometimes they sneak away to go to the beach. Connie’s mother, played brilliantly by Mary Kay Place, is constantly annoyed at Connie. And why wouldn’t she be! The family is living in a crumbling house that is, seemingly, solely her responsibility to fix up. Her husband’s off working, Connie’s older sister is a teacher, Connie spends all day at the mall, and she’s the only one left to paint this rundown house.
Connie’s teenage frustration is immediately recognizable. She wants things that she can’t even articulate; all she knows for sure is that she won’t find them at home. She doesn’t want to end up like her sister (still living at home, unmarried) and she sure as hell doesn’t want to end up like her mom. She’s looking for some kind of excitement and playing around with being a grownup, but running away (literally) when a boy shows too much interest.
The first hour of the movie is like this. Connie goes to the mall, she does things she shouldn’t, she hangs out at a drive-in, hoping to pick up boys. Her mother gets mad, her mother slaps her. It’s all eminently watchable, because Laura Dern was a sparkling star even then. It’s funny and weird and, strangely enough, set to a soundtrack of mostly James Taylor songs (he was the music supervisor).
But the movie really starts in the last half hour, when Connie stays home instead of going to a barbecue with her family. “Let her stew in her own juices,” Mary Kay Place says bitterly as they leave, and that’s such a disgusting phrase that it’s gonna be stuck in my head forever. So Laura Dern’s at home, alone, stewing, when a car pulls up the driveway.
It’s Arnold Friend, which we learn immediately because his name is painted on the side of the car. He has a weird, silent friend in the passenger seat who stares straight ahead. The sun shines bright and unblinking on the dirt. The tone shifts, in one tiny moment, from a teenage rebellion movie to a Lynchian film filled with threats and dread in broad daylight. Arnold Friend has big sunglasses, a 1950’s vibe (he sort of resembles James Dean, whose poster graces Connie’s bedroom wall), and his age is…indeterminate. As are his intentions, at first.
He doesn’t appear that much different than the other boys Connie flirts with—he’s confident, he’s cute, he’s silly. The Arnold Friend in the story is weird, too, but Treat Williams infuses him with a physical comedy that made me laugh out loud. In fact, I truly believe that if this movie was ever remade (I have no reason to think that it would be, but hear me out), Zac Efron could play this part well. I still believe in him, and if he could play Ted Bundy, then I see no reason why he couldn’t do a great Arnold Friend.
Arnold Friend quickly indicates that he isn’t some regular high school boy, though, when Connie tells him she has things to do and he, in a lilting yet menacing voice, says “You’re not telling the truth. Today’s your day set aside to go for a ride with me and you know it.” He knows her name. He knows her friends. He knows her family is at that barbecue. “I know my Connie,” he says, pointing at her. “I’ve been watching you.”
Arnold Friend isn’t from around here, and he isn’t a high school boy—a fact that becomes glaringly apparent when he removes his big sunglasses. This is a full-grown man, and a creepy one at that. He wants something from Connie—for her to go on a drive with him, but more than that, too. He’s her lover, he says: “You don’t know what that means, but you will.”
Connie runs into the house, but even then, all that separates them is a screen door. And, as Arnold Friend says, “What’s a screen door between us? It’s nothing.”
I cannot articulate how good and how creepy Treat Williams is here. He delivers Arnold Friend’s lines sometimes flatly and then shockingly loud. I can’t believe he’s capable of doing this but spent so much of his career doing literal Hallmark movies/shows. You know no one’s allowed to be this creepy on the Hallmark channel.
I won’t spoil the ending for you, as much as it can be spoiled, but it gives an amount of closure that the story doesn’t. And yet, strangely, the ending seemed to be too vague for some people at the time to understand, notably Roger Ebert. You know I love him, but his interpretation of the ending is confounding (I literally do not know what he means!). In a very interesting interview with Joyce Chopra from 2021, she expresses her surprise that so many people thought the events with Arnold Friend were supposed to be a dream.
There’s a temptation here to view the film as a statement or part of a movement—the interview I mentioned above, for example, relates current interest in the film to the Me Too movement, a comparison I don’t understand at all. There’s also possibly an ungenerous viewing of it as a morality tale, nothing more than a warning about what could happen to young girls when they explore their sexual desire.
It’s much more interesting to see the film, in my opinion, as a look at Connie growing up and coming to an understanding about the world. She wanted something without realizing what it was and then, upon getting it, realized that she never, ever wanted that. What she wanted was the wanting itself—flirting at the mall, the danger of going to a forbidden drive-in. She never wanted the actual attention, and when she has it, she doesn’t know what to do with it. The beginning of the film hints at this, when the girls hitch a ride with a strange man. They wanted to attract boys, not this adult in a truck. When the girls run into boys in the mall who tower over them, they run away. When a boy goes too far in an otherwise empty parking garage, Connie tells him to stop. She wants to try these things, but she has limits and she knows when she wants to put the brakes on.
That danger returns tenfold when Arnold Friend pulls into Connie’s driveway. Ultimately, this is a horror film about…well, not about men exactly (although not not about men). This is about the scariness of growing up, of becoming an adult woman, of being perceived by men when you’re not even quite sure who you are yet. The short story was inspired by real-life murders, but Smooth Talk ditches the murder angle, shifting the focus to Connie’s teenage rebellion. It turns out you don’t need murder to create a truly terrifying film.
I watched Smooth Talk on the Criterion Channel, where I also streamed Joyce at 34, a short film about motherhood made by director Joyce Chopra. I truly think this should be required viewing for any mother with a creative job (or any job, really). It’s shocking and depressing how little has changed since then, but it’s also inspiring to see how hard Joyce works to make a film while raising a small child. Fair warning that there’s a childbirth scene which might freak you out if you’re not familiar with what childbirth actually looks like (a lot of blood). But because I’m me, it made me cry. Sure, I turned down the option to use a mirror to watch my own child literally come out of my body (I was afraid I would pass out because I was already using that little oxygen mask), but seeing someone else’s baby be born brings up lots of emotions! I recommend this movie even for non-childbirth reasons, though.
There’s been a larger-than-usual gap between newsletters this time, and so much has happened. The last time we spoke, I was making the bold assertion that Persuasion was just fine. Since then, I’ve announced a new book and then turned that book in. I’m writing a Christmas book, something that everyone (including me) is surprised I haven’t done yet. I’m truly leaning into my brand here: Hallmark but Weird. Hallmark but Puking. Hallmark but Lots of Innuendo. Hallmark but there are Pop Culture References. You get it. Anyway, it’s called Faking Christmas and it will be out next year and I’ve never had so much fun writing a book in my life.
See you next week. Until then, I hope you’re watching lots of scary movies. I’m watching Fatal Attraction, which provides a great argument against cheating on your wife with the first woman you see when she goes out of town. Terrifying stuff.
I have not read this short story or seen this movie, but I absolutely remember being a teen and feeling this way, wanting something but then not wanting it and knowing you are in over your head once you get it. Ugh. The angst.