Marshall Shaffer
Every so often, The Criterion Collection turns heads by selecting a mainstream 1980s American comedy to enter its hallowed ranks. The Breakfast Club and Bergman flying under the same banner proves a little much for some to swallow. Admittedly, the intellectual legacy of Risky Business, which enters the collection this month, has not been well-served by a parade of pants-free parties in honor of Tom Cruise’s star-making strut.
Yet Paul Brickman’s 1983 film represents more than just a rare gem that happened to get past the goalie during the changing of the guard from New Hollywood to an era of corporate consolidation. Risky Business marks the fulfillment and reinvention of the teen movie genre. Though an instant hit with fans and critics, the true meaning of its impact would take another generation to come into focus.
Brickman ran a decade ahead of James Carville in recognizing an organizing principle of American life so fundamental that it trickled down to the country’s kids: “It’s the economy, stupid.” While few alive can remember otherwise, teenagers in a state of personal purgatory like Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodson have not always been recognized as occupying a major life stage. Teens were not born; they were economically constructed. Only in the wake of post-World War II prosperity could the recognition of a distinct passage between childhood and adult labor force participation come into being.
The cohort became a major consumer target for industries like Hollywood, both as a subject of their stories and as a market for them. The genre often wears these tensions on its sleeve as it sells a vision of idealized, ecstatic youth while also reflecting an older generation’s fears that any sign of adolescent indolence was a social problem. As he frets about his collegiate future, Cruise’s Joel exists at the intersection of teen sex fantasies like Porky’s and very adult economic anxieties like Wall Street.
From Joel’s impotent fantasy that serves as the film’s prologue, this privileged denizen of Chicago’s lakeside suburbs gets into trouble trying to distinguish business from pleasure. The budding young capitalist overlearns the dogmatic instruction he receives in the Future Enterprisers club, so internalizing notions of meritocracy and the market that he sees any pursuit of his desire as inherently destructive. Joel’s journey toward success (at least as the Reagan Era stood to grant it) comes from learning that sexuality does not need to be suppressed – merely sublimated.
Following a rendezvous with Rebecca De Mornay’s escort Lana that unshackles Joel from his virginity, he spots an opportunity to bring a professional-class mindset to the world’s oldest profession. In a pinch to raise some cash following some costly hedonistic hijinks, Joel takes advantage of being home alone to run a one-night-only pop-up brothel for his pals. By letting impulses from below the belt override the instincts of his logical mind, he finds the entrepreneurial product that eludes him in a sterile incubator setting: “human fulfillment.”
In multiple moments where the scheme appears at risk of collapsing to seal Joel’s doom, the world slyly greets him with rewards rather than rebukes. With equal parts satirical humor and straight-faced social commentary, Paul Brickman’s script positions his lawless and lascivious behavior as the true embodiment of a sick system. It’s not values and virtue that pay off in Risky Business. Confidently occupying space as a white male willing to treat any person as a profit machine counts for more than most academic achievements.
Risky Business turns the lens back on the capitalistic creation of teenagers. Brickman shows how even their horniness can never be fully extricated from America’s all-consuming commoditization. With a pair of black wayfarers and a shit-eating grin, Joel makes visible the invisible hand of market logic.
But Brickman advances beyond a mere reflection of Morning in America’s dawning early light. Unlike The Graduate, a film he cites as a thematic inspiration on the commentary track, his impressionable protagonist does more than just ingest the lessons of enterprising elders on how to get ahead. Joel imitates and iterates on them further by reconstructing how he views their morally bankrupt system in the image of his own entrepreneurial ambition. To understand the health of an economy, Risky Business posits, is to see how young people enact it.
This quiet revolution within the teen genre went largely unfulfilled as the very opulence Risky Business critiqued began to overwhelm American culture. Class consciousness was common even in the roughly contemporaneous works of John Hughes, but an institutional awareness of economic arrangements faded from subject to setting as affluence became a national expectation. While sex comedies such as 2004’s The Girl Next Door riffed on its premise, they never delivered on the full promise of Risky Business.
Leave it to the 2008 financial crisis to revive flagging interest in centering enterprise within teen narratives. This epochal event for millennials forever altered their perceptions of the economy, be it in the perpetual scarcity of employment opportunities or the collapse of the housing market. That heightened awareness of how market forces interact with daily life became so inescapable that they once again reared their head in popular entertainment.
An entire subgenre of teen movies from the last 15 years feels indebted to the existence of Risky Business. 2010’s Easy A dips its toes in the waters of selling sex, too, but also uses satire to show the perverse value of commoditizing information in the early days of social media. 2013’s The Bling Ring refracts Occupy-tinged anxieties as would-be Robin Hoods attempt to steal a lifestyle as well as goods when executing a string of celebrity home burglaries. 2018’s Hot Summer Nights projects a contemporary class consciousness onto the urban legend of a ‘90s drug dealer who weaponized his ostracism from high society Cape Cod to make a windfall off selling them pot. Even 2024’s Snack Shack, a largely innocuous coming-of-age tale about two teen scammers who stumble ass-backward into an entrepreneurial venture, resonates as an expression of Gen Z’s economic angst. If looking for a job is pointless and their future professional outlook feels hopeless, grifting sure looks appealing by comparison.
While the inspiration taken from these aforementioned films speaks to the enduring influence of Risky Business, a more surprising successor shows how Brickman’s model can evolve further: 2010’s landmark drama The Social Network. While Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar-winning script resembles a Faustian tragedy more than a youthful romp, the film takes a similarly bottom-up view of how the Silicon Valley ethos developed from collegiate iconoclasm before it upended the American economy altogether. David Fincher’s direction more openly embraces and incorporates tropes from ‘80s teen movies, and the filmmaker even cites Risky Business as both a sonic and spiritual influence on his tale of emerging entrepreneurs.
This contemporary advancement of Brickman’s ideas illuminates his real genius in retrospect. Risky Business’s appropriation of the teen film is akin to how Pauline Kael described The Godfather’s relationship to the gangster film: “an obscene symbolic extension of free enterprise and government policy.” Quibble with a Coppola comparison, but this tale of carnal capitalism most certainly earns its Criterion canonization.
“Risky Business” is out tomorrow on 4K and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
