Nora gets an inkling that Mark is Hard Harry when he returns a copy of How To Talk Dirty And Influence People to the library while she’s working, but doesn’t think he’s the type.
She jots clues from Harry’s broadcasts-like “eats lunch in stairwell with book”-on a whiteboard. Nora meticulously scans hers, trying to match a printed face to a voice. Paradise Hills distributes face books to their students. She writes poetic mash notes to Hard Harry-adopting her own persona as the Eat Me Beat Me Lady-even as she tries to sleuth out his civilian identity. She’s brash, outspoken, artistic, stylish.
The film’s female lead is Nora DeNiro, played by Samantha Mathis. It’s easy to see this empathy as an outcropping of his own misfit status as the new kid in school. He champions students who have been hounded out of the school for getting pregnant, being too crass, too weird. He pretends to beat off every ten minutes, makes a bunch of fart jokes, plays songs like Ice-T’s “Girls L.G.B.N.A.F.” But he also plays Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” as his theme song, and adapts an ultimately humane Jello Biafra-esque persona: performative and healthily cynical before the omnipresence of both shock jock and troll culture. Hard Harry (as the press calls him) is juvenile as hell-in some ways. I never noticed this as a teenager from New Hampshire.Īt ten o’clock every night, Mark turns on his pirate radio set and broadcasts as Happy Harry Hard-On, a pseudonym that’s a bastardization of his new school’s name, Hubert H. Sure, there’s the concerned black dad at the emergency school board meeting who stands up and announces he “used to work with gangs in the inner city,” and there’s a Hispanic student who is kicked out of school, but the film is largely devoid of diversity. Arizona, apparently, is a predominantly white place. It’s also samey in its depictions of race. It’s a beautiful place, to be sure, but, in retrospect, a samey one: we see Mark walking through anonymous strip malls and construction sites, no real markers to distinguish one locale from another aside from the states of relative (dis)repair and the particular businesses located in their intersections’ stripmalls. So, briefly: Christian Slater plays Mark Hunter, who moves from an unspecified east coast town to Paradise Hills, Arizona, where his dad becomes superintendent of schools. I rewatched it recently to see if it held up. The movie’s main character, Hard Harry, played by Christian Slater, is a teenage pirate radio DJ who fights against the corruption in his high school while spinning sides by the sickest bands: Descendents, Richard Hell, Concrete Blonde. Pump Up The Volume was one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager.
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