The Outsiders
For the first 11 years of my life, I had no concept that people were different. I didn’t see class or race or indeed even gender. I thought most people arrived into this world with the same sort of breaks; that the kids who came to school with dirty trousers and very little in their lunch boxes had just as much as me and everyone I knew. That was until I saw The Outsiders.
It sounds dramatic to say a film changed the way
I think, but I honestly believe that the right story, introduced at the right time, can send tremors through the rest of your life. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film about a bunch of kids from the wrong side of the tracks did that for me.
Ostensibly, The Outsiders is about two gangs – the Greasers and the Socs – and the tribal hatred they feel towards one another. It’s a boy’s film really – though the book was written by a 16-year-old girl called S.E. Hinton. The cast was pretty much all male and it was violent and gritty with themes seemingly beyond my 11-year-old comprehension: inequality, loyalty, self-identity versus the herd mentality. That sort of thing. But it captured me from the moment my brother brought it home from the local video store and jammed it into the VHS player.
Of course, The Outsiders was hugely glamorous in its own way. After all, it starred the entire Brat Pack
– a moniker given to the seven or so most bankable (and beautiful) stars in 1980s Hollywood: Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio and C Thomas Howell, who played the sensitive lead role of Ponyboy Curtis. I had a crush on at least five of them – though, like the rest of the world in 1989, it was mainly Rob Lowe and Matt Dillon who made repeated viewings of the film a requirement between 1989 and 1993.
Like Ponyboy Curtis, I was a shy, sensitive kid, often on the outside of things. I didn’t – nay couldn’t – connect with groups of girls at school. I spent an awful lot of time in my own head, writing diary extracts, reading poetry, mooning about by myself: a spectator of life rather than a true participant. It’s not that I ever felt it was wrong to be that way, I just didn’t know a lot of kids who were like that. And then along came Ponyboy Curtis. Suddenly I felt understood. At last, it felt like my entire way of being was validated by one of cinema’s most romantic characters.
Though it’s been many years since I’ve watched
The Outsiders, I can tell you with clear-eyed accuracy the exact scene that changed it all for me. It’s when Ponyboy gets up early one morning to look at the sunrise with his best friend, Johnny. There’s a pinky-gold sky and Johnny, the child with perhaps the toughest background in the film, asks why the sky can’t stay that pretty all the time, to which Ponyboy recites the Robert Frost poem Nothing Gold Can Stay. I must have read that poem a hundred times before I understood its meaning: that youth is fleeting and that life eventually changes us all.
Were you to watch The Outsiders now – I suspect you would think it a pretty shonky film. I watched some clips on Youtube recently and the script was poor, the acting a little clunky. But that’s one of life’s deals, I suppose. The pieces of culture that helped build the person you became, themselves become obsolete over time.
I will, however, always be thankful for the way
The Outsiders made me think about the world. I went on to become a writer and editor, one whose focus was very much on the ‘outsider’ perspective. I spent my career looking for those ‘untold’ stories, perspectives that sat outside the majority and ideas that contradicted those of the herd. It has sometimes got me into trouble. But it has always felt the right thing to do. And in many ways, I have The Outsiders to thank for that.
The right story, introduced at the right time, can send tremors through the rest of your life