The 80s Teen Heartthrob Who Made Me Believe There Was More To Life Than Pom-Poms And Keggers
AI Generated There are celebrity crushes, and then there are the ones that actually tell you something true about yourself.
The celebrity crushes of the late '80s and early '90s were a whole ecosystem. And if you were a certain kind of teenage girl, you had your loyalties mapped out like a battle plan. Mine were complicated. I could appreciate the baby-faced charm of the others just fine. But Christian Slater was something else entirely. Christian Slater was the one who made me realize I didn't actually want what I was supposed to want.
He wasn't safe. He wasn't a poster you bought because everyone else had one. He was the guy in the back of the room who already knew the whole thing was a performance and found it vaguely hilarious. For a girl who felt more at home with a book than a pom-pom, that was everything.
In the late 1980s, teenage heartthrob Christian Slater made me believe there was more to life than pom-poms and keggers
Cinemarque-New World / Kobal / Shutterstock
It was Christian Slater who told me puberty had certainly arrived
My earliest love was Bill Murray, but I was so young; it was literally grade-school stuff. On the cusp of teendom, I crushed on the Coreys, flipped for Michael J. Fox, cocked a head at Kirk Cameron (who now, well, you must get lessons in regret somehow).
But those guys were mere posers (and posters — thanks, Bop and Tiger Beat!) compared to Christian Slater. Christian Slater was 3-D, break-me-off-a-piece-of-that blood flow to my nether regions, but in a cerebral way. (Mmmhmm, I'm going to make it noble.)
For sure, no one purloined my adolescent loins the way he did: from the moment he uttered his first "Greetings and salutations" (oh, god, a guy with a vocabulary!) on-screen in Heathers, as Winona Ryder's mirage-like rebel relief to her Heathers and their social-scheming, I was greeting and salivating over the prospect of a romance with this devilishly grinning dude.
I wanted so badly to be Ryder's Veronica, smart-girling as she posed what she knows is a stupid question of the week — "You inherit five million dollars the same day aliens land on earth and say they're going to blow it up in two days. What do you do?" — to Slater's J.D. Alas. I could only watch, but at least my questions about what went into the ultimate guy were answered.
What more did I need than a cocky eyebrow raise and the perfect response — "That's the stupidest question I've ever heard." — to assure me I wanted no baby-faced heartthrob, but a guy who knew, or would at least pretend to know, the whole heartthrob thing was stupid?
As a girl who was maybe a bit of a misfit — a good-girl, honors-student, no-talent-at-flirting and fancying herself some kind of future great writer/thinker/something artsy with a Sassy-mag wardrobe — well, Christian more than tapped into my non-conformist aspirations. He got it, with his hand-through-the-already-mussed-hair and a sly grin that I refused to credit Jack Nicholson with inventing.
Christian Slater knew there was more to life than pom-poms and keggers
Or I told myself he did, knowing full well I'd never make cheerleading or be invited to many parties. Slater's smirky impertinence struck me as more than just an act. He, the real him, knew, too. He knew it was all conformist sameness, as he tossed off lines like "Seven schools in seven states and the only thing different is my locker combination."
The fact that I fell hard for a character who was actually a murderous sociopath? I could overlook that. It was just a movie, after all. Besides, as my infatuation hit peak fan-girl, I learned that Video City was carrying his new movie.
I gathered a group of girlfriends firm in their Slaterdom. (None of them as devoted as me, but I wouldn't be the one to tell them.) The plans were normal sleepover stuff: practicing dance moves to a VHS tape of Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour, prank phone calls from a landline, and then a double-feature of Heathers and the new movie, Pump Up The Volume.
A slick of Chippendales (that's what you call them in a group) couldn't have ignited my friends' parents' impropriety meter faster.
"Tell them we're just watching Gleaming the Cube," I urged one girl, naming an ultimately harmless skateboarding movie where Slater has to solve his brother's murder (hey, it was the '80s).
But really, we were pumping up the volume, memorizing every line and look of Slater's lead, Max Hunter, an introverted, thoughtful high school student by day and Happy Harry Hard-On, a dirty-minded, freedom-fighting, good-music-playing ham radio personality by night.
And we were holding our breath as Samantha Mathis' character undressed for him on-screen. It was another part he played so well that I couldn't necessarily separate the actor from the role. Or didn't want to.
Christian Slater had an appeal that came from his ability to assure me that the world was so much bigger than high school
New Line - © 1990 New Line Cinema via IMDB
If you ask me, Leo DiCaprio's Titanic performance — outsider guy telling insider girl that the trappings of the life she knows don't really matter when you get down to it — wouldn't really exist without Slater's Heathers and Pump Up the Volume performances.
It's to his credit that I don't know what celebrity crush replaced him. There may not have been one, as I entered high school, bringing me into a world of real boys who ignored me as well (if not better) than my Christian Slater poster could.
He made a couple of ill-fated choices in the early '90s, eschewing teen rebel-dom for Kuffs (why?) and bad boy Lucky Luciano in Mobsters, a movie where he should have been hot but came off like a cartoon. An illusion-bubble-bursting cartoon. Maybe it taught me that no one is perfect.
And my love didn't fade entirely, so in 1993, fresh off the heels of my first real boyfriend (whose best line was calling me a Porsche in a sea of Yugos) dumping me, I found Slater again in the Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance. He played shy but utterly romantic loner-slash-movie buff Clarence Worley, who falls for a hooker, marries her, and willingly gets caught up in all the bloodshed it takes to keep her.
It was maybe who I'd wanted Christian Slater to be all along: A grown-up version of the guy on the outside who knows true love matters more than the rest of the garbage we worry about.
All I knew for certain was that Patricia Arquette's character, admiring him amid the carnage, echoed exactly what I'd thought of Slater all along: "You're so cool." And he was, not least for making me feel like no matter how gangly and awkward I may have been at the time, there was something so cool about me, too.
Iva-Marie Palmer is the author of the young adult novels Gimme Everything You Got and The End of the World as We Know It. She also wrote Gabby Garcia's Ultimate Playbook series and Oh My Dog! for middle-grade readers. Before writing professionally, Palmer worked as an award-winning community news reporter in Chicago's South Suburbs and as a web editor for the Walt Disney Company.
