“Hello, mom? This is Denise. Yeah, it’s me. I’m in Los Angeles. Oh, I’m fine. Really, I am. I wanted to call so you wouldn’t worry.”
The movie opens with Denise hitchhiking as the primary scene within a montage of other flash-cuts that include Denise’s mother arriving home and calling out her daughter’s name and an as-yet-unidentified young man breaking through a glass door. The situation is delineated very quickly through the one-side phone call of Denise to her parents: she is in Los Angeles, is very happy and, from the contextual clues, is perhaps involved in a typical communal living situation of the era: 1971. It doesn’t take long to realize this is a “message movie” that, if made today, would probably air—in significantly different form—on the Lifetime Movie Channel. Of course, given a much dark spin, it is also the type of story that could easily wind up today as an FX Network miniseries since the montage—not the phone call—does hint at a strong drug content.
“Don’t be fresh.”
The movie proceeds as if it is going to be about Denise having run away and her experiences and leave it at that. The “present” takes place when she has returned home with the runaway experiences presented in flashback. What the scenes taking place in the present are really about, therefore, is not what Denise leave or even what made her come back, but rather what makes baby sister Susie decide to follow in rebellious footsteps of big sis. Although reactionary by definition of the period and circumstances in which it was made—it would have been a totally different creature if it had been a low-budget theatrical release directed by an unknown like Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma—the most striking aspect of the film is that it lays the blame for the unhappiness driving the urge to run away squarely on the parents. The reactionary aspect is certified in the fact that the above quote directed toward Susie at the kitchen table is about as edgy as the bad parenting gets.
“I don’t understand the world anymore. I mean I used to understand the world, but I don’t anymore. I can’t understand a world where people just peel off and steal an exterminator truck. I don’t understand it. I’m going home. I’m going home.”
This quote occurs early in the movie during a flashback when Flack, Denise’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend during her runaway period, steals an exterminator’s truck whereupon he becomes involved in a chase with motorcycle-riding cops. The dialogue is absolutely unnecessary from a strictly narrative point of view: the point is to show that Flack is a not-terribly-bright small-time crook and there is absolutely no reason for the two exterminators who come running after him to say anything at all. That one of them does make this particular observation of how the times are a-changin’ is, however, perhaps ironically, the single most important dialogue in the movie. If the narrative purpose of the scene is merely to reveal the fundamental traits of Flack’s character, the unnamed exterminator’s philosophizing exists to underscore the fundamental perspective toward the youth of the counterculture by most of the parents watching the film. It is particularly notable that the exterminator who says this is wearing his uniform featuring the name of the company: Wonder.
