In The Legend of Billie Jean (1985), a scooter catalyzes personal transformation. At the start of the Corpus Christi-set film, a teenage boy named Binx (Christian Slater) is beaten up, his beloved red scooter trashed, by a group of bullies he had, a few scenes earlier, finally gotten the guts to stand up to. Binx’s sister, after whom the movie is named and who is played by Helen Slater, is not the type to back down when someone she loves has been hurt. She leads the charge to confront the head bully’s father, a sleazy shop owner named Mr. Pyatt (Richard Bradford), with a $608 repair bill. At first he seems receptive to the idea of paying Binx back. Then he lecherously tries propositioning Billie Jean, suggesting that she can “earn” the money through sexual favors. Binx walks in at the right time and defends his sister with the gun Pyatt keeps in the cash register. Pyatt lives. The teens become fugitives anyway.
Binx and Billie Jean are accompanied by a couple of the latter’s friends, Ophelia and Putter (Martha Gehman and Yeardley Smith), and keep driving toward nowhere in particular. Their outlaw story surprisingly catches on quickly with the kids of America. Billie Jean is stopped for an autograph at a minute mart just barely after going on the lam. (The girl requesting it also offers to pay for Billie Jean and co.’s groceries.) The longer the chase goes on — which is marked midway by a video sent to TV stations on which Billie Jean sets the record straight at length — the more fans Billie Jean amasses, her supporters commonly frustrated with what they see as her being particularly picked on by Pyatt because she is a girl and he’s a man with authority over her. She frequently reiterates that “fair is fair”; mid-film, Billie Jean, so firm in her cause, decides to really lean into her newfound icon status by chopping off all her hair, accentuating her features with striking makeup, and wearing more punk rock-informed clothes. She’s inspired by Joan of Arc, whose story she sees dramatized one night via a rerun of Saint Joan (1957) starring Jean Seberg.
The Legend of Billie Jean is an odd cocktail — patently designed for kids but also prone to violence, imbued with slapstick comedy in some scenes and deadly seriousness in others — that goes down easy. Billie Jean’s awakening, performed touchingly by a wonderful Helen Slater, is infectious; we’re just as frustrated as she and her friends are that so much effort must be made for unequivocal wrong to be righted. It’s not that she didn’t have a backbone before — the characters get in their particular mess because she has a stronger one than everybody else — but it’s thrilling to see someone discover that they actually have more power than they’ve been societally conditioned to think.
It never feels that probable that the character would become a kind of national folk hero as quickly as she does, but it’s also easy to understand her appeal for those who look up to her. Kids are rarely able to stand up to authority and win. Billie Jean won’t relent simply because she’s young, because she’s a girl. By the end of the film, having the scooter’s repairs paid for almost doesn’t matter. But they will be, and Billie Jean won’t be the same.
Peterson Reviews 