Chicago, the 1980s. A high school senior, played by an ascending teen idol, decides to break free from the oppressive demands of his picture-perfect suburban upbringing and with his friends embarks on an escalating series of shenanigans. Among other things, they end up wrecking a swanky European sports car belonging to the father of one of the characters, a symbol of their class status and ambition. Valuable life lessons are eventually learned and the youngsters, having to face no consequences for their actions, safely return to their prescribed paths towards a successful future.

The above synopsis could just as well describe two different and iconic Hollywood teen comedies: Paul Brickman’s Risky Business (1983) and John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Watching these classics today, it’s striking that Brickman’s debut, which he both wrote and directed, should have been released before Ferris Bueller. It now reads as a scathing satire of the latter, the dark flip side of Hughes’s Reaganite fairy tale. Brickman’s prescience is all the more remarkable when one considers that Risky Business was released in only the second year of Ronald Reagan’s eight-year administration, though it already confidently portrayed the values that would come to define the era and steer US politics and culture in the following decades.

It’s therefore somewhat dispiriting, and perhaps indicative of a certain cultural sway, that today Risky Business is largely remembered as a light-hearted comedy featuring a scene of Tom Cruise in his tighty whities dancing to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll”. The opening minutes immediately announce a very different kind of film. As the camera observes the night time streets of Chicago through the window of an elevated train, Tangerine Dream’s haunting and hypnotic score ushers us into a dream narrated in voice-over by the protagonist, Cruise’s Joel Goodsen. This sequence, in which a sexual fantasy is brought to a comic halt by the harsh intrusion of his real-life responsibilities, introduces the theme of duality that runs through the whole film and serves as a structuring principle: superego vs. id, sunny suburbia vs. nocturnal downtown, money vs. sex.

At first, Risky Business presents these realms as binary. The scenes pertaining to Joel’s desire for freedom and adventure, employing an oneiric mise en scène, seductively contrast with the banal routine of his everyday. When he hires Lana (Rebecca De Mornay), the call girl who flips his life upside down, her arrival is filmed like something out of a Meat Loaf music video. He is dozing on the couch in the semi-darkness of the living room, all the windows improbably lit up from outside so as to cast suggestive shadows, and she walks in like an apparition. She beckons him over and they embrace while the soundtrack music crescendos. As he removes her dress to the wail of electric guitar, a gust of wind bursts open the garden door, bringing in a swirl of flying leaves. It only gets more ridiculous from there (Cruise’s real baby pictures make a terrific appearance) and, just so the satirical intent isn’t mistaken for mere cheese, it all culminates with the characters humping on an Eames chair next to a television broadcasting an American flag. 

More subtly, the film’s commentary is expressed through a gradual blurring of the distinction between Joel’s actual and fantasised worlds. As they bleed into and corrupt each other, they are revealed to be subject to the same capitalistic logic. At school, he is a member of the Future Enterprisers, a society of students who come up with a business idea and then compete to earn the highest profit. Though his idea is a failure, when he and Lana apply the same principles to turning his house into a brothel, he makes $8,000 in a single night, effectively winning by a large margin. Brickman’s subversive achievement with Risky Business is that of packaging a damning social critique as entertainment by adhering to the generic template of the sex teen comedy, films like Porky’s (1981) in which the male protagonist always comes out on top regardless of his objectionable behaviour, while at the same time draining Joel’s humanity.

Even though the studio forced Brickman to change the film’s ending and make it more upbeat (his original version can be found on YouTube), Cruise’s performance leaves no doubt about the toll taken by Joel’s realisation of his privilege. He might have achieved everything he wanted – sowing his wild oats and getting into Princeton — but he comes out of the experience shell-shocked, an American Psycho in the making. His and Lana’s playful banter as they disappear into the Chicago night is forced and hollow. They sound less like lovers setting off towards a happy ever after than like children desperately trying to regain their lost innocence.