Can't Buy Me Love (1987) - a bright wall in a dark room.

5 months ago

Can’t Buy Me Love (1987)

THE CAPTAIN OF THE FOOTBALL TEAM AIN’T GOT SHIT ON ME

by Chris Cantoni

High school. High school never changes. It’s been almost twenty-five years since Can’t Buy Me Love came out, and, in twenty-five more years, high school will still be the exact same thing: a place to put teenagers so they can socialize and form cliques and try to figure out who they are. In other words, it sucks.

Ronald Miller is entering his senior year still a geek, wishing he wasn’t. He and his friends have a weekly Saturday night card game (me and mine had Risk). He is saving money to buy a telescope and invest in a money market account. Ronald Miller is basically a Mark Zuckerberg twenty-five years ahead of his time. And he’s longing for the neighbor girl, Cindy Mancini.

Everyone in high school had a Cindy Mancini.

As luck would have it, Cindy Mancini needs a thousand dollars to replace an outfit she ruined, and her mom is going to kill her if she finds out. So Ronald proposes renting Cindy for a month. While this is basically some form of prostitution, Ronald knows being around her will make him popular, and Cindy is desperate for money. So she goes for it. The strange thing is, Ronald isn’t paying to be her boyfriend, he’s just paying for association. This is the girl he’s been obsessing over for all of high school and when he finally has the chance to spend time with her, he uses her as a step ladder.

You know the rest of the story: Ronald Miller becomes Ronnie Miller. The kids eat it up, and when Cindy realizes she has feelings for him he’s already gone, riding the crest of popularity to new heights, ditching his old friends, becoming a jerk in a few short months. He even goes so far as to throw dog shit on his best friend’s front door on Halloween.

Ronnie ignores Cindy’s warnings about popularity, about how being in the cool crowd takes work, about how all of her friends show as much loyalty as a snake. Ronnie doesn’t care; he tells her she just wants to ride the Ronnie Miller Express. This is, of course, after she has opened up to him, showing him her poetry. Now, reader, I am no judge of poetry. I don’t know my Walt Whitman from my Walt Disney. In all probability, Cindy Mancini has no talent as a poet, but it doesn’t matter. It is no surprise that when she overhears Ronnie seducing a girl using her words, her vulnerability, she spills the beans to the whole school, and Ronnie is soon cast down to depths of unpopularity he never even knew existed.

In high school, I didn’t think of myself as popular. I was into Star Wars and the aforementioned Risk. I accused friends who fell in with the popular crowd of “selling out.” All of it was brought home at a party my senior year when, upon being introduced to a girl I knew (I mean, duh, of course I knew who she was), she said “what’s your name?” The fall from delusion was great! I knew I was a nerd, but then I realized I was a nobody! My bruised ego somehow managed to limp home and survive the night, but with a new reality: I was Ronald Miller and I didn’t belong with the cool kids.

But looking back after high school, I saw I wasn’t always the person I thought I had been. I was more Ronnie Miller than I ever cared to admit. I was in school plays and in the show choir (ok, not “cool” activities, but widespread). I knew how to cut with words, and spent many a study hall ridiculing another kid when he got on my nerves. And on a brisk fall day, when my parents were out of the house, my best friend and I thought it would be fun to try the beers that were left in the fridge. He quit before he finished his first one, while I worked on a second. “That’s it?” I sneered, disdain and haughtiness dripping from my lips. I was Ronnie Miller. I was an asshole.

I don’t understand people who say they have no regrets. I have many moments I wish could be undone, that scene chief among them. That sneer has traveled decades, dear reader. The memory will come at me randomly, in the middle of a laugh with friends, driving home from work, when I am brushing my teeth. In my efforts to be “cool”, to be a person I knew I was not, a crooked finger will unfurl at me and a voice will say “you are the cruel and heartless emptiness of Ronnie Miller, and you don’t deserve your Cindy Mancini.”

I am being too hard on myself, of course. I doubt my friend even remembers the encounter. But watching Can’t Buy Me Love helped me realize that I am both Ronald and Ronnie, and that’s kind of what high school is. There were those who treated me like some unknown person entirely beneath their notice, and there were others that I treated with shameful disdain. High school is like that because we don’t yet know who we are, and we try on every possible persona to try and figure it all out.

Adults always want to tell us that high school matters. Your grades matter, attendance matters, how you score on your tests, what college you get into, your extracurricular activities. It’s all bullshit. “It’s hard enough just trying to be yourself.” That’s what Ronald Miller learns. I don’t mean to say that working hard and being responsible aren’t valuable. They are incredibly valuable, and until we are dropped into the adult world, grades are our best way of understanding that value, however intangible and/or meaningless.

But at the end of the day, whether you are sixteen or sixty-six, you have to go home and be alone with yourself, and be happy with the person you are. I was somewhat of a loser and somewhat of an asshole in high school. Ronald Miller was both too, but when he finally realized it, overcame it, he and Cindy rode into the sunset on his riding lawnmower (no, seriously). Looks and money might get you plenty of girls, but heart (and a riding lawnmower) wins you the Cindy Mancinis.

Like the song says, you can’t buy me love.