Sex on the Beach: What 80s Bikini Comedies Tell Us About Gender and Class

By Greta Parry, PopMatters. Posted September 25, 2008.

A group of young women dressed in homemade army-print bikinis are stretching in the shallow water on the beach, preparing for a running race.

Todd [through megaphone]: Okay! It's time to get wet! Are you ready?

[Alan rushes up to Todd, distressed]

Alan: Todd! I just read the invoice from that surgical supply house ...

Todd [through megaphone]: On your marks! [Turns to Alan] So?

Alan: The thread... the surgical thread we used to sew the bikinis!

Todd [through megaphone]: Get set! [Turns to Alan] What about it?

Alan: It's full of dissolving stitches, Todd!

Todd: I know!

Todd fires his gun to start the race, and the film cuts to a slow-motion shot of the girls running through the water as their bikinis gradually fall off. Then we see onlookers -- boys, men, women, and one police officer, who all laugh at the spectacle, and a close-up of Todd and Alan, smiling.

No, the above scene is not from a porn movie. It's from the The Bikini Shop (released as The Malibu Bikini Shop in the U.S.), directed by David Wechter, one of a number of low-budget Hollywood beach movies that had a brief resurgence during the 1980s. You may have come across such films as Summer Job, Spring Break, Sizzle Beach USA and Private Resort in a dark corner of your local video store -- not naughty enough to be behind the curtain, but titillating enough to provide pubescent boys with their first taste of adult entertainment. The movies belong to the broader genre of the teen movie, and they necessarily include gratuitous female nudity, as in the scene detailed above.

The movies are, at first glance, basically tit-and-ass comedies that take place on the beach. There is no doubt that the novelty of seeing daggy '80s fashions can make these films fun to watch now, but they have more than mere nostalgia value. The films capture the transition from adolescence to adulthood. But whereas we must reluctantly accept adult responsibilities, '80s bikini movies allow us to indulge the fantasy of rejecting them and return to a world where fun rules.

The basic premise in all these films is the same: a group of young, attractive characters spend their spring break or summer vacation on the beach getting naked (girls) or trying to get laid (guys). This gives ample opportunity for gratuitous nudity and close-up bikini montages, but these same ingredients -- the beach, a vacation and sex -- bestow the movies with unlikely substance.

The Bikini Shop follows college graduate Alan (Michael David Wright) on a trip to California, where he intends to settle his deceased aunt's estate and return to Chicago to be married into high society. But the aunt left half of her estate to Alan's rowdy brother Todd (Bruce Greenwood), who doesn't want to sell her beach house -- he wants to run his aunt's bikini shop with Alan.

So begins Alan's journey. His transformation from an upper-middle-class tire sales executive to a laid-back Californian can be understood as a liminal journey. Film theorist Adrian Martin observes that liminality -- an anthropological term that refers to the transitional period between major life events -- is, more than any other aspect of teen movies, the thread that connects them all. For Martin, liminality manifests in teen movies as "that intense, suspended moment between yesterday and tomorrow, between childhood and adulthood, between being a nobody and a somebody, when everything is in question, and everything is possible." This brief but often life-changing detour between life stages figures in The Bikini Shop: by the end of the film, Alan has dumped his snobby fiancée, fought to keep the modest shop, and shacked up with the shop's salesgirls in the beach house. As Alan goes from wearing full suits to shorts and Hawaiian shirts, his core concerns have gone from money and status to family loyalty and hedonism.

You'd be hard pressed to think of any teen film from any era that doesn't explore liminality.  American Pie focuses on a group of boys determined to lose their virginity before they finish high school; the quest to "become a man" by having sex is as explicitly liminal as the classic teen transition between high school and college.  Dazed and Confused limits its focus to the last few days of middle school and the rites of initiation teens experience in order to enter senior high's social circle.

At a basic level, liminal journeys can be understood as various rites of passage. But the implications of liminality are more complex than this. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, author of The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, explains that the liminal operates in opposition to structured society, and "secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized". '80s bikini movies explicitly explore this aspect of liminality within the space of the beach, separating the subgenre from other teen movies.

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Greta Parry currently works as a subeditor for Metro magazine in Australia.

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