I was a month away from turning thirteen when I saw the movie Blue Crush in theaters. I was visiting my dad in Santa Rosa, California. I often watched a lot of movies when I stayed with him. I walked downtown and got a Jamba Juice or walked around one of the bookstores—Barnes and Noble or the used one where you never knew what you’d find. I poked my way through the mall alone when that was a thing you could still do alone during the day as a teen or pre-teen.
The fact that I am still listening to songs from the Blue Crush soundtrack—which I bought as a CD, transferred to my iPod, and now stream on Spotify—is a testament to how much I loved the movie after I saw it. I’ve probably rewatched it every couple of years since it came out. I’ve spent two-thirds of my life watching Blue Crush. Today it was too cloudy for me to watch the eclipse which was only partial in Portland, Oregon anyway so I stayed inside. I wanted to watch a movie and saw that Blue Crush was free on Peacock.
In the opening of Blue Crush, the main character Anne Marie wakes up early and calls around to find out what the waves look like that morning. They’re big. The sun is rising. She and her friends sleepily get out of bed and take their shitty car to the beach. They surf until it’s time for work. The girls can barely afford Twinkies for breakfast and yet their lives seem so unbelievably cool.
I didn’t know until I became a journalist that the movie was loosely based off an article by Susan Orlean, “Life’s Swell.” In the article, she follows teenage surfer girls who live in Hana, Maui whose days are filled with sun and sand and videos of surfing. When the article came out in 1998 not many people knew that women (or girls) surfed or could surf. Orlean writes in the article, “I spent a lot of time trying to picture where these girls might be in 10 years.” That line seems to be what inspired the movie, whose characters are older but still young enough to not know what direction life could take them in, wondering if a life-changing sponsorship could be just one wave away.
One of the things about rewatching a movie over and over as I got older—eventually as old as the main characters and now beyond them—is that I notice different things. It’s like the theme of the movie has changed with each viewing even though the only difference is what’s happened in my life since the last time I watched it and now.
Today I couldn’t help but think how much of the movie is about fear. This isn’t some deep insight. You learn early on that Anne Marie’s last competition ended with a near-drowning incident. She wants to get back out there. In many ways it’s her only option—surfing is what she’s good at and she can’t even keep her job as a maid until the end of the movie. But when she meets a handsome NFL football player, she allows herself to wonder what life could be like if she, you know, didn’t do the hard terrifying thing that she’s good at.
“Some guy thinks you look hot in a bikini and you forget all about the contest,” Anne Marie’s friend Eden tells her. “I’m not mad. But I happen to know that you kick ass out there and you worked hard to get where you are,” Eden says.
The midpoint of the movie, when Anne Marie is ordering room service and not training, when she’s entertaining thoughts of having an easy life where everything is paid for by the football player or someone like him and she doesn’t have to worry about finding out exactly how talented she is, is the “romantic part”. But you can feel how scared she is the whole time. There have been rewatches when I understood why she would run from her problems by spending time with a football player keeps over a grand in cash in his hotel closet. This time I root for her to get out of the hotel and back to the ocean.
The love story is about Anne Marie and surfing, not her and this football player who wants to give her fancy shoes and dresses. He isn’t even the one who gets her back big wave surfing, not really. Her friends do that by telling her how talented she’s always been (better than the boys even), by helping her train, by renting a Jetski that can pull Anne Marie into the deepest water and onto the biggest waves.
On some watches I’ve noticed how alone the three girls are, all barely keeping it together as adults in their shack of a house that’s not even waterproof when it rains. Anne Marie is raising her teenage sister because her mother has run off to Vegas. Eden and Lena’s parents aren’t mentioned. But now all I see is how much support (and luck) Anne Marie has. She has friends who love and believe in her. Even the other local surfer men (begrudgingly) take her seriously.
“Pipe is the heaviest wave in the world. You don’t just get worked there. You die. People die there,” Anne Marie tells the football player. The thing she wants comes with real stakes if she fails—both physically and emotionally.
And that, I think, is one of the reasons why people like me are still watching Blue Crush twenty years after it came out. Because we all have something we love that feels as scary as paddling up to a wave the size of the house and riding it until it swallows us up. Because you just have to hope that you don’t get sucked under, that you come out of the other side. Because there will always be the easy choice and the choice that you can’t stop thinking about making even though you don’t know where it will take you in five years or ten or twenty. It’s a movie for all the people who make the choice anyway.
My friend (and fellow Portlander!)
’s debut poetry collection, Instructions for Traveling West comes out tomorrow. I cannot wait to read it and think you might want to check it out too. Her Instagram is also great.Somehow I am already making plans for my entire summer through August. Is this the summer creep? There’s a period before summer starts when the whole season is wide open and then suddenly every weekend is spoken for and my friends are all out of town if we haven’t already made plans to do something together. It makes it feel like summer is almost over even though it hasn’t even started.
I’m traveling this week to see my closest friends in New York and have taken some time to regroup and refocus on ~big projects~ I have in the works. It’s a quiet time. I have so many books I want to read. Is it reasonable to take two books and a kindle with you on a five day trip? Should I take three or four books just in case?
Because all writers have a never-ending hope of finding ways to make writing more financially sustainable, I’ve opened a Bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy any of the books I mention here, I will get a small commission.
Love this line: Because there will always be the easy choice and the choice that you can’t stop thinking about making even though you don’t know where it will take you in five years or ten or twenty.