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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpted from Chapter Twelve: The Day Virginity Died?
A very different sort of virginity-related peer pressure forms the subject of director Ronald Maxwell's 1980 Little Darlings. Set at a sleepaway summer camp for teenaged girls, this film pits a posh daughter of the old-money set, Ferris (Tatum O'Neill), against the tough, streetwise Angel (Kristy MacNicholl), who hails from a working-class single-parent home. The predictable storms of adolescent bitchiness and put-downs among the various teen campers eventually resolve into an insidiously competitive conversation about virginity. Although most of the girls are lying through their teeth, all but two members of the cabin claim that they are sexually experienced. The only ones to admit to virginity are Ferris and Angel. A wager is promptly lodged as to which of the two girls will manage to lose her virginity first that summer.
Making loss of virginity into a matter for deadly earnest wagering is of course nothing new in the annals of fiction; French writer and military officer Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 Les liasons dangereuses (converted to the screen on more than one occasion) provides a classic, vicious example of such a bet. What makes Little Darlings so remarkable is that the bet involves two teenaged girls, and that the virginities they are scheming to lose are their own.
In a funny and telling sequence, the cabinful of young women enact a strategy to obtain condoms: street-smart Angel, who knows how to drive, steals one of the camp's busses and they all pile on board for the trip to the nearest gas station, where the girls steal a coin-operated condom vending machine from the men's bathroom. While other campers are busy making off with the vending machine, Angel, back in the parking lot with the bus, meets and flirts with a lanky, pretty young man named Randy (an androgynously radiant Matt Dillon). Randy, like Angel, comes from an urban, working-class background and is attending the boys' summer camp across the lake, and Angel sets her sights on him as her vehicle for virginal victory. This portentous meeting over, Angel and the girls return the bus and bear their stolen prize back to the woods near the camp. There they smash it open, scooping up condoms with squeals of glee.
This errand dispatched, the two contestants set about attempting to finagle their ways into actually having sex. Their methods, as well as the men they choose as their targets, are predictably aligned with the stereotypes of their respective socioeconomic classes. In attempting to seduce the older, college-boy camp staffer Gary (Armand Assante), Ferris first falls back on feigning a near-drowning from which Gary must rescue her, on the romance-novel theory that heroes fall madly in love upon rescuing damsels in distress. When this fails, she ends up trying to play the sophisticate card, inviting Gary to seduce her with a hand so heavy with the weight of cliched romance that even he cannot, finally, mistake her intent. For her part, Angel, with no-nonsense working-class sangfroid, simply sends a message to Randy and sets up an assignation in a boathouse.
While Gary ultimately (and sensibly, from his perspective) refuses Ferris, Angel and Randy ultimately do have sex. Despite Angel's apparent cockiness and her tough-girl swagger, however, she does not lose her virginity either casually or quickly. In a remarkably honest portrayal of adolescent sexual deliberations, we see an insecure young woman who is conflicted about whether she is really willing to accept being obligated to lose her virginity by the terms of a bet, but feels that she must pursue it anyhow. The primary emotion of Angel's first sexual experience is bittersweet disillusion. She approaches her sexual debut with her eyes open, without expectations of grand passion, yet still ends up confused by its mundanity.
The final twist of this film again hearkens back to the pursuit of maturity, "cool," and social acceptance at all costs. Having proven humiliatingly unable to get Gary to deflower her, Ferris finds herself unable to bring herself to puncture the bubble of romantic fables she has been spinning for her fellow bunkmates. While she does not lie, specifically, she behaves in such a way as to let it be assumed that she has in fact succeeded in losing her virginity in spectacular, movie-worthy style. Angel, meanwhile, has actually lost her virginity, but the path to doing so was no smooth romance-novel narrative. Angel's experience of first-time intercourse clumsy and underwhelming, and while emotionally intimate to a touching, even shocking degree (the tender vulnerability in both MacNicholl and Dillon's portrayals is one of the film's strongest points), it is not romantic, and thus not something she can share with her friends as a trophy. Instead, she keeps her news and her emotions to herself.
This leads to a final, private scene between Angel and Ferris in which Angel learns the truth, that Ferris didn't really lose her virginity to Gary. But what could have been written as a showdown ends up as precisely the opposite. By lying, Ferris gets the first time every girl is supposed to want, romantic, sophisticated, and most of all, socially validating. But in playacting the myth for her peers, Ferris is forced to inhabit the sham. Angel, whose virginity loss was a far cry from the high-romance mythos Ferris perpetuates, senses an echo of her own sexual disillusionment when Ferris reveals her lie.
What Ferris gets from her fake sexual debut is the guilty awareness that other people's willingness to believe in a pretty mirage doesn't make it true. What Angel gets from her real one is the flip side of the same coin: that other people's perceptions of her sexuality may or may not have anything to do with the truth. Where virginity and sexuality are concerned, these young women end the film not so much sadder-but-wiser as clearer of sight. Able to see one another as having been mutually transformed by their virginity wager, and not at all in the directions they expected, the relationship of these social and temperamental opposites becomes one of quietly respectful, surprisingly mature kinship. If Rocky Horror used virginity to mirror and mock a collision of sexual cultures, Little Darlings uses it to capture a candid summer-vacation Polaroid of the difference between sexual ideals and sexual realities.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames