Times Square and the Ecstasy and Chaos of Teen Girlhood

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

There’s a scene in Times Square of the two main characters, Nicky and Pammy, making their way down a sidewalk in the titular Square while “Life in Wartime” by Talking Heads plays (at first as the soundtrack, then diegetically through a boombox). They interact with everyone and everything in their wake–dancing, saying hello, play-fighting, running in and out of an adult video store. It’s two minutes of pure joy, and it embodies what Pammy says to Nicky early on in their reign: “Everything you do, or you say, that’s poetry.” This scene, these two girls having their own renaissance, is poetry. 

When I was in college, I worked at an art studio with a ceramicist who had lived in New York City through the 70s and 80s. He told me once that he missed it, but lamented that it wasn’t the same city now, that “they took the seeds out of all the seedy parts.” Released in 1980, Times Square is a celebration of the seeds. It follows two teenage girls, Pamela and Nicky, who meet in a neurology hospital room and run away together, ruling the city as the Sleez Sisters. Pamela’s father, David Pearl, is a commissioner set out to “clean up” Times Square, but when she runs away with Nicky, she relishes in the neon- lit grit and chaos. Tim Curry’s Johnny LaGuardia, our radio dj-cum-narrator, feels the same; he addresses David in one broadcast, urging him: “Come see Times Square, in the flesh, not from the windows of your limo. It’s hot down here. It’s Hades. It’s Rio at Carnival time. It’s ripe, baby. Get in touch with our place inside you. The great slime, more than plastic, David. And vitality, more than manners, David. And life, more than television.” Seeds, vitality, ripeness: the point here is that the things that make places like Times Square “dangerous” are actually the proof of life. 

If New York City itself is a main character, it’s part of an ensemble cast that also includes costumes and music. The latter is established immediately: Nicky enters the film on a warpath, her weapons being her guitar and her radio. When she evades arrest with a fake seizure and lands in the hospital, her rallying cry is The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”—an ironic choice, considering she actually seems to want nothing but. “Take your pills and you lose your fight,” she warns Pamela, “and fight’s all you got.” Misguided stance on mental healthcare aside, Nicky’s certainly got fight; she’s living in survival mode, grifting and hustling and scheming her way through the world, backed by a soundtrack of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and The Cure, to name a few. When I realized that all of the Time Square’s music is contemporary to the time–in fact, almost all of the songs were released in the same year as the film–it made me long to have seen it back then, to feel the raw energy that’s Nicky’s driving force. 

The only thing in this movie more punk than the music is the costume design. There’s a verite in Nicky and Pammy’s wardrobes; we see the same pieces over and over, mixed and matched and shared between the two, and there’s so much believability in the idea that they’re creating these outfits from scratch, the most iconic being the trash bags. We first see garbage bags used as jackets–on first glance, I thought they were leather–and then later as dresses, the uniform of the Sleez Sisters’ fans. The costumes also hint at a scrapped storyline: Nicky and Pammy were much more explicitly in love in the original script, and while many scenes exhibiting their relationship have been woefully scrapped, we still have evidence of their love worn plainly, and quite literally, on their sleeves. Pammy’s quilted housecoat, for example, is repurposed into a vest for Nicky, and they trade Nicky’s trademark leather jacket and hat back and forth. Their clothes are the evidence of their life together, and even if there was no dialogue, it would be easy to trace the development of their relationship–and their personal development as individuals–through their wardrobes. One of the most iconic looks is Pammy’s Miss Pearl ensemble: she, ludicrously, gets a job dancing at a nightclub (though she refuses to take her top off, thank god), and creates a costume of a chiffon scarf skirt and a corseted top made of doilies. It’s pretty and soft and scrappy and punk as hell, just like Pamela, who is finally awakening from the “zombie girl” in the schoolgirl uniform she identifies as at the film’s start. By the film’s end, when she’s finally ready to assert her independence and carve out her own path, she’s also defined her own style, influenced by, but separate from, Nicky’s.

While she does begin the film as a sleepy, discontent, quiet child, Pamela blooms when she meets Nicky. When you’re a teenage girl, there’s nothing as intoxicating as a “bad influence” friend, and there’s no thrill quite like being seen by one. In that hospital room, the girls are both put off and intrigued by each other; as soon as they leave together, a bond is formed and cemented. The girls assign a kind of life-or-death gravity to their relationship: when they move into the abandoned pier on the Hudson, Nicky initiates a blood pact, and reassures the scared Pammy that if she ever needs her, to just scream out her name. Later on, when Nicky lashes out in a self-destructive breakdown, she’s the one screaming out for Pammy, who has outgrown her doe-eyed discipleship and graduated to a quiet confidence; she’s the one who guides Nicky back and reminds her that she’s meant for stardom. 

The movie’s depiction of girlhood feels so honest and accurate that it’s surprising to remember that it was directed by a man (Allan Moyle, best known for Empire Records). There’s the heightened drama of their relationship, elevated by homelessness and teen hormones, but there’s also the giddiness brought on by freedom. They’re playing at adulthood, getting by but never really succeeding, but still having a blast just being together. At one point, they try to rob a man, but when Nicky scrambles her words–”I’m going to brain your blows out”—they dissolve into giggles and the man walks away. The failed holdup is just another scheme, and when it doesn’t work, they move on to the next. It’s moments like these that remind us that our heroes are just a couple of kids living in a romanticized version of what is actually a quite dangerous situation. While the film has plenty of opportunity to go dark, though, we’re blessed with moments of bliss, like that aforementioned walk down the sidewalk. But my favorite moment in the film is the first time we see Nicky perform “Damn Dog” at the nightclub. Her righteous anger is replaced with absolute ecstasy, and we feel the same watching her get the validation that nobody seems to have granted her til now. 

There’s an exquisite delight in seeing teenage girls do cool shit onscreen. There’s a canon of this type of film: The Runaways, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, and Skate Kitchen, to name a few. As a woman in her 30s, I felt myself looking up to the Sleez Sisters in the same way that their fans do as they gather in the Square for the final scene. There’s a nihilism in youth that we lose once we know about things like stranger danger and taxes, but Times Square gives us the chance to revisit the pursuit of fun with reckless abandon. It reminds us, to quote another Johnny LaGuardia adage, to “let it be passionate, or not at all.”