It Couldn't Happen Here Retro-Review: Notorious P.S.B.

What happened to Pet Shop Boys' movie, and how does it hold up?

Movies featuring major pop stars usually manage to prevail in the popular consciousness so long as the band or performer does. Prince's Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge, a.k.a. his “bad” films as opposed to the good ones, Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, are still known even if they aren't as loved; Talking Heads' True Stories got a Criterion disc not long ago, and Pink Floyd's The Wall remains a favorite of stoners and nihilists. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is a movie so bad it's one of only three non-festival movies I've ever walked out of, but people still talk about it. Hell, Vision Quest likely lingers more in the pop culture memory for the Madonna songs than any of the plot. [I fully expect Christian Lindke, if he links to this, explaining why Vision Quest, which I admittedly never saw, is great, actually, quite apart from the soundtrack.] Yet Pet Shop Boys [no “the” in their name] movie It Couldn't Happen Here, made at the height of their initial popularity, pretty much vanished for years. What happened, and with Pet Shop Boys still kicking, why isn't it better known and loved?

I wondered these things until I finally saw it for myself this week, on a tip from my friend Ramzi that it was on the Criterion Channel. Now I have some idea why it tanked at the time, though I must say I think the time is right for a re-appraisal.

Perhaps we should begin by reiterating the way the band was perceived at the time. As I said in my review of The Last Dragon, in the backwater of '80s Ireland, flamboyantly heterosexual Black music artists like Prince were slagged with homophobic epithets, and those who listened to such music were, in the vernacular accent, “gae buys.” Meanwhile, technopop bands were hiding in plain sight, with clean-cut presenting members, and coded names and lyrics young adults understood but kids and clueless parents missed completely. Surely the band Erasure were named after mistakes made in pencil! If the song “Rent” is about rent boys, well...what was a rent boy? Who could make out what exactly Jimmy Somerville was saying in that falsetto of his – something about how awesome it is to be a small-town boy, right? All a gay male band needed to do was cast female love interests in the music video, and everyone who wanted to believe it did.