Weirdos

In 1976 Nova Scotia Canadians watch TV coverage of the US’s Bicentennial Celebrations. “It’s not you,” the Canadian teens are admonished by the Cambodian landlord whose back bears the scars of the Khmer Rouge oppression. The kids know nothing about that outside world. They’re confused enough about themselves and their puzzling physical and psychological changes. 

There’s something of a hollowness to that American flash of patriotism, however, even in the 1976 setting. All the Presidents Men, the Nixon exposure, is running in the Sydney movie house. Meanwhile, Antigonish gets Mother Jugs and Speed. 

But that’s not why Kit and his friend Alice fib to their respective parents and hitch-hike to Sydney. Kit wants to go live with his mother, mistaking her lunch invitation for an offer to move in. Alice wants to seduce him in hopes he won’t move away.  

Kit is abetted by the spirit of Andy Warhol, who embodies and endorses the weirdness that ennobles the human species. There are several “weirdos” here. A boy trying to seduce Kit backs away when Alice approaches; the boy calls Kit a weirdo. The high schoolers in the car and at the beach party play at being wild and weird. The old drunk who tries to steal the cop car is an unrepentant weirdo from earlier time, still crazy after all those years.

So are our heroes’ parents, all apparently old hippies. Alice’s father is a drunk who’s trying to inveigle himself back into her mother’s graces and bed. Kit’s dad Dave is a social studies teacher declared cool by the skylarking teens. But Kit overheard him refer to the French teacher as a “fag.” As he’s trying to come to terms with this own homosexuality, Kit decides to go live with his freer-spirited mother. 

When he finds her dissolved into looniness he has to call dad to come get him. Once Dave hears his son’s concern he apologizes for his insensitivity and by implication suggests a family life that will be as warm and cozy as those delicious views of Nova Scotia. The film closes on inter-generational comfort, Alice and Kit together as platonic friends and Dave and his mother dancing to Country & Western.     

The title refers equally to the adolescent issues of the teenagers and the scars still worn by the survivors of the freedoms of the ‘60s. The latter is a psychological contrast to the Cambodian’s physical marks. Here it’s not the sins but the spirit of freedom that passes from the parents to the children, the fertile weirdness of Warhol. It carries its own costs.