“Don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Photo: Screenshot//Trailer
When I sat in a theater to watch The Surfer, my initial reaction was: who is this movie for? It felt too cheesy to appeal to surfers. Poor attempts at surfer slang like “he cut it up” to describe good surfing made me wonder if they bothered to consult any surfers before turning in the script.
And on the other extreme, does the general, non-endemic audience really care about surfers’ ego-fueled pissing matches? The audience has to follow the plight of the main character, played by Nicolas Cage, as he literally spends the entire movie in a beach parking lot.
Despite a commendable 85 percent review on Rotten Tomatoes, when I sat down in the theater for an early 11:25 a.m. showing several days after its release in Santa Cruz, California – the historic birthplace of surfing in North America – it didn’t seem that anyone was too interested. I was the only person there to watch.
But as the movie progressed, my initial dull impression was warped as the movie got… weird. And I like my movies weird. I cannot stand a predictable, cookie-cutter Hollywood script where people display qualities that aren’t observed among actual humans, and the protagonist unsurprisingly saves the day.
The Surfer was anything but cookie-cutter and quickly began to live up to its Rotten Tomatoes categorization as a “psychological thriller.”
The film is a hilarious parody of surfing localism and surf culture as a whole. The local surfers wax Cage’s car with the word “kook,” steal his surfboard, throw rocks at him, threaten to shank him with a broken beer bottle, and beat up visiting French tourists. The locals repeat their mantra ad nauseam, “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.”
Cage has the ubiquitous metal water bottle that every surfer carries, a Subaru-driving, brain-fried surfer lives in the beach parking lot, the local guys smoke weed around bonfires at night, and, best of all, the main villain is wearing a not-so-intimidating changing robe for the entire film.
As outlandish and embellished as the portrayals of localism are, they aren’t far off the mark. Anyone who has surfed long enough can relate to it. During my first surf session ever in Santa Cruz when I was 14 years old, I also had locals hurl rocks at me. (Somehow, that didn’t deter me from sticking with surfing.) I’ve been name-called from a mouth so close to my face that I could shower in the mist of the man’s saliva. I’ve been run out of lineups for not being “local.” And, funny enough, the film’s release coincides with a recent surf dispute in Santa Cruz that resulted in the arrest of a man for allegedly stabbing someone who wasn’t following surf etiquette.
Director Lorcan Finnegan skillfully exaggerates the absurdity of zealous localism through hyperbole. He portrays the “Bay Boys” – inspired by a real group with the same name that dominated Lunada Bay in Palo Verdes Estates, California for decades before facing legal consequences – as a violent, cult-like gang. New members undergo bizarre initiation rituals like face painting, chanting around a fire, and branding their club members with a hot iron.
To get in a few more obvious jabs at the Bay Boys and authorities of Palos Verdes Estates, the police officer in the movie is in on the locals’ scheme, while Cage is obsessing to the brink of derangement over the purchase of a $1.6 million house on the cliffs above the beach.
“(The film) examines masculinity, in a way, and how people can be drawn towards these very toxic kind of characters who are also very charming and charismatic,” Finnegan told NPR.
I see the film as a commentary on the dual lives that many of these macho local surfers lead. On land, they are part of a community, hold jobs, and have families. But when it’s time to go surfing, they put on a costume (in the film’s case, a changing robe) as if they are disguised, becoming aggressive, irrational enforcers who project their traumas and insecurities on people they feel threatened by.
Cage grows increasingly haggard as the locals subject him to relentless psychological warfare. Eventually, he snaps, beating one of them with a wooden post and forcing him to eat a dead rat. After the bold outburst and being forced to set another man’s car on fire, he finally earns their respect and is accepted into the crew.
You never get to see Cage surf one wave in the film, but at the very end, as he’s paddling out, the leader of the surf gang takes a bullet to the head in a murder-suicide committed by a surfer who lost his son and dog to the violence of the Bay Boys. You are not quite sure if it’s all real or part of Cage’s imagination. But Cage goes surfing anyway, fiending for waves, sacrificing his morals and completing his transformation to the mob mentality of the locals.
When I stepped out of the theater, I felt entirely disassociated from the real world, still living in Cage’s psychotic, localism-induced breakdown. I had the impression that the film was a bit too “weird” to appeal to a wide audience, and didn’t really include any surfing to please surfers. But it’s worth a watch. I didn’t hate it. And if it can convert one lonely, lost, crazed local to change his ways, then props to Finnegan. But I doubt it will.
