Opening like a travelogue over stock aerial footage of palm trees as far as the eye can see, Where the Boys Are (1960), a pre-Camelot American beach flick, begins with a monologue, read out by Paul Frees, a voiceover actor best known for providing vocal tracks for Disneyland attractions like the Haunted Mansion, before climaxing in the swoon-worthy title track of the same name (“Where the boys are, someone waits for me...”). It’s pure mid-century American schmaltz, which makes the film’s shocking denouement—in which a young girl, looking for a life-changing experience, becomes a victim of sexual violence—more remarkable. Where The Boys Are is an essential text of girl codes of conduct before the women’s liberation movement, peddling iconography that would be refined throughout the 20th century and become instantly recognizable to this day: drunk college students, liberated from the grind of university life and left to their own devices in a faraway destination town; beautiful young women, clad only in swimsuits, tanning by bodies of water; and ritual fraternization between the sexes in the hot Floridian sun. The film may seem to be about a girls’ trip undertaken by four friends, but the truth is right there in the title: this film is about men. The women are simply caught in their gravitational pull.
In Where the Boys Are, the title is both a promise and a threat: where there are girls, there are boys, and where there are boys, there is danger. (“Boys: they’re always hurting little girls,” teen pop chanteuse Lesley Gore sang on the chorus of her 1964 track “Boys” from her album “Boys, Boys, Boys.”) The film warns of a truth interwoven into the very fabric of fabled American (white) girlhood, codified through the rituals of a shared vacation: you are not safe. Travel in groups, watch your drinks, don’t give out any personal information to strangers, and you’ll have fun. Be safe. Every “girl” knows this.
The film, regarded as one of the earliest “beach movies,” is a quickie adaptation of a 1960 novel of the same name, originally titled The Unholy Spring, written by novelist Glendon Swarthout while teaching Honors English at Michigan State, who developed the comedic novel while observing the antics of his students. The subsequent film portrays Fort Lauderdale as a fantasy vacation hotspot, but in doing so manifested its designation as the default spring break destination: thousands of tourists flocked to the locale after the release of the film, which sanctified southern Florida for spring breakers in popular imagination.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood underwent a concerted effort to capture the blossoming post-War teenage culture, establishing the modern template for the “teen film.” Shot in widescreen formats, oversaturated with colors, and stuffed full of multi-hyphenate teen idols, these films aspired to draw kids away from the allure of television and its seductive immediacy. There’s little reality to be found in Where the Boys Are, a floating world made more surreal by its complete aesthetic artificiality, in which movie sets stand in for paradise and the physical realities of Fort Lauderdale are completely abstracted. Robert J. Bronner’s cinematography derives tension from iconography rather than typical narrative stakes—the camera draws the eye to the women themselves rather than their destination, making them the point of visual interest throughout the film (and their internal struggles the sole source of conflict). They’re all so pretty, even when they cry.
Released in December of 1960 over winter break, Where the Boys Are isn’t a teen movie, and it isn’t really a beach flick, either, though it shares a lot of visual and thematic cues with both genres. It was directed by Henry Levin—a filmmaker best known for B-pictures and genre films that have largely been forgotten—his first picture for MGM Studios, and was written by George Wells, who previously won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Designing Woman (1957). A coming-of-age melodrama aimed at older teenagers and young college students, the film has two unique qualities that set it apart from similar escapist fare of the era: there are no moralizing parents, and the film openly (and boldly) addresses and confronts issues of sexual coercion and violence. When one of its characters is accused of having an unhealthy obsession with “the problem of sex” by her school dean, the girl reasons, “I’d say there were probably a half a million coeds in this country [and] I imagine 98 percent of them are overly concerned with that problem.” In that sense, it feels like a film for young people, rather than a film for young people to see with their families.
Filmed in color on location in Fort Lauderdale and shot in startling, wide-frame Cinemascope, the film delivers a simulated, heightened version of “Easter vacation” (as “spring break” was then called), inviting viewers to attend by proxy. But its dark conflation of the proverbial never-ending party with sexual assault means viewers can never shamelessly escape into the fantasy. The film reinforces a narrative that all young American girls are taught at one point or another: you may travel, but you cannot (truly) “escape.” There is no carefree life when the risk of violence waits for you at every turn. The men may be there, as the opening voiceover states, to “soak up the sun and a few carloads of beer,” but you are there because the boys—and all that boys are capable of—are there, and don’t you dare forget it. Watch [out for] the boys.
The film tells the story of four college friends, played by an impressive roster of actors who would go on to become major icons of 1960s cinema: the overeducated Merritt Andrews (Dolores Hart), the tall and frank “Tuggle” (Paula Prentiss, in her film debut), the naïve and sheltered Melanie (Yvette Mimieux), and the short and brassy Angie (pop crooner Connie Francis, in her first film role and fresh off her 1960 hit “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own,” which made her the first woman to land a number one single on the Billboard Top 100 charts). The film opens at a fictional Midwestern college in the dead of a cold spring, where three of the female leads are introduced as students contending with the frigid conditions and waffling on plans for their imminent Easter vacation. Two of the girls, Merritt and Melanie, are headed to their next class, “Courtship and Marriage,” or “The Birds and Bees” as the wizened Tuggle quips. Merritt is adamant that she won’t be going anywhere for the vacation period, determined to devote herself whole-heartedly to her studies, which she’s failing despite her high IQ; her friends are determined to convince her otherwise. It’s unclear why Merritt, a former “Frosh Queen,” is even really at school, though it is implied that her parents paid considerable money to send her there: neither her nor any of the other girls are in pursuit of a vocation, and there is no evidence to suggest that their studies are terribly important, anyway. There seems to be little point to their education beyond visibility to potential husbands, and everything in the movie exists to re-emphasize that point.
The “Courtship and Marriage” class that Merritt and Melanie attend sets up the film’s frank treatment of sex, which, thanks to the collapse of the studio system and dissolution of the Hays Code the previous decade, could now be spoken about openly, at least by the younger generation. The all-female lecture, led by a stern older woman named “Dr. Raunch,” outlines the film’s central tension: for many of these young women, college is “their first experience in an adult heterosexual society [and] their first unrestricted contact with members of the opposite sex.” This claim is as exciting as it is foreboding, as young women will naturally find themselves in compromising sexual situations, or “premature emotional involvement,” as Dr. Raunch euphemistically refers to it. This tension will prove terribly significant to the girls throughout the course of the film, but the viewer is invited to eye roll at the infantilizing (and insulting) way premarital sex is presented to a group of adult women. When Merritt, singled out for her opinion, is asked to define “necking” (both for her all-female class and the audience at home), she clarifies, “Making out is what used to be called necking [and] before [then it was petting. And going back to early American days, it was also known as bundling. It’s all the same game.”
Merritt balks at the teacher’s old-fashioned allusions to casual sexual arrangements: her follow-up assertion that women should definitely “play house” (or sexually experiment) before marriage—as well as her citation of “Dr. Kinsey” and a particularly lurid reference to the efficacy of “backseat bingo” in the process of courtship—draws strong condemnation from her teacher and earns her a trip to the dean’s office, where her future at the college is called into question, given her failing grades and general apparent degeneracy. For the innocent Melanie, who bears silent witness to this exchange, the moment bears particular significance: she idolizes Merritt and her confidence, and she’s just made a particularly convincing argument for sexual experimentation. Sheltered and impressionable, Melanie takes Merritt’s words at face value—the internal conversion conveyed silently by Yvette Mimieux, a standout of the film despite just being 19 years old at the time of filming. At risk of expulsion, Merritt is easily persuaded by her girlfriends to move her studies to Florida, thereby avoiding a return home to her (unseen) parents for the extended break: “It’s not that they aren’t wonderful, they’re darlings,” she tells the dean. “But I can’t talk to them. Not about things that really matter. Not about this.”
In a whirlwind ellipsis that alludes to two days’ worth of driving, the girls pull into Fort Lauderdale, with Tuggle swooning over the promise of a “tan to end all tans” and Merritt determined to find peace and quiet. Angie, Italian-American and painted in comically broad strokes, gives the game away as a series of images of palm trees flash on the rear projection screen behind her: “Why don’t we all admit it: we’re going to Lauderdale for one reason: to meet boys!” After all, college has provided their first experience in an adult heterosexual society and their first unrestricted contact with members of the opposite sex, and a change of scenery with “a little fresh talent,” as Tuggle puts it, feels like the ultimate reward. Melanie, full of shy gumption, confesses her desire to date “some nice kids, maybe even an Ivy Leaguer!”
Upon arrival, they are quickly disavowed of any romantic notions of their spring break experience. Their picture-perfect Florida motel—a hokey soundstage set rendered in muted pastels of pink, yellow, and blue, with a vibrant turquoise pool to match—is expensive: $22 a day, driven by high demand and scarce infrastructure. The beach is located across a crowded intersection overrun with rowdy extras in sweatshirts advertising faraway schools like Ohio and Xavier University and is completely covered up by vacationing bodies spread out in clusters stuffed beach towel to beach towel. The beachfront hot spot, the real-life Elbo Room, is a darkened dive, pitch black and stuffed to the gills with revelers: Tuggle wastes a sunny day at the beach to drink alongside a cute boy she picks up on the road to paradise.
In their modest but well-appointed hotel room, also a studio set, the girls tally their meager finances. Angie proposes a “steak pact” for all the cohorts to prevent “basic starvation,” as she puts it: if any of them get invited out to dinner, they are to order steak, eat half, then bring the rest home. “People do it for poodles!” she reasons. The line recalls Marilyn Monroe’s advice to Betty Grable in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), a sex comedy about three working class models who feign sophistication to attract wealthy suitors, which reconfigured the gold-digger archetype of the 1930s for a post-War audience: “Remember, if there’s anything left over, don’t forget to tell the waiter you want to take it home for the dog.” The wisdom, practically passed down from the gold-digger to the college student, flattening the distance between the two, speaks to a girlish desire for the pretense of glamor in the acquisition of affluent men for marriage, whitewashing real issues of adulthood into rituals of chic suffering. “Nobody likes a poor girl. She is just a drag,” Helen Gurley-Brown would later state, bluntly, in Sex and the Single Girl, her explosive 1962 advice book, which set out to establish rules related to sex and dating. “It does take money to be successfully single—for clothes, an apartment, vacations, entertainment…to create an aura of seductive elegance about you, so no one will ever be able to feel sorry for you.” She’d even memorializes the dog tip, advising her readers to “Ask the waiter to put the meat from your plate in a Bowser bag. It’s for your breakfast, and you don’t care who knows it.”
Against this abstracted backdrop of strapped resources and good-natured mayhem, each of the girls embark on an individual romantic storyline that mostly keep them apart from one another with occasional reunions in frame, either on double dates or during breathless, date-prep beauty routines, sacred bonding rituals carried out in the soothing confines of a shared seafoam green bathroom. Tuggle picks up a financially strapped undergraduate of Michigan State University, TV (Jim Hutton), a wry comic, whose obsession with sex and commitment to a good time repeatedly drives a wedge between the two lovers. Angie, reduced to a caricature of non-threatening femininity because of her comparatively bulky frame and uncouth manner of speaking, is relegated to a dreadful B-storyline involving an indifferent and intellectual bass cellist (Frank Gorshin, later the Riddler in the sixties cult Batman TV show), who only reconciles himself to a romance with her after he loses his bottle-cap eyeglasses, rendering him practically blind and in need of her assistance. The primary romance involves Merritt’s flirtation with—and seduction by—a young (and tan) George Hamilton, playing Ryder, a rich playboy from Brown University who is intent on taking her to bed even as he dutifully performs the necessary dating rituals “in a chaste way.” Meanwhile, sweet Melanie’s inevitable ruin in the face of her newfound freedom is telegraphed throughout the course of the film, beginning with a coin flip between two over-friendly motel patrons, Dill (John Brennan) and Franklin (Rory Harrity), both of whom take her out—and eventually take advantage of her.
“It’s the tropics,” Tuggle bemoans. “Everybody goes to pieces in the tropics.”
In the world of the film, romance may be a game but it’s also a constant negotiation, with extremely definite rules for women, written by moralists who preach against the dangers of unwanted pregnancy and social ostracization by teaching women how to curtail all sexual desire, from themselves and their male partners. “A sensible way to stay out of trouble is to keep active and busy,” Ann Landers wrote in her 1961 advice book, Since You Ask Me, excerpted in LIFE magazine in August of 1961. “When ‘necking’ becomes the major interest and No. 1 indoor sport, you’re playing with fire, and you could get badly singed.” Throughout the film, we witness the girls make such attempts to “keep busy” with their lovers—via yacht rides, stargazing, walks, and (halved) steak dinners. These efforts seemingly keep them from the sexual assault that Melanie endures, but they don’t shield them from having to contend with the constant threat of nonconsensual sex at the hands of men, even the ones that claim to love them.
There is no such thing as casual sex to the girls of Where the Boys Are, and sexual violence is an inevitable result of an environment of sexual permissiveness, which is an inevitable result of unchaperoned revelry. This was still two years before the publication of Sex and the Single Girl—a disruptive cultural phenomenon that introduced the (extremely controversial) concept of (adult) feminine sexual independence to mainstream American discourse—and many years before “date rape” was a widely understood term to address sexual assault at the hands of a boyfriend. (A college-themed issue of Ms. Magazine from September 1982, which shows a smiling young woman in cap and gown, asks in the top right corner: “Date Rape: A Campus Epidemic?”, marked one of the first times the phrase was used in a news publication). Although the first oral contraceptive was approved by the FDA in 1960, access would not be constitutionally guaranteed for married couples until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and wouldn’t be guaranteed to unmarried women until Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972; abortion, obviously, was illegal, relegated to the shadows. An unwanted pregnancy could destroy a woman’s life, particularly if the culprit responsible refused to marry the mother, leaving her at risk of social disenfranchisement (which in turn eliminated her chances of finding a husband, leaving her financially dependent on her family, provided they continued to support her).
The girls of Where the Boys Are search for suitors, not casual romance: they are looking for husbands from impressive alma maters (and the familial pedigree to match), speaking dreamily of “Ivy Leaguers” as if they are morally superior people and naturally more attractive by birthright. Men are “Harvards” or “Yalies,” and are implied to be consummate gentlemen, even as they are sowing their wild oats in the streets of the city. The consequences for playing the game of sex against the grain are spelled out in no uncertain terms in hotel room gab between dates, as Melanie recounts an anecdote about a married couple of university students who met in Fort Lauderdale and got married within the month. “You’ve got your calendar a little wrong,” Merritt fires back. “She met him in March, and they got married in October, two hops ahead of the obstetrician.” Melanie, who lost her virginity the night before under ambiguous circumstances, remains silent and stoic at this insight, a cruel reminder of the consequences of her trusting nature (and ignorance of the harsh realities of girlhood). She sits perched in a pink baby doll gown, smoking (but not inhaling) and staring out the window, her anguish hidden in plain sight like something out of a Lana Del Rey song.
From the beginning, it’s obvious that the trip is Melanie’s first vacation as an independent, unmarried young woman, and that her naivete in the face of newfound freedom will be her downfall. She still lives with her parents while not at school, and they don’t know that she’s vacationing down south for Easter vacation. She asks Angie to parrot the lie that she stayed with her family in Chicago instead if she ever “runs into” her folks. “What if I run into your folks,” she asks Angie from the backseat of a mud-encrusted convertible. “Where were you?” Angie is nonchalant: “Who cares? That’s the nice part about being captain of the girl’s hockey team. Your parents know you’re safe.”
Angie’s stature and world-weariness afford her protection: at no point does she run the risk of exploitation at the hands of the opposite sex, who want nothing to do with her. Melanie, blonde and petite and winsome, isn’t so fortunate. As the girls go about courting the “chaste” way, Melanie continues to move quickly, floored by the assumption that her new male motel mates are “Yalies,” and buoyed into increasingly reckless behavior as the infectiousness of Florida living overtakes her. As her friends sit together on the beach, she emerges, separately, breathless from the waves in a gingham two-piece, swooning over the natural delights her vacation has afforded her and the tremendous power she feels at the hands of unchaperoned exploration of the world. “I guess I sound naïve but I’m getting a big charge out of this,” she tells her date. “…Being on my own, part of a bunch of live-it-up-kids. I never knew I could have so much fun in my life.”
Frequently depicted alone, Melanie prioritizes her dates, putting her in increasingly risky situations. One night she returns to the hotel drunk off grasshoppers and nonsensically insisting that Merritt was “right” about “the whole thing.” She has clearly had sex. Merritt’s monologue about sexual experimentation in Courtship and Marriage class has taken root in Melanie’s mind and compelled her to act impulsively towards the pull of what she believes to be love. How can it be anything else? There is no sex without love. Melanie “loves” Dill, who takes her virginity on their first date, then Franklin, the original loser of the coin toss, who pushes her to imbibe and free her inhibitions. The next day, poolside, Merritt cautions a hungover Melanie against her youthful abandon, warning her not “to get caught on some merry-go-round.” Melanie, who has already given up being a “good girl,” (though her friends don’t yet know it) is livid and defensive: “I’m not CAUGHT!”
After all, as Lauren Bacall explains in How to Marry a Millionaire, “If you don’t marry him, you haven’t caught him, he’s caught you.” It’s all the same game.
Despite Merritt’s attempts to re-integrate Melanie into hangouts with the girls for her own protection, Melanie remains isolated at night: everyone is paired off on dates, leaving her with few other options besides hanging by the motel, waiting for a date of her own. When Merritt brings her along on a boat date with Ryder, he balks at her bringing along a “chaperone,” convinced it’s a ploy to avoid sleeping with him.
Melanie stops going out, tied to the telephone in case Franklin calls. Naturally, he doesn’t. So, she calls him: he’s busy imbibing with male friends, but they arrange a date at a nearby motel, only for Dill to then appear at the door, implying that Franklin is too drunk to make it (though who knows what backroom arrangement was made between the two men). “No,” Melanie immediately implores, stricken, her voice wavering in disbelief, even though she knows what’s coming, and we know what’s coming, even as the scene fades out into ambiguous suggestion. Her “loose” actions as a single agent have finally, tragically, caught up with her: when she calls her friends, numb with anguish, she’s alone at a motel “up the road” (stark in contrast to their airy hotel, rendered in aggressive reds, with a tawdry scrawl of “MOTEL” painted down the side of the building) and is visibly devastated by whatever offscreen horrors she experienced. Her pink gingham dress, dotted with crumpled white daisies, sits half unzipped from her body, and her gorgeous blonde locks stick out in disarray behind her. She’s ruined: a crushed, plucked flower. It goes without saying that the audience understands this: she is ruined. Later, in the hospital, she’ll beg to be free of her vacation, which has become a nightmare that threatens to swallow her whole: “I want to go home to my father,” she weeps. “I want to talk to my father and my mother. They’ll tell me what to do.” Merritt, who has stayed behind to accompany her back home on the bus, assures her that she has her whole life ahead of her, that she’ll meet some nice boy from back home and get married. “Oh, some nice boy,” she sneers. “Then I’ll tell him all about my wonderful spring vacation.”
“Well, that’s the way boys are!” Lesley Gore sang on her 1964 hit of the same name.
Where the Boys Are mythologizes American white femininity in the wake of a newly established world order, in which the young consumer is the arbiter of mainstream tastes and whims, and young girls are offered the illusion of newfound power through cultural products meant to articulate their dreams and desires. In Where the Boys Are, the film’s title single, a recurring musical leitmotif, captures girlish longing through a perfect pop lamentation:
‘Til he holds me, I’ll wait impatiently
Where the boys are, where the boys are
Where the boys are, someone waits for me…
The song, like all great pop songs, is vague enough for the viewer to map their own experiences on to the lyrics, transforming the meaning for each individual listener, while also beckoning listeners to commune with one another in a shared experience of heartbreak and romantic frustration.
The last line of the song’s chorus holds two meanings: though the singer has been waiting for her true love, she longs for a boy who waits for her, too. The women of Where the Boys Are must wait until marriage, but is there a man out there willing to wait for them? Throughout the film, it’s unclear whether the women experience sexual desire in any fashion: sex doesn’t exist outside of coercion, and their only vocalized desires are to avoid any premature “emotional involvement” with their suitors until they can secure a marriage proposal. It goes without clarification that they all desire marriage. “Girls like me weren’t built to be educated,” Tuggle, whose sharp wit and crisp transatlantic accent paint her as a mini-Eve Arden for the post-War set, reflects. “We were made to have children. That’s my ambition: to be a walking, talking baby factory. Legal, of course. And with union labor.”
Even Merritt, the diegetic voice of the Kinsey report, longs for a love connection that lasts beyond (a) night(s) of passion, even as Ryder, her heartthrob, repeatedly pushes and pressures Merritt into sexual experimentation, voicing a young male generation emboldened by Playboy magazine and the nascent sexual revolution, from which she does not stand to benefit.
Manipulation and coercion at the hands of every male love interest are played throughout the film for laughs. Even TV, the good-natured comic relief, gropes a local showgirl (who immediately absolves him) and condescendingly asks Tuggle if she’s “a good girl,” expressing distaste upon learning that she is, and constantly dragging their conversations back to sex. “He keeps knocking on the door,” she confides to the girls. “It’s just a question about how long I can keep it locked.” Tuggle, committed to playing the game “the chaste way,” attempts to distract TV from sex with diversions and activities, a popular era strategy to “avoid” sexual coercion at the hands of men. “If you are seeing a lot of a certain someone, have a planned program of activity. Don’t just sit around with nothing special to do or, even worse, ride around with no destination,” Landers advised in the pages of LIFE.
Despite its dark final act and general themes of sexual coercion, the stakes in Where the Boys Are feel generally low, even for the relatively low standards of the “beach flick,” which prioritizes visual stimulation over narrative complexity. The film has more to say about the events of its era in what it excludes, whittling the sharp edges of American culture into something attractive enough for a travel brochure. In the real world, college kids of all races would embark on freedom ride bus trips just a few months after the release of this film, deliberately bringing attention to segregated bus terminals throughout the south and causing brutal crackdowns by police, forcing the intervention of the federal government. The world of Where the Boys Are paints youthful clashes with police as a good-natured, even natural part of youthful abandon: a crucial counterpart to spring break. The Fort Lauderdale of Where the Boys Are is a paradise: any conflict is between those inebriated and those sober, a hermetically sealed world for the pursuit of pleasure wholly divorced from real-life strife. The only conflicts are internal, a war between personal desire and a fairy tale ending.
That ending unfurls as if sung by Lana Del Rey, herself a living pastiche of mid-century crooners like Connie Francis whose pop is often proto-feminist for its articulation of feminine desires and woes, snuck into catchy refrains and harmonies. Lana even allegedly recorded her own version of “Where the Boys Are,” never released, but teased in a Facebook post. Her music—particularly from Honeymoon, her fourth studio album, which acts as a tribute to the sounds and motifs of 1960s vacation cinema—mythologizes the sort of wretched adolescent femininity found throughout Where the Boys Are, from the naïve sense of girlish abandon to the darkness of unholy night: beautiful and broken, girls are forged by heartbreak and pain. Tracks like “This is What Makes Us Girls,” from Born to Die and its thematic follow-up, “Watching the Boys” from Honeymoon, feel directly inspired by Where the Boys Are, with its themes of formative heartbreak captured through a pop lens and the stories of degradation and violence that we essentialize as an unavoidable part of cis hetero femininity. The film’s most harrowing image, of a traumatized Melanie trudging through oncoming traffic after an implied sequence of sexual violation by a spurned former date, evokes the pre-chorus refrain from “This is What Makes Us Girls”:
There she was, my new best friend,
High heels in her hand, swayin’ in the wind.
Oh, she starts to cry, mascara runnin’ down her little Bambi eyes.
“Lana, how I hate those guys.”
The world has opened like a flower for these girls, vacation offering the allure of total freedom, particularly from the watchful eye of their parents, but it’s as illusory as the rear projection screen that shuttles them to Fort Lauderdale. This limitation, ultimately, is what makes them girls.
Where the Boys Are is the blueprint for all subsequent spring break films, which makes its conflation of spring break with themes of sexual violence significant. The film was even (unsuccessfully) remade in 1984—with nudity and overt sexual content, but curiously, without the date rape storyline, which still feels bold to this day and disorienting in its honesty. Watching this film invites unwelcome memories from girls’ trips past: quick, pointed exits from house parties; reckless car rides with strange guys; moments of ill-advised isolation; and too many rum drinks, all coalescing to blur good times and bad times, fantasies, and nightmares. Other stories too, from other, faraway girls: cautionary tales of girls roofied in Italy or thrown into the streets of Paris in the middle of the night, all alone, except for (maybe) each other. “I was just plain scared,” Merritt, for all her strength, sadly confesses to her boyfriend after her friend’s attack. “I kept thinking it could have been me. It could have been Ryder.”
“I lived it up, didn’t I? I sure lived it up,” Melanie weeps in her hospital bed in the last waning minutes of Where the Boys Are, which ultimately ends on a hopeful note, with the potential reconciliation and engagement of Merritt and Ryder, who will both accompany Melanie back home. It’s a classic Hollywood ending: positive and optimistic, regardless of what we’ve witnessed before it. The film ends on a shot of the couple walking into the future on an empty beach, a hopeful final image as “Where the Boys Are” swells back up in conclusion as if to say: Mission Accomplished. Once again, Connie Francis sings:
‘Til he holds me, I’ll wait impatiently
Where the boys are, where the boys are
Where the boys are, someone waits for me…
The discerning viewer, however, may still be occupied with the previous scene in the hospital, in which Merritt comforts her grieving friend as she makes a final punchline regarding the men who have ruined her: “They weren’t even Yalies.” It’s a devastating and cruel final moment for the character, who disappears from the story as soon as we fade to black, the outcome of her tragic spring vacation ultimately unknown to us. The final refrain of the title track, taken in that context, feels haunting.
“Boy, look at you, looking at me,” Lana sneers on “High by the Beach,” also on Honeymoon and maybe her angriest song to date, which articulates a desire to find solace and relax on her own terms, outside the watchful gaze of men. “I know you don’t understand.”