The latest piece in a series in which writers name their most rewatched comfort films returns to 1980s Los Angeles, where the writer says she ‘‘never pass[es] up a rewatch’’ of Valley Girl. Writing from a vantage point shaped by a 1990s adolescence steeped in 1980s pop culture, she frames the film as a private refuge and a source of enduring nostalgia.
She traces her affinity back to childhood and teenage tastes: a Care Bears-filled early life and a later determination to set herself apart from peers who favoured the 1990s mainstream. The writer recalls sporting a bandana tied around her trouser leg and a Duran Duran shirt as visual markers of that difference, and contrasts her preferences with the khaki-wearing, Dave Matthews Band–listening crowd at her high school.
Her attraction to 1980s teen movies, she says, came from their combination of mood, music and reassuring narrative arcs. Even when the central characters were awkward or overlooked, many of those films promised a tidy happy ending — examples she cites include Samantha and Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles and Stacy and Rat in Fast Times at Ridgemont High — which helped cement their place as comfort viewing.
Valley Girl, set against the city and culture of 1980s Los Angeles, functions for her as a concentrated version of that appeal: an aesthetic and emotional shorthand for an era she loves. She describes returning to it repeatedly because it reliably summons the fashions, soundtrack and adolescent longing that first drew her to the period’s cinema.
Beyond a personal throwback, the essay reflects on why viewers keep returning to particular films: they provide predictable pleasure, a sense of continuity and a way to revisit a formative cultural moment. For the writer, Valley Girl is more than a filmic curiosity; it is a ritualised, feelgood refuge that she will keep revisiting whenever she needs to be transported back to that 1980s LA mood.