Breaking the cresting wave of surf films that ran as counter-programming to the medium-cool cinema of the early sixties, 1959's Gidget, despite finding itself as the bane of the real surf counterculture, is a surprisingly darkly-hued entry into the evolution of generational rebellion that heralded the new-real of the coming decade.
It works as a sunnier mirror to the next year's West Side Story likewise spinning off from a tomboy's infiltration of an insular boys' club to examine some of the friction that exists between the staged artificiality of Old Hollywood and the grittier verisimilitude of the American new wave.
As grizzled beach bum The Big Kahuna, for instance, Cliff Robertson has a thousand-yard stare, a couple of tours in Korea under his belt, and a disturbing rape/pedophilia moment wherein he realizes that his life of retreat is all comprised of glittering sun-kissed surfaces and carefully-waxed emptiness. Kahuna's surrender to the bourgeois is more The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause than it is Psycho and Hud, but therein lies the embryonic hint of the theme that drives sixties films: acceding to Mrs. Bates makes you a psycho.
Frances (Sandra Dee) tags along on a "manhunt" with her man-eating pals, throwing a ball at a group of surf bums only to have it greeted with exclamations of "jailbait" and robbing the nursery.
Gidget is sixteen--old enough to browse the buffet, not really old enough to get a plate--and the boys seem to get it. But the newly-dubbed Gidget ("girl plus midget equals gidget") is particularly resolute after getting herself tangled in seaweed, necessitating a rescue by Byronic Moondoggie (James Darren) and introducing her to a surf culture that values freedom while cherishing, like every other institution in the United States, the money that buys freedom. Financial transactions form the basis of each of the Gidget films: bribes, mainly (the lubricant that oils the capitalist machine), but it's only the earliest Gidget that recognizes the hypocrisy at the root of its rebels without causes.
Once grudgingly accepted (leader Big Kahuna cynically consents to Gidget's presence because of the cash infusion she brings the starving hedonists), Gidget gets initiated in an appalling rite that washes out as something as unsavory as a ritualized gang rape: getting repeatedly dunked by her manly-love until, again, she finds herself dangerously entangled in seaweed. It seems there's something in the underneath of Gidget, something sticky and hungry.
From the moment Moondoggie throws the unconscious Gidget prostrate on his board as he rides a gentle swell to Fred Karger and Stanley Styne's rapturous love theme, Gidget's sexual underbelly establishes itself as obsessed with a child's violent induction into the world of carnal night. Motifs of drowning, devouring, consumption, and calculated violation run riot through the piece: Big Kahuna smoking a giant stogie while riding his longboard; another bum's attempt to "seduce" Gidget under the guise of teaching her how to surf (and then promptly burying his face in her rear); even Gidget's disturbing admission to her mother of her failure to lose her virginity. ("After all those hours of concentrated effort, I come home pure as the driven snow.")
Gidget is thick with violent love subtext that's only leavened once Big Kahuna mourns (a little hysterically) over his dead bird, Fly Boy. The film's shifts in tone are facilitated mainly by the interference of the clueless parents (Arthur O'Connell and Mary LaRoche), providing that Golden Age of Television anchor to the piece that, pitched at comfort, actually rings disquieting in the face of all the real wolves their Gidget is facing alone in the pathless wood. Such is the pleasant schizophrenia of Gidget, a Hollywood picture through-and-through that, in trying to appease the way the wind was blowing, ended up incorporating disquiet in its blinding Pollyannaism
