40th Anniversary: Vision Quest (1985)

This essay originally appeared on my old blog. It has been revised after I recently rewatched the movie to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

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In 1985, I looked to fulfill my own vision quest, eager to realize my dream to become a great high school band director. Compared to my peers pursuing careers in banking, commerce, or entrepreneurship, my vision quest seemed inconsequential. But it was mine. This initial process of learning the ropes and making mistakes felt inevitable but necessary. This was, after all, my first teaching job at a junior high school in Meridian, Mississippi. The plan was to teach junior high for a year, maybe two, then get a high school position where true greatness could begin. Yet such plans have a way of working themselves out in their own way without bothering to consult us.

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I watched Vision Quest because I watched almost every movie in those days. At the time, it was just another film. I had no interest in wrestling and had never heard of the film’s stars Matthew Modine or Linda Fiorentino, but Vision Quest was a movie, and watching movies was as natural to me as breathing. After the first few minutes, the story began to resonate. I understood Louden Swain and his quest to defeat the toughest wrestler in the state. I wanted to adopt his quest, sacrifice, and determination. I understood his quest, and in an illogical way that happens only in the movies, I felt he would understand mine.

I longed to become a great teacher and achieve greatness early on, so impressive that people would think I’d been teaching for several years. In my mind, Vision Quest transformed from a simple movie into a call to action, a roadmap for success.

Vision Quest is a coming-of-age story about a high school wrestler in Spokane, Washington named Louden Swain (Matthew Modine), a young man willing to drop down two weight classes (roughly 23 pounds) for a chance to wrestle Brian Shute (Frank Jasper), a powerhouse three-time state champion at a rival high school. Louden’s a smart, confident kid, writing term papers that sometimes get him in trouble with his teacher, especially one explaining the function of one particular part of the female anatomy. Louden also works as a bellboy at a local hotel and lives alone with his dad (Ronny Cox) since his mom abandoned them both. Things begin to change (for better or worse? I won’t tell you) when a 20-year-old artist named Carla (Linda Fiorentino, in her film debut) comes to stay with them. How this happens is neither believable nor important. What is important is that Louden falls for Carla completely. The question is, however, will he fall so hard for her that he forgets his quest?

It’s a movie you either follow with your heart or don’t. There’s no good reason for Carla to be in the Swain household, yet she’s more than simply a plot device. Fiorentino brings a presence to Carla that makes us forget the story’s weaknesses and focus simply on her character. You aren’t really interested in how or why she got there, but you care about her and how she may affect Louden’s ultimate goal. Carla’s confident without being arrogant, slightly distant without being an ice queen. Maybe there’s something from her past causing that distance, or maybe she’s wary of becoming the object of a high school kid’s fantasy.

The characters in this film display depth and not just the two headliners. Michael Schoeffling (above right, the guy Molly Ringwald had the hots for in Sixteen Candles) plays Kuch, Louden’s teammate, friend, and “half-Indian spiritual adviser.” Without getting involved in a lot of backstory, the Darryl Ponicsan script shows us quickly everything we need to know about Kuch. The same goes for Louden’s wrestling coach Charles Hallahan (the actor who got so messed up in John Carpenter’s The Thing), his teacher, Mr. Tanneran (Harold Sylvester), and Elmo (J.C. Quinn, below left), the short-order cook Louden works with at the hotel. (You'll also see Forest Whitaker, Daphne Zuniga, and Madonna singing “Crazy for You” in her first movie appearance.) All of these characters live and breathe, giving us the feeling that even if they couldn’t star in their own movies, they’d be worth sitting down and talking to.

Until recently, I hadn’t seen the film in over 30 years, but there’s a scene near the finale that I’ve never forgotten. It’s a speech delivered by Elmo regarding Louden’s upcoming wrestling match with Shute, an event Elmo has told Louden he plans to attend. We know very little about Elmo. He’s older than Louden, but not old. Yet Louden (and maybe we, the audience) seems to think that the life of a short-order cook implies a limited life experience, or maybe a stagnant resignation to the ordinariness of existence, something which would be anathema to Louden. Louden tells Elmo that there’s no need for him to get dressed up for a match that will last six minutes, tops. How Elmo responds to Louden is honest and open, simple and profound, revealing an aspect of his character that surprises, elevates, and saddens us all at the same time. It’s one of those moments in movies that don’t come nearly often enough, a speech that makes you try a little harder, reach a little higher, and dream a little bigger. You know it's just a fictional story, a few lines from a script, but it did something to me. It still does.

That scene and all of Vision Quest made me try harder, reach higher, and dream bigger. Even when reality hit me in the face in the form of a competition for which I utterly failed to prepare properly, I kept trying, reaching, dreaming. The fault didn’t rest with my students; it rested with me. I felt I was a major disappointment. I didn’t live up to Louden Swain’s vision for himself. I realized that Swain was a character in a movie; he wasn’t real. But I was. I wasn’t following a script, but I thought I was scripting my own destiny. I learned otherwise with a quickness as painful as being slammed onto a gym floor. But that lesson was crucial.

That failure also taught me another, far more important lesson: Great teachers care about their students. Sure, I liked my students and cared about them on one level, but in the beginning, it was all about me. My inadequacies as a teacher primarily hurt my students. Their success, I soon realized, was far more important than my own. It took me years to realize this fully, and that realization has affected not only my teaching, but also my work as a librarian and how I shepherd people at my church. It’s not about me. Those 7th, 8th, and 9th graders I taught that year (and every person I’ve encountered since) mattered. They still do. I’m honored that many of them still want to keep in touch with me. They remain a part of my life.

Back to the movie:

I’m not sure I consciously thought about Louden Swain as my career began to develop and as I started experiencing success on a professional and personal level. As plans often do, mine changed. Instead of teaching at the junior high/middle school level for a couple of years, I did so for 13. Perhaps Vision Quest played a part in that development. Seeing it now, I still feel that drive to excel, compete, win, and succeed. I’m not 23 any longer, but there’s still some Louden Swain in my DNA. Maybe the same is true for you. But again, I began to focus on how to help others. I hope the same is true for you. That’s where the real excitement is.

Vision Quest is far from a perfect film. You can find plenty of things wrong with it, and I wouldn’t argue with you over any of them. Yet the film represents a milestone in my life, measuring from where I was to where I am and just maybe where I'm still headed. I wasn’t sure how I would react to the film 40 years later. Not surprisingly, I found that the film hadn’t changed at all, but maybe I had. Maybe…

Modine recently reflected on what it was like to star in the film and his role in the upcoming season of Stranger Things.