Of Rails & Ollies
A week ago Activision dropped Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, to both critical and (is there really such a thing as) nostalgic acclaim. I scrambled for funds, having pegged the release date months back but then proceeded to alter financial and spiritual priorities infinite times.
The software, available on all respectable gaming platforms, appears to have done all it was supposed to: supplemented the soundtrack of a certain era of millennialism with even more guitar-powered goodness (wherever one even begins to find such exotic things, honestly, nowadays); perfectly recreated and yet updated the experience of skating across bigger, more ridiculous locales for bigger, more dangerous ramps, off of which to churn bigger, more awesome air; and reminded a bunch of us, of course, what it was like to be young, carefree, and charging into the afternoon light with a bunch of forceful and yet delightfully half-formed values.
I want to tell you about Betty, from the flips-&-tricks-laden house of HBO, as purely as I can. I want to tell you exactly how the show makes you feel, without sacrificing much in the way of plot detail or Googling Skate Kitchen, which I’d only honestly ever heard of vaguely. A bunch of girls in their early 20s assemble at a local skating ramp to postpone adulthood as long as possible, to middle-finger the scene’s conventionality, and to discover themselves, by slapping boards onto the pavement and just letting rip. It’s obviously a male-dominated environment, and you can guess this before accepting the norms and proprieties of this strange new world - you got into Tony Hawk games, remember, watching the man go on Pro Skate tours largely patronised and materialised by dudes. But it’s been so many years since all of these things, since youth itself had a purity to it: a purpose that wasn’t constantly interrupted by digital noise. Everything is the ramp, or a sip of water to get right back at hurtling across summer, or a slow walk home, boards in hand, chortling over grazed knees, bruised egos. These girls fall in and out of and back in love with each other over skating, and nothing else matters.
Kirt, the most easefully charismatic of the bunch, stands out in traffic with her backwards baseball cap and loose shorts and psychedelic T-shirts - the most orange juice, the most California of them all. When the gang stumbles into a van after a ‘sesh’ in the park they meet Indigo, who Kirt is instantly besotted with. “Yo, can I hit that?” she says dreamily, sexily, of a doobie Indigo waves carelessly out the van’s window. The moments eyes meet and boards flip are as crisp as one another in this gorgeous show, and adventures of a Twainian scale are borne of either magic. When Kirt’s overtures towards Indigo are spot-lit by banter and teasing she responds, poetically, “It’s not my fault if my ‘let’s skate’ and my ‘let’s smash’ vibes got some overlap.”
Betty just brims over with unabashed displays of love. Technically, the sweet sound of wheels rolling across turf, which are layered over sun-kissed shots of endless motion, are creator Crystal Moselle’s gesture of shameless affection for this curious underground. Camille, it’s most gifted craftswoman, is socially awkward around both her friends and the universally beloved Bambi, an older gent who takes a shine to her skills. But once she lays her board down, she’s (pardon the surfer reference) a motherfucking tidal wave - swerving and curving into the lens like a Victorian poet penning a verse in feathered cursive. That dichotomy, I’ll say it again, is so gorgeous, so pure.
When the girls teach possible love interests or wandering toddlers how to skate by holding their hands, instructing timid legs to bend quivering knees - or when bashful Honeybear, a film-maker, smiles a bunch of radiant teeth at Ash - or when Kirt, in response to Camille saying she doesn’t ‘do’ hugs, tackles her to the ground declaring, “You do now, bitch!” - when Betty lays its heart out, again and again, like really it’s no big deal … it makes your heart do rails down your spine, ollies across your thoracic cavity. Sue me, I guess.
If you could do with a sweet reminder of what it was like to live in a world without masks, emotional and otherwise, you can’t do any better than Betty right now. It’s such a remarkable, beautiful, innocent little thing.
