In 1982, not long before Suburban Lawns ended, Su Tissue (real name Sue McLane) released a hypnotic solo record, Salon de Musique. She also knows what it looks and feels like for someone to give that up in favor of becoming another pregnant suburban cakeface. Peggy can likely identify another rebellious spirit on contact, just as Audrey could with Charlie. But Peggy's hundred-yard stare calls bullshit on Audrey's remarkable Stepfordization.
In the reunion scene, we see Audrey show up in character, as another version of Peggy, similarly grown-up and sold out. If you’re going to escape, Demme seems to be saying in both the Suburban Lawns video and Something Wild, you may as well do it in a smokin’ hot American convertible. It’s easy to imagine the trio as carjacking, beachgoing teens in the “Gidget Goes to Hell” video, especially given the two projects’ vehicular continuity.
When Audrey’s sociopath of an ex-husband makes his first appearance at the end of the reunion, he addresses Peggy first, outside of the whole group - “We remember ol’ Peggy, don’t we?” - to which she gives no immediate answer.Ī 10-year high school reunion taking place in 1986 would place Audrey, Peggy, and Ray in the senior class of 1976, meaning everyone from Blondie and the Ramones to Pere Ubu, the Stranglers, and Zolar X (an easy precursor to Suburban Lawns) were already around and putting out records. Perhaps it’s not a look of disdain at cheatin’ Charlie, but a subtle, knowing glance at her former classmate Audrey, still living the life that poor Peggy had given up. This knowledge places Su-as-Peggy’s preggers non-reaction in a much funnier context.
We don’t find out until later in the film that Charlie’s wife had left him at least six months prior to his meeting Audrey Dillman’s cheering is a playful go-get-’em-tiger for an acquaintance toeing back into the dating pool. Thumbs-up, as it turns out, from the bland Dillman - but not from his wife, Peggy, played by Su Tissue, who stands pregnant and mumbling at his side, barely audible and entirely detached. What will Charlie’s straitlaced and utterly herbaceous officemate think about him, a supposedly married man, canoodling with a much younger, far stranger woman? Dillman, one of the coworkers Charlie’s calamitously ditched out on, who happens to be attending the reunion. It’s an escape caper for all involved: Griffith as the aforementioned sentient haircut trying to outrun her abusive felon ex-husband (played by Ray Liotta) poor Charlie being dragged along at the end of her arm, himself trying to escape the boredom of his everyday and Mr. This is Audrey, played by Melanie Griffith, and the kidnapping turns out to be part of a bigger plan, in which she’ll make herself over, sundressed and blonde, and force poor Charlie into the role of her deeply normal husband at her 10th high-school reunion. The plot goes like this: A rank-and-file vanilla office lemming named Charlie Driggs, played to the edges of naïveté and restraint by a young Jeff Daniels, is swept off his feet (all right, kidnapped) by a Lydia Lunch protégé with a shoe-polish-black Amélie bob, countless aliases, and a pile of culturally questionable Zulu Nation–style accessories.
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