The shot is grainy and the colors muted; the camera alternates between a close-up of a twenty-foot wave breaking on repeat and a wide-angle shot of a sandy beach with a backdrop of rocky cliffs and slender windblown pine trees. On the sand, two men stand handcuffed together. The rain is visible to the camera but there is no noticeable change in the weight, color, or stringiness of the men's hair as they stand in it. The dark-haired man pulls out a key and unlocks himself from the friend/mentor/blonde muscular man/bank robber/fugitive he is attached to.
"Vaya con Dios," the dark-haired man says as the friend/mentor/blonde muscular man/bank robber/fugitive tucks a surfboard under his arm and runs towards the epically large wave, the 50-year wave, the Australian wave at Bells Beach he's been waiting his whole life to ride. The man paddles out towards a dark, thundering, tunnel of water. We see the wave crash over him. We are to assume the wave kills him and therefore the man who unlocked the handcuffs will not lose his new job as an FBI agent.
The 1991 film, the 1991 movie, let's call it a movie, Point Break, stars Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, and Gary Busey – and it is so bad it is awesome. It was released on my tenth birthday, which I absolutely don't remember because I didn't yet know surfing existed, and my mother definitely wouldn't have let me watch a movie with sex and swearing.
In Point Break, a team of bank robbers has been eluding the FBI for years when rookie agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) pairs up with loveable loser and FBI veteran Gary Busey. Reeves quickly validates Busey's theory that the bank robbers are surfers, due to the robbery timeline coinciding with surf season and the tan line on one of the robbers' ass as he moons a security camera. The agents hatch an undercover plan. Gary Busey isn't going to learn to surf at "his age" so Keanu Reeves buys a neon pink surfboard from a ten-year-old manning a surf shop and heads out into the waves.
He paddles out in cocky confidence but almost immediately falls off his neon pink surfboard into the churning ocean, and it looks like he might drown. We know he won’t drown because he is a famous actor and a lead character and we are only twenty-three minutes into the movie, but it looks like he might as the water swirls around him in a dramatic way in which neither the character nor the audience can tell which way is up.
A woman rescues Johnny Utah. She pulls him out of the ocean's spin cycle under a breaking series of waves, drags him to shore, checks his breathing, yells at him for being an idiot, and leaves. He stalks her, finds a vulnerability, lies about his past to connect to her vulnerability, convinces her to teach him to surf, and then a few scenes later we see her half naked in bed with him. Later, the friend/mentor/blonde muscular man/bank robber/fugitive kidnaps the woman, Tyler, and do we even remember her as a badass surfer who pulled a reckless man out of a potential drowning? Nah. All we've ever needed from her to move the story along is to be a fuckable woman who needs saving.
Lori Petty plays the female character who rescues Keanu Reeves from drowning. Aside from her character, Point Break's cast is almost entirely male. We've already mentioned novice FBI agent/wannabe surfer Keanu Reeves, his mentor and nemesis, Patrick Swayze with the Hindu-appropriated name, Bodhi, and Reeve's partner. Swayze's team of surfers-turned-bank robbers are all men and they demonstrate sort of a tender brotherhood in addition to being criminals and womanizers. The other male characters seem to exist in the movie just to highlight the aggressive male posturing that accompanies surf culture. Reeve's and Busey's boss at the FBI screams at his employees constantly for no apparent reason. Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers makes an appearance as a local surfer who gathers his gang to beat up/attempt to murder Keanu Reeves for being new in their ocean. There's a skydiving scene. A semi-automatic bullet bath or two. A midnight surf session. Man is posturing. Man is posturing. Man is posturing.
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I have been surfing for ten years now. First in Puerto Rico, where I spent most of my time unsuccessfully paddling against the incoming waves and marveling at my instructors' abs. Then Newport, Rhode Island, where I snuck in a quick lesson between a rehearsal dinner and a wedding, probably the fifth or sixth I'd attended solo that year. I traveled to Nicaragua where I let the instructor kiss me so he'd let me back on the boat. Three years of vacation days and all my extra dollars going to surf lessons. I learned the lingo, the mechanics, the culture. I learned that I wasn't taken seriously in the lineup on a board, but that a bikini could get me somewhere. And then in July of 2012, in a wetsuit in the water breaking towards Indian Beach in Ecola State Park, Oregon, I learned how to surf.
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I am three days into a new life. In a new state in a new town at a new elevation where there are other things for single 30-year-olds to do than attend baby showers and bridal brunches. Three days into a new life and I am sitting on a beach waiting for a surf instructor, fantasizing about his abs and our potential. To get here, I have driven a few miles off the 101, through the wisdom and ancientness of the ferns and the canopies of Old Man's Beard. And the spectrum of green that surrounds you. I have never been to the Amazon, but I imagine that to be the only place on earth with more shades of green. The road ends on top of a cliff overlooking a crescent-shaped cove, fairy drip castles guard the south and the cliff wraps around the north. A staircase leads down to a half-mile of rocks and sand and driftwood. The clouds obscure the sun as I watch the waves churn like my stomach and I wonder if my instructor will be cute.
I recognize the surf shop’s logo and the red pick up the owner told me to look out for as it pulls into the parking lot. I chose this shop, and its wetsuit, board, and instructor package, because YELP told me it was the closest spot to the brown faux leather couch in my cousin’s living room where I landed jobless and road-weary the summer after I left a ten-year teaching career in Chicago. I was delighted when Mark, the surf shop owner, paused as I spelled my surname for the reservation and asked if I was Lithuanian. Most people assume I am Greek. Mark is a Makenas. I am a Petroliunas. The “as” gives us away to kin. It’s a deceptive ending. Americanized by force at Ellis Island. If I were a true Lithuanian, my surname would be Petroliunaite, signifying my unmarried status. And when I was taken for a wife, and given a new name, the “as” at the end of my husband’s surname would become “iene” to label me. Mark was born in Chicago too, a fellow half breed, his mother an emigree, my father the son of two. Mark doesn’t give lessons anymore, so he will send his best instructor.
Jules’ hair looks as if it hasn’t been washed in days. Bleached blonde by years in the sun, the salty strings are pulled back away from their face. Jules’ skin is leathery and taught across high cheekbones, yet they don’t look nearly as old as Mark insinuated. Also, Jules is a she. I feel disappointed that Jules is not a 6 foot 3, six-packed, blue-eyed dude that says “brah.” I assumed. Jules is a unisex name, isn’t it?
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My first body of water was a melmac blue concrete rectangle that turned my blonde hair green with chlorine. I grew up in the middle of the country, in the first suburb west of what was then the world’s tallest skyscraper in a city of three million people. We lived about ten miles from Lake Michigan, which is large enough to make you think she is infinite like the ocean, but the city shoreline was often littered with dirty diapers and dead smelt so we didn’t spend much time there. At least once a summer we ventured north up the lakeshore to the Warren Dunes for a day of huffing and puffing vertically through sand and cartwheeling down. We swam in the diaper-free waves. But most of our June through August days were spent splashing around the neighborhood pool and cannonballing off the diving board while mom read Danielle Steele novels on a deck chair.
The Atlantic was my first ocean. I was six or seven the first time I saw her. My parents packed our gold Dodge station wagon with the forest green Coleman cooler, a bulk section bag of bridge mix, two new books each for my sister and I, and a pack of cardboard car bingo cards with translucent red tabs you slid across to mark when you spotted a sign for road work ahead or speed limit: 65mph. My dad drove us southeast through the night to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, the working-class northern neighbor to the better-known Hilton Head Island. We spent four or five summers there and the memories tangle together like the strands of my hair in the saltwater. I have no grand recollection of the first time I saw the ocean. My composite memory of Kiawah Island, which are the strongest memories of my childhood, includes an accidental twenty-mile bike ride, loggerhead sea turtle nesting sites, little-while friends and sandcastles, giant flying beetles in the bathroom, alligators in golf course ponds, not being allowed to wear a two-piece bathing suit, riding waves on a goldenrod and navy-blue canvas camping air mattress, and the aftermath of jellyfish tentacles across my stomach. My body remembers the gentle rocking of the ocean that returns when you're in bed after a day in the waves and how I was never much of a napper, but I wanted to be lying down when I couldn't be in the water after my first taste of that. I remember ocean-seining. Or maybe I just think I do because while there are thousands of photographs of me as a child, my mother appears in twelve of them. She was always behind the camera, but my father caught her occasionally, this time with my sister and I as we dragged a giant net through knee-deep water. We dumped the living bounty on shore and a marine biologist shared brief factoids about the creatures as an imaginary clock ticked and he threw them one by one back to the sea before time expired. I am sure that when we pulled a stingray out of the seining net and watched the leathery dark gray disc thrash in the sand, its barbed tail crashing back and forth like BamBam's bat in The Flintstones, I vowed never to set foot into an ocean again. I am sure I swam in the ocean again before we left it that year.
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Jules pulls a board off the truck, hands me a wetsuit, and sits beside me in the sand, her own wetsuit pulled down around her waist, as she wriggles into a dry baby blue rash guard and draws a surfboard between pieces of driftwood.
I am eager to plunge into the ocean, but she slows me down. She tells me how the tides control when they surf here and shows me where the rips are. Two are easy to see and she reminds me to beware, but encourages me to learn to use them when I am tired of paddling. Surfers and beachcombers alike often confuse the phenomena of undertow, riptides, and rip currents; all are dangerous movements of water back out to sea. Here, Jules means rip currents. One each pulls next to the rocks to the North and South and one in front of where we sit. They can form at any beach where waves are breaking. As the water builds up near shore, it seeks the easiest path back out, often through a gap in the sandbar or reef, creating a channel of water moving at up to 1.5 meters a second. It is nearly impossible to swim directly against it, and a few people a year die trying in Oregon. Instead, you should swim parallel to shore until you are free of the rip. The surfers who know this ride the rip out on top of their boards and make a perpendicular exit into the line-up.
I am anxious to get into the ocean, but Jules sits in slow silence with me and we count the sets. She asks if I have any questions, and slightly embarrassed, but always worried, I mutter, “Sharks?” She laughs reassuringly and points out the shark belt—close enough to see, but not to swim to. Yes, she says, there are sharks in this Pacific Northwest Ocean, but they won’t bother you. She learned to surf on this beach, she tells me, and I can’t remember why I was disappointed.
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Point Break is a fairly accurate surf movie. Except that the final scene, on Bells Beach, Australia, was not filmed on Bells Beach in Australia. The twenty-foot wave is stock footage of Waimea, Hawaii and the beach where the men stand handcuffed is Indian Beach in Ecola State Park, Oregon. I didn't notice this the first or second time I watched the movie, when I had been freshly bit by the surfing bug. When it was the first film I could think of to reconstruct that stoke from a couch in Chicago, thousands of miles from an ocean, before I’d even seen the Oregon coast. When I’d seen Blue Crush, but remembered it as a romcom, not an archive of gorgeous footage of women surfing. Now when I watch Point Break, it is obvious. The cliffs, the rocks, the trees blown two dimensional — their stringy tendrils of green permanently stretched to the east as years of ocean winds have come from the west —I knew that beach. I wish I could say I knew it because it became part of me, some empowering tidbit in my female surf journey, but I knew it because earlier that day, I had visited Ecola State Park and found an Oregon Film Trail sign celebrating Point Break next to the commemorative Lewis and Clark trail sign on the bulletin board by the outhouse.
Keanu Reeves doesn't surf. Patrick Swayze doesn't surf. And sadly, Lori Petty doesn't surf either. So what I mean by Point Break being a pretty accurate surf movie, is that it is a fair snapshot of the macho bullshit of surf culture, and Lori Petty's surf double knows something about that.
Jodie Cooper is a world-class Australian surfer. She won thirteen world surf tour competitions and got paid less than her male counterparts at every single one of them. She stopped competing in 1994 and the World Surf Organization didn't start awarding equal prize money until 2018. A pro-male surfer punched her in the face in Hawaii over wave possession. A few years later, a local in New South Wales stole her wave and then when both of them lost their footing, grabbed her with two hands and held her underwater, pushing her back under each time she resurfaced.
In a press interview for the Australian surf film, Girls Can't Surf, Cooper describes the double standard desires of the men who ran the surf industry—they wanted women to surf as powerfully as any man in the lineup and look like a swimsuit calendar model in a bikini while doing so. She also talks about the prize money being less for women, not being able to secure the same level of sponsorship as men, and getting sent out in the middle of surf competitions when the waves weren't great. The officials would reorganize the order of the competitions and let the ladies surf while the men were waiting for the wave conditions to improve.
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The first time I watched Point Break, I imagine I swooned over Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, extras catching sweet rides on waves, and the coolness of surf culture. The second time, I probably saw parallels to my own experience on beaches and in lineups, and started to notice how violently and misogynistically most of the characters behave. This last time, that was all I noticed.
When I started to write about it, I began to wonder if maybe that was the point.
A woman directed Point Break. A really famous woman who was the first female director to win an Academy Award and three other prestigious American directing awards. Kathryn Bigelow’s graduate thesis, the 1978 short film The Set Up, consists of twenty minutes of two actors beating each other up in an alley while philosophers narrate dryly in a voiceover. They’re not for-screen fighting, they’re pummeling each other to bloody bits. She directed Point Break after Blue Steel, where a psychopathic male killer stalks a rookie female police officer and before The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, two American “war thrillers.” Kathryn Bigelow’s work often, or maybe always, creates questions about the meaning of violence.
Leading men in action movies in the nineties were triangular-chested, bounce-a-quarter-off-their-muscles guys like Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, neither of whom appear in Point Break. Sure, Patrick Swayze was fresh off of Roadhouse, but also Dirty Dancing, and he was a classical ballerina before he was a film actor. Point Break was released the same year as Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and My Own Private Idaho. Keanu Reeves and his characters have never exactly screamed “my pecs are popping buttons off my shirt and I will fuck you up!”
While Point Break might actually be the most prescient and subversive movie I’ve ever seen, has there ever been a war film that is truly anti-war? If one replicates violence as a spectacle for human consumption, does it matter that the intent is to criticize it? The impact remains. A surf movie that turns a critical lens on male chauvinist culture, power and brutality, and the degradation of women, still gives air time to misogyny and glorifies violence. I wasn’t a teenage boy the first time I saw Point Break, but I can’t imagine that many watched it thinking, “Hmm, this violent and misogynistic surf culture is really gross and ultimately leads to the demise of these guys.” I think it’s more likely they watched it thinking, “Right on, Brah. This is epic!”
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What I remember most about meeting Jules is that she laughed at me. Not in the haughty, judgmental way that male surfers had laughed at me as I paddled against impossible currents or got pummeled by sneaker waves. She laughed when I told her about my surf journey thus far, knowing things I didn't yet. She laughed in the way that other female surfers I have met since have laughed. Laughed to acknowledge. Laughed to welcome. Laughed to be the smoke and the sage. To cleanse. To say, "I've been there too. So has she and she and she. And now I will show you our way."
"Head up," she yelled at me so often that first session. "Look up, look ahead. Find a tree above the shore and focus. Don't look down."
Ann Petroliunas is a high school educator, writer, and collage artist who earned her MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Portland State University in 2022. Born and raised in Chicago, she now resides in Oregon and often gets confused about which one is home. Ocean waves, glue-sticks, and avocados are a few of her favorite things. Her writing has previously been published in The Rumpus, Heavy Feather Review, and Unchaste Anthology: V3. Her artwork is forthcoming in Liminal Spaces.
Photo by: Silas Baisch