He didn’t buy anything, sell anything, or process anything.

He didn’t buy anything sold or processed. 

He didn’t sell anything bought or processed. 

He didn’t process anything sold or bought.

What Lloyd Dobler did do was speak for us all. 

As the hero of Say Anything (1989), written and directed by three-time Academy Award-nominee Cameron Crowe, John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler is strong but not silent, sensitive but not emo. And when he stands outside Diane Court’s window, serenading her with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” blaring from a boom box, he is a rebel, but not without a cause.

In one sense, Say Anything isn’t the stereotypical teen movie: we never actually see Lloyd in high school. But in another sense, he is all the heroes of all the teen movies. He has the wisdom of Ferris Bueller and the angst of the Breakfast Club. Sure, the Heathers might not be caught dead in his car, but he has that subtle hint of the outlaw, of the man apart, that would have drawn at least one of them in. 

In other words, all roads lead to Lloyd.

In the pop culture of the ‘80s, it’s easy to hear echoes of the ‘50s. With movies such as Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle, this earlier decade is the one that first brought us the teen movie genre (as well as rock ‘n’ roll-charged soundtracks). The years that followed saw different kinds of teen films—from the beach blanket variety to the slasher strain. 

Many of these trends were exploited by filmmakers in the 1980s.  At the malls and the multiplexes, movie teens were lust-driven, computer-hacking, cross-dressing, werewolf-becoming, galaxy-hopping, time-traveling maniac bait. And they fought everything from bullies to vampires to World War III. But with the decade’s angsty teen comedies, the genre proved that it hadn’t entirely forgotten where it came from.

These movies include Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), also written by Crowe; (most of) John Hughes’s greatest hits; and Say Anything. Apart from their music montages, though, teen movies are not usually thought of as being big on visual storytelling—at least not in comparison to such genres as the Western, horror, and film noir.

But the moment Lloyd shares with his radio stands out. The shot, in which Lloyd says nothing and everything, has become iconic of the genre and of the era. Crowe, a former music journalist, has made several films that can seem inseparable from their music: Singles (1992), Almost Famous (2000), and this one. But despite how the scene rewired a generation’s connection to “In Your Eyes,” it is not the song, but the image that is the film's anthem. 

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