My Favorite Romantic Subplot: The Blob

Warning: Contains spoilers

I have an affinity for Eighties movies because I came of age during that time. Eighties movies have a distinct aesthetic that makes almost all of them instantly recognizable as being from that decade. They often take place in small towns and big cities that, while often recognizable by name, never truly existed in real life. The depictions of American cities and characters were embellished and usually idealized to convey an idea of America that the country was trying to achieve at the time.

My favorite 80s sci-fi horror movie is easily 1988’s The Blob. The movie handily delivers on the sci-fi and horror fronts with several practical effects-driven set pieces that pay homage to the 1958 original but also establishes itself as its own distinct updated 80s take on the story. The romantic subplot in The Blob concerns the characters Meg (Shawnee Smith), a popular high school cheerleader, and Brian (Kevin Dillon), the town’s resident bad boy who sports a leather jacket, a mullet and a motorcycle as his defining characteristics. Meg and Brian are from opposite sides of the social strata of the small town they live in, but they will join forces and work together to save themselves and defeat the Blob.

The film successfully fakes out its viewers during the opening football game scene by introducing Meg and Paul, the high school’s star quarterback, as if theirs is the romantic plot of the movie. They get not-exactly-a-meet-cute when Paul is sacked by players of the opposing team and lies on the ground in a daze, while Meg stands above him, concerned. “Will you go out with me?” he manages to ask her, before passing out. Intercut with the football game action are clips of Brian, a town outsider with no interest in the football game, who attempts to jump a washed-out bridge on his motorcycle, but instead crashes into the wash that the bridge originally crossed.

Later that night, the three characters wind up at the local hospital together after bringing in a homeless man to whom the Blob has attached itself. Brian leaves, and not much later Paul is consumed by the Blob. As empowered heroines go, Meg doesn’t get off to a very impressive start. She stumbles upon Paul, who is in the process of being devoured alive by the Blob, and attempts to save him by grabbing the one hand/arm of his that hasn’t yet been consumed. But Paul’s exposed hand and forearm part ways in gruesome 80s fashion with the rest of his body, and Meg loses her balance, stumbles backward, hits her head against the wall and passes out. Once home, Meg pretends to take a sleeping pill that her mother insists on giving her, then sneaks out of the house to find Brian. She locates him after he’s been held and questioned by the police regarding Paul’s death.

Meg and Brian talk in the town diner, and they get off to a rocky start when Meg asks for Brian’s help. Brian resents her sudden interest in him now that she needs help, reminding her that they’ve been going to the same school for three years and she’s never bothered to speak to him. When Meg explains that she saw Paul being devoured by the Blob at the hospital, Brian jokingly asks her is she’s “strung out” on something, at which point Meg tells Brian that while he pretends to be the town rebel, he is actually, like everyone else in the town, “Full of shit!” Brian apologizes and later jokes that he’s never heard her say the S word before, asking, “What was that like for you?”

When the Blob attacks the diner, Meg and Brian outrun the beast and seclude themselves in the walk-in freezer. As the movie unfolds and the Blob continues its murderous rampage, Meg and Brian have time to bond over their shared experience and their commitment to saving the town. Before long, they are once again separated when, after being detained by mysterious “government officials” who claim the town has been exposed to a contagious disease, Brian escapes on his own, leaving Meg to find and protect her family.

Brian and Meg’s romantic subplot in The Blob is thin, but it provides a progressive update on the form of the romantic subplot, one in which the parties are separated and required to rely upon their individual agency to achieve their shared goal. Having left Meg on a truck heading back to town, Brian intends to leave town until he overhears the government officials identify the Blob as a government-developed biological weapon that was let loose on the town unintentionally. He then returns to town to work with Meg to defeat the Blob and to warn the residents that they’re being lied to.

Meg, for her part, embarks on a heroine’s journey during which she single-handedly saves her little brother from the Blob, and also discovers the Blob’s Achilles’ heel weakness that will eventually save the town, and theoretically the planet, from its destruction. Once reunited, Meg and Brian work together in the films final scenes to defeat the Blob, identifying and providing tools to be used to stop the Blob’s rampage, and saving each other from near death encounters with the Blob as they try to save each other and their town.

In the film’s final moments, after the Blob has been defeated, Meg and Brian embrace. What I like most about their romantic subplot is that, once they separate, they are each forced to proceed on their individual journeys and achieve better self-awareness and resolve, outside the presence of each other. This allows them to make choices about their progress and survival without subverting themselves to the relationship before it’s even been properly established. At the end of the movie, they come together as stronger, better realized individuals who are in a better position to move forward in their own romantic subplot, should they decide to do so.

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