The Travolta/Cage Project #5 The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976)

I don’t know what it says about my self-esteem and how I see myself that I recently found myself envying the social graces of Carrie White of 1976’s Carrie and the lead character in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble from the same year. These are, as you are perhaps aware, given their deeply iconic status, an abused, terrorized social outcast who wreaks apocalyptic telekinetic vengeance on the school bullies that have made her life a living hell and a teenager with no immune system who similarly grows up an outcast, blessed and cursed to live his life in a literal protective bubble that keeps him from touching or kissing, or even getting so much as a quick and dirty hand job from a classmate while his contemporaries lead lives of carefree freedom abandon, unrestrained by the restrictions that make his life a never-ending challenge, respectively.

Yet watching Carrie’s title character at the prom I found myself thinking that if I were at the big dance with the most popular kid in school there’s no way I would have carried myself with the aplomb of Sissy Spacek’s rage-filled psychic avenger. True, I like to think I wouldn’t have murdered everybody after things took a turn, even if I could, but for a while there Carrie was doing a whole lot better than a 17 year old me would. 

Similarly, John Travolta plays bubble boy Tod Lubitch as such a weirdly normal, well-adjusted, even chipper young man that I once again found myself thinking that if I lived my entire life in a bubble and could never touch other human beings there’s no way I would be holding my shit together at all, let alone be better adjusted than most. 

I’d be naked and crying all the time, throwing my poop at the bubble and my parents and begging for something in the way of alcohol or hard drugs, if not merciful death. And if anyone judged me for it I’d be all, “Dude, I live in a fucking bubble. Cut me some slack.” 

Yet not long after we’re introduced to Tod Lubitch, a healthy, strapping, virile boy except for somehow also having no immune system, living in a a bubble and being the sickest person on earth, his doctor, Dr. Gunther (the great Ralph Bellamy) gives him a surprisingly fierce tongue-lashing, accusing him of using living in a protective bubble as an excuse to never grow up and remain a child forever when it’s entirely possible that maybe they’ll find a cure for Bubble Boy disease and won’t he feel like a real fucktard if he’s still luxuriating in eternal adolescence when that happens? 

Bellamy’s stern, asshole doctor doesn’t use the word “Fucktard” with the boy, possibly because The Boy in the Plastic Bubble was a television movie and networks were much less lenient about language back then but that’s the gist. That seems incredibly harsh considering Tod’s condition but The Boy in the Plastic Bubble depicts life inside Tod’s bubble as so cozy and safe that it spoils him, the same way the professional bubble that is Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place is so comforting and hospitable that leaving it to do outside work can be tough. 

When you have a professional home that is nurturing and safe and warm like my website, why ever leave? Similarly, when you have a sweet-ass man-bubble full of all the things that you enjoy, other than, of course, someone to share it with, why even bother trying to leave? 

The answer, of course, is girls. Tod nurses a poignant, seemingly impossible crush on the girl next door, coltish, horse-loving beauty Gina Biggs (Glynnis O’Connor). Gina is intrigued by Tod and his smoldering good looks but put off by the “living in a bubble and having no social graces on account of his unique and extreme socialization or rather non-socialization” thing.

Tod is invited to a Fourth of July party by Gina despite, you know, living in a plastic bubble. I like to imagine that on the invite to the patriotic soiree it listed the three responses as “Yes”, “No” and “Sorry, I live in a plastic bubble.” 

Tod is a horny motherfucker, in addition to being a pure-hearted romantic learning for escape and transcendence and connection so he remarkably would be able to answer the question of “Will you be coming to my Fourth of July party?” with BOTH “Yes” and “Sorry, I live in a plastic bubble.” 

Tod makes it to the beach party inside a stylish mobile bubble but, in an uncanny echo of Carrie, just when everything seems to be impossibly perfect—fireworks exploding in the distance, young, albeit star-crossed love in the air, the girl of his dreams asking him to hold hands through his bubble—the dream turns into a nightmare when Gina reveals she’s merely holding hands with him as a cruel dare from even more sadistic than usual classmates. 

Tod’s strangely contented solitude is interrupted when another immune-challenged teen ends up in a bubble alongside Tod’s. While Tod embraces bubble life, it has driven this less resilient youngster to suicidal despair, in part because he’s lived in the world enough to know exactly what he’s missing while Tod’s life experiences are so limited that he has nothing to compare them to and find lacking. 

Sounding every bit like a teenager, bubble-bound or otherwise, this abrasive peer seethes, “I want a beard and a mustache and I want to make it with anything that walks.” Tod is put off by the young man’s horniness but the scene ends on a wonderful moment of connection when they both agree that whether you’re in a bubble or outside, nothing relieves the angst of teen life quite like frenzied masturbation. 

Yes, Tod has the kind of life where Buzz fucking Aldrin, playing himself, badly, just fucking shows up to gush over how brave he is and embrace him as a kindred soul, but he wants more and he has wonderful, supportive parents in the form of Mickey (Diana Hyland, who was apparently the love of her onscreen son Travolta’s life before dying young at 41 in 1977) and Johnny (Robert Reed, the beloved song and dance man from The Brady Bunch Variety Hour in a rare acting turn) who support him in his desire to become more independent and experience more of the world, even if doing so might endanger his life and fragile help. 

So when Tod has the idea of going to high school in what appears to be a homemade space suit from someone badly cosplaying Jodorowsky’s Dune, which was so fucking influential that its reach extended to the costume design of Aaron Spelling-Executive Produced disease of the month movies, they support his plan.  

Tod is so eager to be part of the outside world, to leave his comforting cocoon and experience the joy and heartbreak of the outside world that he starts dangerous risks. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble really jumps the plastic bubble in a scene where Gina literally jumps over Tod’s plastic bubble on her horse but things don’t get really crazy until Tod, in a wildly misplaced display of machismo, challenges the school bully to a push-up contest. 

A push-up contest! A dude what lives in a plastic bubble so he doesn’t die and needs for his space suit to be recharged every 90 minutes like an iPhone battery or he’ll fucking perish challenges a more than healthy classmate to a push up contest and wins. 

The Boy in the Plastic Bubble has a VERY loose basis in reality in the case of David Vetter, who similarly was born with next to nothing in the way of an immune system and lived his entire brief, tragic life inside a science-fiction looking containment unit that won him the nickname “bubble boy” before dying in 1984 at the age of 12. 

Like Rumble Fish, the film we paired with it for the second episode of the Travolta/Cage podcast The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is a screamingly sincere, bravely, poignantly non-cynical, non-ironic melodrama about the angst and overwhelming emotional intensity of teenage life.

But where Coppola’s film was overflowing with artistry and highbrow ambition but emotionally inert at its core director Randal Kleiser’s male tear-jerker is comparatively artless in its storytelling but powerful to an almost unfair extent. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is shameless in its manipulativeness. 

The Boy in the Plastic Bubble director Kleiser and writer Douglas Day Stewart would reunite a few years later for another unabashed melodrama all about what it’s like to be young and horny and overflowing with hormones and emotions you do not understand and can’t control: the half-forgotten 1980 smash The Blue Lagoon. 

Travolta with his screen mom, real-life girlfriend.

Travolta had such a positive experience working with Kleiser that he recommended him for Grease. Grease, along with The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and Welcome Back, Kotter established Travolta as a preeminent pop culture good guy, even though he very compellingly and convincingly played borderline sociopaths in Carrie and Saturday Night Fever, his other smashes from this era.

Saturday Night Fever was infamously re-edited for a PG on the dubious logic that the studio wanted everyone to see Travolta’s performance, not just adults emotionally equipped to handle him playing a pill-popping, racist misogynist asshole who is utterly compelling without ever being remotely likable. 

In that respect, Travolta is lucky that people often misremember Saturday Night Fever as a fun movie about disco dancing and not an incredibly bleak exploration of the emptiness and false promise of the American dream and don’t remember he was in Carrie at all but clung to the image of him as a cuddly, All-American hunk with an irresistible smile and bedroom eyes in the star-making trilogy of Welcome Back, Kotter, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and Grease. 

Travolta famously ends The Boy in the Plastic Bubble taking his life into his own hands by leaving his previously happy, satisfying home and venturing out into the scary, exhilarating outside world. Travolta was similarly a young man at the very start of an auspicious career wondering what the future held. 

Tod’s future is a big question mark at the end of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Travolta’s was much rosier. The future held iconic, enduring greatness for the handsome young actor with the excess of boyish charm, as well as spectacular, historic disaster, and a whole lot in between.

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