And how delightful to watch 1963's Beach Party—in which a worldclass anthropologist travels from Micronesia to Malibu to study the "puberty rites" and "mating dances" of surf culture—and see that the dudes' main haunt, a place called Big Daddy's, is based on Cafe Frankenstein in Laguna Beach:
Professor Sutwell is our Doctor Frankenstein, our Margaret Mead, our Joseph Banks—our scientist, studying alterity. What foreign contagion been blown by tradewinds to the American shores? What hath been brought back from the Pacific by the Fathers, and infected a nation's Sons and Daughters? Banks had observed surfers in Tahiti; other European observers had made note of similar practices on the West African coast; though now, Americans learned of it chiefly through Hawaii.
Sutwell describes himself as an explorer, searching for "contact." Like Gidget, he is an infiltrator of the surf subculture, an outsider who must learn a new dialect, a new set of aesthetic and moral principles, and the sport at their center.
There is always, in these films, a circle of surfboards around the fire, like a palisade fence—calling to mind early European illustrations of East Coast indigenous villages. Perhaps a "dame" (in Hammerstein's language) was made from sand on the shoreline, her hair from kelp, her breasts prominent, as in
Beach Party or PTA's
The Master (GIs not just far from home but ship-locked and celibate).
And
Gidget's Kahuna? Big Man for the Malibu tribe, a drop-out who chases the sun, and seeks to get away from his memories of "that Korea jazz"? His real-life influence was Terry "Tubesteak" Tracey, who left behind the insurance biz for a palm frond surf shack on the beach. An "anti-authoritarian sage in Wayfarer shades and Madras shorts"; a "burly bohemian" holding court when Kathy Kohner walked by on the Malibu sands. Kathy's father would model his novel on his daughter's diary, to be adapted to silver screen.
An almost sexual rhythm, in and out, waves cresting and crashing. The wet of the water and the salt of the sweat. Sex both suicide and death, the end of innocence, of individuality—independence obliterated, by coupledom, children—the end of that unattached and floating state of surf which is half libertarian and half zen.
And the sirens on the shoreline, playing the game "Come closer, but not too close." Luring the men in, then dancing away—safeguarding their purity. Rhonda's bend'n'snap routine, in
Beach Party—drawing eyes off the waves, causing wipeouts and collisons. Postures to accentuate curves, performances of nonperformance, a feigned indifference. "Oh, this old thing?"
Canny themselves, and hungry for it: "Sex gorgeous hunks of male... Almost enough for second helpings." Then they strip down, bare their bodies—"We'll have them drooling"—but the "hunks of male" keep focus on the water, cannot be lured from their boards, even as their "glands are working overtime."
An anthropologist float-planes in, from Micronesia to the beaches of Malibu, from cannibals (like Melville's Typee) to the Cali coast. He is writing a book titled The Behavior Patterns of the Young Adult and its Relation to Primitive Tribes. His research materials include Mead's
Coming of Age In Samoa, plus studies on puberty rites and Aztec fertility ceremonies.
He watches couples surf tandem on their soft-tops. Bronzeoiled bodies adorned with goldnecklaces.
Watches a boy rub sunscreen into the inner and upper thighs of a chick, splayed out on a beach towel, in a two-piece bikini that shows her belly. (Bikini, from bikini atoll: A sunburn from a nuclear blast.)
He watches their luaus, the surfboards stood upright in the sand, in a ring around a bonfire—like the palisade fence of a Wampanoag village. He likens their rock'n'roll music to a "Haitian voodoo ceremony"—the bodies shaking, jerking, spastically twisting (Wop-bopa-loo-bop-lop-bam-boom)—or to a "Samoan puberty dance," or the "mating dance of a whooping crane"—their ecstatic celebrations ended with an exhausted collapse into sand. 
