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Nostalgia seems to me to be an appropriate subject for a blog post that's commemorating a millennial occasion of sorts (albeit one measured in blog posts rather than in years), so let's get right to it:
How many of you directly experienced the 1980s?
Those of you who were born on or after 1985, put your hands back down, because I was born in 1975, and I don't claim to have directly experienced the 1970s, if only because any memories I have from before the age of 5 are so suspect and/or negligible that I'd qualify them as nearly nonexistent.
As of last month, I've lived 34 years, and in all that time, the '80s remain the only decade in which I've ever felt truly at home, and I'm not even sure that I'm capable of explaining why to those who haven't lived through that era themselves, but I'll give it a shot.
The '80s were a paradox. The real-life events of that era scared the shit out of me, but the pop culture that those events produced has become perhaps one of my most cherished possessions. The real-world Cold War that I found more terrifying than anything else, when the United States and the Soviet Union played at it through the mutually assured destruction of their nuclear arms race, was also responsible for countless fictional Cold Wars that I found entirely comforting, because unlike Reagan versus the Russians, I could believe in the starkly good-versus-evil dichotomy of the battles between G.I. Joe versus Cobra, He-Man versus Skeletor, and the Autobots versus the Decepticons. As a kid, I never believed in John Wayne's cornball cowboy "heroes," but even after he "died," I never stopped believing in Optimus Prime.
Perhaps the even larger paradox inherent in the '80s lies in that era's internally contradictory attitudes toward rebellion. After all, this was the decade that gave us Huey Lewis and the News singing "Hip to Be Square," and any number of similar "Reagan Rock" musical acts. Pop culture has always been at least slightly artificial, but in the '80s, it literally became synthesized, as the forerunners to the electronica movement of the 1990s broke into the Top 40 charts. Sex was sold shamelessly by the mainstream media as a slick, sensationalized commercial product, but at the same time, it was rendered more societally taboo than at any other point in modern history since the 1950s. The slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the '70s, such as National Lampoon's Animal House, spawned an entirely new sub-genre of tongue-in-cheek teens-on-the-make flicks in the '80s, most of which espoused surprisingly traditional ideas about gender roles, however well they may have been hidden away, under multiple layers of explicit sex jokes and nude scenes.
In spite of my misgivings about their covertly conservative moral messages - not to mention their deeply misogynistic treatment of women - I still can't help but love the fuck out of the teen sex comedies of the '80s, because as a whole, they boasted, bar none, the broadest, and perhaps even best, collection of laughing mad, unrepentant tricksters of any single decade of cinema. Between Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack, Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards and Curtis "Booger" Armstrong in Revenge of the Nerds, and most especially, TOM MOTHERFUCKING HANKS in Bachelor Party, THE GREATEST GODDAMN MOVIE EVER MADE, YOU WHORES, it was like watching a stand-up lineup at the Catskills that consisted of Coyote, Loki and Harlequin. Even Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (a "teen sex comedy" minus the "sex") and Robert Downey Jr. in Less Than Zero (an exercise in "teen sex" totally and intentionally devoid of "comedy," aside from a hauntingly Chaplin-esque performance by RDJ that was equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking) managed to tap into that rich trickster vein.
What's funny about a lot of these class clowns - notably the ones played by Hanks and Bill Murray, the latter of whom went from Stripes, through Ghostbusters, to Scrooged infusing more melancholy and misanthropy into his wise-cracking characters than any actor since Tom Baker on Doctor Who - is how tolerably conventional many of them would have been, in damn near any other decade. If the whole of the '80s could be distilled into a single work of art, it would be a Patrick Nagel lithograph, because like the facial architecture on any Nagel woman, the social mores of the '80s were so sharply defined and uncompromising as to be practically Cubist, but ironically enough, that only made their relatively sparse splashes of color stand out all the more. '80s trickster heroes lived in a world so repressed, on all sides, and so unaware of its own repression, that a gesture as simple as a smile at the wrong occasion could constitute an act of insurrection. For all their humorously glib lines, guys like Hanks and Murray did more damage to the uptight social order through dismissive eye-rolls and indifferent shrugs of their shoulders than any words could.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, twice over - first in a little neighborhood, in the east of Washington state, called Otis Orchards, that was so rural that relatively nearby Spokane seemed like "the big city" to me by comparison as a child, and then, when I was a teen, in the somewhat more populated suburbs of North Andover, a strictly residential burg about an hour and a half's drive outside of Boston, Massachusetts - and it made me hate living in small towns. I grew up watching the movies of the '80s, almost all of which seemed to be set in Los Angeles and New York City, and I wanted to live in the neon-streaked, always-just-after-sunset worlds of those movies so badly that it made my teeth hurt. Everything was fluorescent in those movies, and everything that happened there happened well after my bedtime as a kid. I was convinced that I was missing out, by not living in those cities, and by not staying up late enough. As I grew older, it fed my craving to stay up later and later, until I became such a night owl that I came to regard daybreak in the same way that some people regard the stroke of midnight.
Even now, when I see the bright lights of a big city, I imagine that its rivers of colored light are the trails left behind by the souls of those fictional tricksters with whom I grew up, from Tom Hanks to Robert Downey Jr. Sometimes, if you look at the silhouette of a city at night, with its buildings and vehicles beaming out light, with just the right eyes, you can see those spirits, lighting up the sky with their insurrectionist smiles, like a little kid armed with a sparkler on the Fourth of July, and writing out in the air ...
HERE I AM
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
... But it only lasts for an instant, like spotting a fairy between the leaves of a tree, because some things aren't meant to be seen for too long. And like that, it's gone, scattered like eraser dust blown off a sheet of paper.
And in the end, that's what the '80s are to me. Taken as a whole, they're an ephemeral thing of beauty, one that's been captured in time, after a fashion, by mass-media artifacts, but which can never really be held or possessed. It's the only decade that's ever felt like my home, but trying to live in such a home would be like trying to live in a House of Leaves. As an era, its events and culture have continued to shape so much of my life, but as an object, it's no more tangible than the mere concept of a color or a flavor. No matter how far it recedes into my past, a part of my identity will always remain frozen in those years, carrying on endless conversations with the echoes of ghosts.
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