Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (14 page)

4 Nathan,
Parenthood

A rare non-nerdy role for Moranis, and he’s adorable in it. Bonus points for singing a Carpenters’ song, too.

3 Dark Helmet,
Spaceballs

Rick Moranis as Darth Vader! For God’s sake, what’s not to love?

2 Seymour,
Little Shop of Horrors

OK, so he’s not Pavarotti but the man can sing! He really can sing!

1 Louis Tully in
Ghostbusters

He is hilarious as the accountant throwing the worst party ever (‘Everybody, this is Ted and Annette Fleming. Ted has a small carpet cleaning company in receivership, but Annette is drawing a salary from a deferred bonus from two years ago …’), and adorable as the demonic Key Master. Moranis at his most Moranis-ish.

Ghostbusters

(With a Segue into
Top Gun
):

How to be a Man

I read a lot of film books while researching this (sort of) film book and they’ve taught me a few things about how film books should be written if they are to be taken seriously, and these are lessons that I feel are as useful in life as they are in film books:

1. Drop in random French phrases wherever possible so it looks like you’re quoting from the French film magazine,
   Cahiers du Cinéma
   , because even if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, nobody will be able to tell;
   
2. When in doubt, start banging on about Godard;
   
3. Never describe a film as your ‘favourite film’. This looks unprofessional and childish. Instead, claim – in ringing tones
   comme les écrivains de Cahiers du Cinéma
   – that it is the Greatest Film.
   

Zut alors! Malheureusement
, not all the French in the world could convince anyone that I am more interested in Godard than
The Goonies
, so that’s a non-starter. But I shall make use of one of these handy life lessons and state that the best, most brilliant, most extraordinary, the most deftly created piece of auteur film work of all time is
Ghostbusters
.

For pretty much most of my life, I’d assumed that this was a fact accepted by everybody:
Ghostbusters
is the greatest movie ever made. Sure, people tended to say random words like ‘
Citizen Kane
!’ and ‘
Vertigo
!’ and ‘
Return to Oz
!’
^fn1
when asked by
Cahiers du Cinéma
for their favourite film. But I thought they did this just as, when asked who they’d like to have at their dream dinner party, they say, ‘Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela!’, as opposed to who everybody would actually like which is, obviously, Madonna and Bill Murray.

Now, one could take my massive assumption that my tastes reflect those of everyone else on the planet two ways:

1. I have an ego the size of Asia coupled with a narcissist’s complex and incipient sociopathic tendencies;
   
2. Ghostbusters
   is so good that even if it’s not everyone’s FAVOURITE movie, it is probably in their top ten and so whenever I mention my love of
   Ghostbusters
   people say, ‘Oh yeah, everyone loves
   Ghostbusters
   .’
   

For the purposes of this chapter, we will go with option two.

I never thought of my
Ghostbusters
obsession – and it is, I fully admit, an obsession – as remarkable. If anything, I saw it as a perfectly natural response to a great work of art. Devoting an entire shelf to books and articles by or about the people involved, however tangentially, in the making of this movie? Commendable intellectual curiosity. Spending £150 on a book about
Ghostbusters
that came out the year the film was released, just because it finally explains why the character of Winston is squeezed out of the movie? Hey, that’s an investment piece! Refusing to go on a second date with someone because they failed to recognise a completely random (and not, to be honest, wildly relevant)
Ghostbusters
’ quote over dinner?
^fn2
Well, why waste time with losers? It wasn’t until I found myself awake at 2 a.m. at the age of thirty-three on a Tuesday scrolling through eBay in search of a rumoured copy of Bill Murray’s original
Ghostbusters
script, which obviously was not going to be on eBay, that I felt it might be time to look at what, precisely, was going on here and why, after all this time,
Ghostbusters
still feels so special, maybe even more special, to me.

There is sentimentality, for sure, not exactly for my childhood but for the city of my childhood.
Ghostbusters
is as much of a love letter to New York as anything by Woody Allen, and a less self-conscious one at that, showing New Yorkers reacting with relative normality to an invasion of the undead.
^fn3
Many of the jokes in
Ghostbusters
stem from the idea that, ghosts aside, Manhattan itself is an out-of-control Wild West place, a Gotham city where a man could collapse against the windows of the Tavern on the Green, the ritzy restaurant that used to be in Central Park, and the diners would simply ignore him. Trash is piled on the sidewalks and Checker cabs whizz round corners: this recreation of New York, 1984 – the New York of my childhood – is still how I think of the city, even though it has, for better or worse, changed a lot since then.

Even the hilarious anachronisms give me a sentimental frisson: Louis being mocked for his love of vitamins and mineral water; Ray and Peter chuffing down fags while toting nuclear reactors on their backs; Larry King in a cloud of cigarette smoke while chatting drily on the radio; the bad guy being the man from the Environmental Protection Agency. These all look particularly out of date in the Manhattan of today, and I can’t help but feel the city is a little poorer for it. But my absolute favourite New York-y moment in the film is at the end, when a doorman brings Ecto-1 round after the Ghostbusters have saved the world – or at least Central Park West – from destruction. Despite having battled a giant marshmallow man, Dan Aykroyd still has a couple of dollar bills in the pocket of his ghost uniform with which to tip the doorman. You cannot get more New York than that.

But there is something else in
Ghostbusters
that makes me sentimental, something else that I love in it that doesn’t exist any more. That is, its depiction of how a man should be.

Just in terms of sheer variety, one could do a lot worse than turn to eighties movies for lessons in how to be a man. When most people think of masculinity in eighties movies, they probably think of that strange genre that sprouted and bulged up in that decade like Popeye’s biceps after eating spinach, consisting of men who look like condoms stuffed with walnuts
^fn4
speaking their lines in confused accents and emphasising random syllables, strongly suggesting they’d learned the words phonetically: Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Stallone
^fn5
and, towards the end of the decade, Van Damme. Chuck Norris, too, can be included here, despite his lack of walnut-ness, but he earns membership of this group with his similar lack of obvious acting talent and strong fondness for right-wing messages in his films.
^fn6

But there is more to eighties men than that. For a start, there are the men who raise babies and children (
Mr Mom
,
Three Men and a Baby
,
Uncle Buck
), which some feminist critics argued at the time was a backlash against feminism because they seemed to mock the idea of feminised men. In fact, in retrospect, these films look more like movies awkwardly coming to grips with feminism (
Tootsie
, too, can be included here, with a man pretending to be a woman, and occasionally looking after a child, and becoming a better person for it).
Mr Mom
(1983), in which Michael Keaton loses his job and looks after the kids while his wife works, is clearly none too sure what to make of this ‘feminist’ thing: the movie’s message is that the swapping of traditional gender roles will probably destroy the marriage and almost certainly the house (somewhat dismayingly, the film was written by John Hughes).

But by 1987,
Three Men and a Baby
was getting much more of a handle on things. The men (Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson) are unexpectedly lumbered with a baby girl and, by the end of the film, very much want her to stay with them in their bachelor shag pad, even after the baby’s dippy English (foreigners – tchuh!) mother turns back up. It turns out that, unlike Mr Mom, they are capable of looking after a baby without causing havoc to domestic appliances (men – amirite??). The men in
Three Men and a Baby
are notably much less obnoxious than
les mecs
in the original French version,
Trois Hommes et un Couffin
, who have a pact never to let a woman stay more than one night in their flat and have a tendency to call the baby ‘a swine’ when it has an accident on the sofa.
Ahh, les Français – ils sont tres masculins, ooh la la!
^fn7

Which is not to say that the American version is without its anxieties.
Three Men and a Baby
goes to such lengths in order to reassure audiences of the uber-masculinity of the three guys, despite their TERRIFYINGLY FEMINISED baby-raising skills, that they become hilariously camp. Peak camp is reached, for me, when Selleck goes out jogging wearing little more than a tiny pair of shorts and an enormous moustache, and he picks up a sports magazine full of photos of muscled-up half-naked men. Now, if that isn’t the definition of throbbing heterosexual masculinity, I don’t know what is.

Yes, the eighties were a different time and American movies in that era seemed to think that ‘homosexual’ was merely Latin for ‘psycho killer or flouncy interior decorator’. But nonetheless, whenever I watch this movie (which is more often than I’m going to commit to print) I think it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t just go with the obvious option here and make the guys gay, living in a happy yuppie
ménage à trois
. After all, this would explain why three apparently very solvent guys in high-flying careers
^fn8
in their thirties would choose to share an apartment in midtown Manhattan as opposed to getting their own
American
Psycho
-style bachelor pads. And for heaven’s sake, have you looked at that Broadway-themed mural Steve Guttenberg paints of the three of them in the atrium of their apartment? No amount of references from Selleck to his love of sport can obscure the fact he and his two friends are living in the campest New York apartment north of 14th Street. These guys – the actor! The architect! The cartoonist! – are basically the eighties yuppie version of the Village People.

And let’s talk about that homoeroticism! Accidental homoeroticism is yet another one of the great joys of eighties movies, and it was the last decade that would be blessed with the pleasure because from the nineties onwards gay culture and references would be too mainstream and recognisable to slip past studios unnoticed.

The plethora of eighties buddy movies easily and frequently tip into accidental homoeroticism, with the female characters being explicitly excluded from pretty much the whole film and all sorts of intense emotion between the two male leads.
Lethal Weapon
is one example and an even more obvious one is
Stakeout
, in which Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss spend an entire movie living together in faux domesticity and, in the case of Estevez, voyeuristically spying on his male partner’s sexual encounters.

The Lost Boys
is the most blatantly homoerotic mainstream movie ever made for teenage boys. In this film, young Michael (charisma vortex Jason Patric) is initiated into the manly life of a new town by going into a cave with Kiefer Sutherland and his male buddies (none of whom seem the least bit interested in the fact that a half-naked Jami Gertz is wandering around drunkenly in front of them) and drinking their body fluids. Sure, why not, right? Vampires are inherently homoerotic and the director Joel Schumacher (who later homoeroticised
Batman
– not difficult, admittedly – by sticking nipples on the batsuit) revels in the connection in this movie in a way
Twilight
later determinedly, somewhat dismayingly avoids. Michael does at some point have what looks like deeply unsatisfying sex with Jami Gertz, but the person he gazes at with the most intensity is young Jack Bauer. And I haven’t even mentioned that Michael’s little brother Sam (Corey Haim), who dresses like he’s trying out for Wham!, has a poster on the door of his closet of Rob Lowe lifting up his shirt. Because sure, why not, right?

The Lost Boys
is not the only eighties movie to suggest that the way a man becomes a man is by rejecting the world of women and gazing lustfully at other men.
Top Gun
is, clearly, the camp king here, with men in uniform staring passionately at one another and offering – and this is an actual quote from the movie – to ride one another’s ‘tail’.
Top Gun
is officially the most homoerotic thing that has ever existed, and I say that as someone who spent eight years covering men’s fashion shows in Milan.

Most of uber-producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson’s films – including
Flashdance
,
Top Gun
,
Beverly Hills Cop
and, in the nineties,
Days of Thunder
and
Bad Boys
– are, at the very least, camp because they are, as producer Julia Philips put it, ‘a series of soundtracks in search of a movie’. More simply, they are extended music videos – in fact, some of the scenes are nothing but music videos, with montages set to a power ballad – and, to my mind, that is not a criticism. I love eighties music videos, I adore montages, and anyone who doesn’t thrill to a power ballad is lying to themselves. These movies are fun (well, except for
Days of Thunder
) because they are about pure sensation. But they also easily become camp because camp is about exaggeration and surface aesthetics, which is a perfect description of Simpson and Bruckheimer’s films.