Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (15 page)

Simpson himself was known for the kind of exaggerated macho posturing similar to that of his films: the drinking, the hedonism, the voracious use of call girls. And so, as is always the way with self-consciously macho men, there was something extraordinarily camp about him. This is especially true of macho men in the eighties, when straight men dressed like members of Duran Duran, blow-dried their hair and took an open interest in bodybuilding. Simpson himself was the Liberace of eighties heterosexual Hollywood: he was obsessed with plastic surgery and body image, he spent ridiculous amounts on clothes and cars, and he cultivated a self-image that included fabricating stories about his own childhood. His films almost invariably feature an especially close and yet emphatically platonic male friendship – in
Top Gun
, most famously, there’s the tortured triangle of Maverick’s (Tom Cruise, obviously) intensely loving relationship with Goose (Anthony Edwards) and his lustful one with Iceman (Val Kilmer). Even Maverick’s alleged girlfriend, Charlie (Kelly McGillis), has a male name.
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All of this, unsurprisingly, reflected Simpson’s life offscreen. His relationship with Bruckheimer was extremely close and while neither was or is gay, there was something bizarrely camp about them as a duo. During the making of
Top Gun
, they bought matching black Ferraris and matching black Mustang convertibles, they designed their houses to match and, as if to ensure they definitely looked like evil camp villains, they hired identical twin secretaries. They revelled in super-macho displays, ones that frequently seemed to disguise their own insecurities or outright lacks: every Friday night during the making of
Top Gun
, the cast and crew would throw a huge pool party to which Simpson would bring dozens of young women he picked up on the beach. One particular Friday, the cast and pilots working on
Top Gun
decided to throw Bruckheimer and Simpson into the pool. Bruckheimer relented – but only after he prissily took off his expensive cowboy boots. Simpson clung desperately to metal railings but he could not fight off the pilots and they threw him into the pool. Simpson promptly ‘sank to the bottom, having been too embarrassed to tell anyone he could not swim’.

Bruckheimer loyally remained colleagues with the increasingly out of control Simpson, until even he could no longer tolerate his friend’s excesses. And then, like that other image of camp American heterosexuality, Elvis Presley, Simpson eventually died, bloated and battered and far too young, on his own toilet.

In fact, if anyone wanted to learn how to be the ultimate eighties movie man, the obvious place to start would be, not
Ghostbusters
, but
Top Gun
. As well as homoeroticism, this movie features the two other major takes on masculinity in movies from that decade: a fist-pumping love for the American military, and the celebration of the maverick – and male = lone wolf.

The eighties was the decade when American politicians, led primarily by President Reagan, began to rewrite the story of the Vietnam War, pitching it not as a tragic and wasteful period in America’s history, but rather as ‘a noble cause’, to use Reagan’s favoured phrase. Reagan followed up this revisionism by launching a series of military ventures in Central America and Libya, acting as palate cleansers to wash away the old taste of Vietnam loss and replace it with, instead, newfound American militarism.

Hollywood happily reflected this switch, with movies such as
Red Dawn
and
Top Gun
. Even films like
Rambo: First Blood Part II
and
Predator
, which are ostensibly about the failure of the American military top brass in Vietnam, celebrate the strength of individual soldiers over dubious natives. These films looked like pure propaganda, which is precisely what they were: many were made with assistance from the military in exchange for script approval, as the Pentagon saw these movies as an excellent means of recruitment. Which, again, they were: according to David Sirota, recruitment went up 400 per cent when
Top Gun
was released, thanks in part, as the
LA Times
reported at the time, to the navy’s clever wheeze of ‘setting up manned tables outside movie houses during
Top Gun
premieres to answer questions from would-be flyboys emerging with a new-found need for speed from an F-14 warplane’. Of course, most of these young people didn’t realise that they were watching what were little more than adverts for the military, nor did their parents, whose taxes were partially subsidising the tanks and guns featured in these movies to tempt their children to enlist.

Hollywood had collaborated with the military plenty of times before the 1980s, going all the way back to 1927 with the film
Wings
, the very first winner of a Best Picture Oscar, which the military helped to produce. But given
Top Gun
’s enormous success, the number of collaborations between Hollywood studios and the military increased exponentially in the eighties, with studio bosses convinced that churning out pro-war propaganda in exchange for access to military equipment was a guaranteed winner of a formula, and the military was now fully persuaded that recruitment through movies was the way forward. And so, alongside anguished films about Vietnam such as
Platoon
,
Full Metal Jacket
and
Good Morning, Vietnam
, came what Movieline describes as ‘hyper-macho, bazooka-toting fantasy fare’, like
Top Gun
.

This is one movie lesson from the eighties that is still very much alive today. Michael Bay’s deadening
Transformers
franchise, the laughable 2012 flop,
Battleship
, which starred Rihanna as a weapons specialist and the 2012 film
Acts of Valor
(which Movieline describes as ‘Navy SEAL porn flick’) were all underwritten by the Pentagon, and all dutifully present a defiantly macho, determinedly pro-military message. Nor is it just bad films that get made this way: 2013’s
Captain Phillips
starring Tom Hanks as a captain taken hostage by Somali pirates was also made with the military’s cooperation and it, too, presents an utterly sterling view of the Americans in uniform. ‘When you know that you’re going to need the military’s assistance, and you know they are going to be looking at your script, you write it to make them happy right from the beginning,’ writes David Robb.

But of course,
Top Gun
isn’t just about falling in line with the military. Hell no! It’s about (somewhat contradictorily) rebelling against it, too! Because that’s what real men are like, you see. A real man isn’t a pencil pusher – he’s the lone wolf, the renegade, the MAVERICK. Real men ride their motorcycles against a sunset into the danger zone. Women have sex with the mavericks, but men ARE the mavericks. High five low five! Yeah! And just in case that isn’t entirely clear in the script, Cruise’s character’s name is, of course, Maverick (real men also don’t bother with fey subtlety).

The idea of the male rebel outsider was hardly coined in the eighties, but the idea of the rebel outsider fighting against the inept or even evil American government was one that not only gained enormous traction in the eighties, but was encouraged by, of all things, the American government – or, to be more precise, President Ronald Reagan. ‘I’ve always felt that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,”’ Reagan said in 1986. Reagan had cannily picked up on this national mood that had been burgeoning in the seventies in the wake of the disaster of the Vietnam War and the humiliation of the Watergate scandal. Anti-government moral mavericks started to emerge in films of that time, including Han Solo (another character who, like Maverick, was blessed with nominative determinism), the sexy outsider who made money working against the Empire, and, of course, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Tellingly, Reagan – a B-list actor through and through – was especially fond of using references from the films of both those characters, referring to the Soviet Union as ‘the evil Empire’, much to George Lucas’s horror, and notoriously telling tax increasers in 1986 to ‘go ahead – make my day.’ Movie nerds like myself around the world sympathise with this tactic of Reagan’s: if you can’t get cast in the movie, quote the movie.

Thus, the mentality of the eighties in America began to take shape: government and social collectivism is bad, the male renegade outsider is good, and it was a mentality that was instantly reflected in TV shows (
The A-Team
,
Knight Rider
,
The Dukes of Hazzard
,
Moonlighting
) and movies. Wild buccaneer-for-profit Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) in
Romancing the Stone
and
The Jewel of the Nile
is a straight rip-off of Han Solo. So is Indiana Jones, for that matter, the renegade archaeologist, trying to save cultural and religious artefacts from collectors and Nazis. As if Spielberg wanted to make this point extra clear, he then cast the same actor who played Han to play Indy.
Lethal Weapon
,
Die Hard
and
Beverly Hills Cop
also play on this idea of the rule-breaking maverick, with, respectively, crazy ol’ Riggs (Mel Gibson), sweaty ol’ John McClane (Bruce Willis) and wisecrackin’ Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) determinedly giving ulcers to their fat superiors with their maverick – and ultimately CORRECT – ways.

E.T.
is probably the most obvious and – for those who saw it as kids – most formative example of a movie that pitches the US government as actually nefarious. In the film, faceless government agents tear through Elliott’s home like zombies rampaging through the family’s sleepy suburbia, in a classic horror movie trope. The government then doesn’t just kidnap sweet and innocent E.T. (and, ostensibly, Elliott) – it nearly kills them both, and they are only saved by Elliott’s pure childlike nature, not the clumsy oafish ways of the evil government.
Splash
and
Project X
completely ripped off I mean paid heavy homage to
E.T.
with their distinctly similar plots featuring, respectively, in place of an alien, a mermaid and monkeys which had to be kept safe from meddling government agents.

But it’s in
Top Gun
where this trope that the rule-breaking maverick is awesome is at its most ridiculous because it is so heavily and paradoxically tied to that other ultimate eighties movie trope about masculinity: that the military is awesome. And this means the movie’s ending is utterly bonkers. Maverick’s brash arrogance and reckless selfishness turn out to have been the correct instincts all along, meaning there is really no message. Music videos feature more interesting emotional journeys than
Top Gun
. In fact, the filmmakers were so averse to making Maverick’s maverickness seem in any way misguided that they refused to give the movie the story arc it so obviously needed: for him to be the reason his partner Goose dies. But despite Maverick’s guilt after the crash, Goose’s death has nothing to do with him – it was due to faulty equipment. The only lesson Maverick (and audiences) learn from this incident is that Maverick should not have let the death of his best friend cause him to lose his confidence, because that is when he is at his least manly, repulsive both to his girlfriend (Charlie) and his boyfriend (Ice). It is only when he gets his confidence back that he becomes a triumphant ‘fly boy’ again and Ice invites him to ride his tail, again.

This, the movie suggests, is how the military will survive, just as the police are dependent on rule-breakers like Riggs in
Lethal Weapon
, McClane in
Die Hard
and Axel Foley in
Beverly Hills Cop
. These movies aren’t arguing for the dismantling of institutions, just for the triumph of the unleashed individual within, and that’s because these movies were made in the eighties: the era of selfish individualism, yes, not full-on revolution.

Being a man the
Top Gun
way is still very much a popular message in today’s American movies and, for that matter, politics. The Tea Party is explicitly based on the premise that the federal collectivism is deeply suspect and individualism is the way of the future. If the US government nearly killed E.T., no wonder millions of Americans don’t trust them to look after the national healthcare system. Has President Obama forgotten how E.T. turned a crusty shade of white when the government got their hands on him? White, for gawd’s sake! It’s not natural for an alien!

But there was another way to be a man, according to eighties movies, and it had nothing to do with homoeroticism, the military or howling lone wolves. It might have something to do with looking after kids, but that wasn’t its main point. And yet, unlike the
Top Gun
way, it’s one that’s hardly endorsed at all by today’s movies, or, indeed, any American pop culture at all, even though it is far, far preferable. And that is, the
Ghostbusters
way.

Ever since I saw this movie at the age of six, sharing my fold-down seat in the cinema with my mother’s big purse for added weight so the seat wouldn’t snap back up and swallow me up like the killer plant in
Little Shop of Horrors
, the Ghostbusters have represented to me an ideal of masculinity. This is not just because I fancy all of them, which I definitely do – the Ghostbusters are all total hotties, although this fact is rarely noted, for some mystifying reason. Young Aykroyd, for a start, is very much in my top five, maybe even my top three, and the only thing hotter than him greeting the crowds at the end of
Ghostbusters
with a fag in his mouth on Central Park West is him looking all sweet and poor and forlorn in
Trading Places
(mmm, sweet poor forlorn Aykroyd …). ANYWAY, I digress.

It might seem odd, this idea that a bunch of dudes running around Manhattan wearing cartoon insignia on their uniforms and car represent masculine goodness, and some people would disagree with me.
^fn10
In fact, some dark souls have accused the Ghostbusters of sexism, and to be fair to these people and their souls it’s not wildly difficult to see why: the ghosts are all female (minus Slimer, of course) and are either trying to kill the Ghostbusters (Zuul, Gozer) or give them oral sex;
^fn11
Venkman sexually harasses or patronises any woman in his path; the general air of male clubbiness to the whole film. Read this way, the film sounds like a terrible precursor to a terrible Adam Sandler film – and it could have been, had it starred and been written by anyone else (just imagine if it was a Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor film. Or, you know, don’t). While defending the movie from such accusations, writer and
Ghostbusters
mega-fan Adam Bertocci writes that the confusions come from the fact that the film is actually about ‘ancient power struggles in which the boundary was between two worlds, masculine and feminine, and all that they represented: Apollo versus Dionysus, yang versus yin, sun versus moon, fire versus water, ego versus id, reason versus emotion, science versus magic.’ This is sweet, but it does also emphasise the alleged gender distinctions in the film. Journalist Noah Berlatsky puts it a little less forgivingly, describing
Ghostbusters
as ‘totally sexist’ because it ‘denigrated and (literally) demonized women’ and ‘bodily fluids are viewed as ectoplasmic ick’.