Authors: Hadley Freeman
Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (18 page)
One could easily argue that it was the eighties that started this trend of infantilisation and especially infantilised men, which makes sense as this was the decade of the so-called backlash against feminism. After all, it was the eighties that saw a huge rise in youth culture, with MTV and teen movies dominating the pop culture, as well as the growth of high-concept movies, which are the definition of an infantilised artform. In his both fascinating and charmingly pretentious essay on 1989’s
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
, Peter Biskind argues that George Lucas and, in particular, Steven Spielberg popularised in the seventies and especially the eighties ‘the echt lesson of the sixties: don’t trust adults, particularly those in authority.’
Star Wars
, most obviously, is a film about kids versus parents (i.e., the Empire), with the kids being very much on the side of the good. Lucas then described
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
as a movie ‘for the kids in all of us’, and movies like
Star Wars
and
Indiana Jones
encourage a childlike unquestioning sense of awe in audiences of all ages (‘I want a movie to overwhelm me,’ Spielberg once said), bludgeoning them with spectacle and old-fashioned derring-do, replacing the more complex and anguished post-Vietnam films of the 1970s with something far more simple with clear-cut good guys and bad guys.
Spielberg has been fond of the-wisdom-of-children versus the-obtuseness-of-adults trope in his films for decades, and this is perhaps most obvious in the films he made in the eighties. In
E.T.
, Elliott is shown to be the one who should control the situation, not his mother and certainly not the US government. In
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
, Indy is emphatically in the child’s role, locked in an Oedipal battle with his father (Sean Connery), who he resents but also wants desperately to please, like the neediest of adolescent boys.
The eighties saw a weird flurry of actual man-boys in a slew of utterly disposable films about fathers, grandfathers and sons swapping bodies:
Vice Versa
(Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage),
18 Again!
(George Burns and Charlie Schlatter),
Like Father, Like Son
(Dudley Moore and Kirk Cameron) and
Dream a Little Dream
(Jason Robards and Corey Feldman – not, I suspect, a film Robards looked back on with much pride). Yet all these movies show that being an adult is preferable: you get to have sex, drive cars, not go to school and not listen to your parents. Being a kid, in these films, sucks.
The wonderful if deeply, deeply weird 1988 film
Big
comes closer to the current mentality that idealises man-boys. When thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin asks the arcade game Zoltar the Magnificent to make him big, he becomes Tom Hanks, replete with Tom Hanks’s chest hair and Tom Hanks’s penis, which is more than I ever got from an arcade game. As an adult but with a child’s mentality, he charms women and work colleagues at his new job at a toy manufacturer, the insinuation being that his delightful innocence is just what the world of adulthood needs. This theory works well enough in the arena of Josh’s job – who better to come up with ideas for toys for kids than a kid? – but gets decidedly icky when it comes to Josh’s love life. The intimation here is that what a jaded thirty-something career woman needs in her life is a man who is – and acts like – a prepubescent virgin. If I ever went back to a man’s apartment with him, and he suggested we sleep on different levels of a bunk bed, as happens to Susan (Elizabeth Perkins) when she goes to Josh’s loft for the first time, I wouldn’t think, Wow, what a sweet guy! I’m so girlishly excited about his innocent way of seeing the world! Instead, I would pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello? Operator? Put me through to the Weirdos on the Loose Unit.’ This, however, is not Susan’s reaction and she eventually sleeps with and moves in with the chap Carrie Bradshaw would refer to as Bunk Bed Guy, which is weird in itself, but even weirder for the audience who knows that Josh – I repeat – is thirteen years old.
‘It’s emphasised in the screenplay that it was a secret he was a little boy,’ says Tom Hanks, a little defensively when asked about this. ‘And when we shot the scene when they’re about to be intimate for the first time and there’s that bit when he turns the light back on because I thought, well there’s no way a thirteen-year-old boy wouldn’t want to see this.’
Sure, the sex scene is believable but that doesn’t mean it’s not weird, right? He’s THIRTEEN.
‘Yeah,’ he agrees. ‘It was weird.’
But at least in the case of
Big
and all the body swap films, the reason the man is acting like a boy is because he is, actually, a boy. In none of these films, no matter how much they celebrate George Lucas’s ‘the child within us all’ is there any suggestion that men should resist growing up, or that this is even their natural inclination. The reason the Ghostbusters represent an idealised sort of masculinity to me is because they’re neither patrician nor man-boys – they’re just funny, friendly guys whose funniness doesn’t depend on misogyny or insecurity. Is that really too much to ask for these days?
fn15
They were enough like my father when I was a kid to feel reassured by them (Harold Ramis), they were enough like me so that I wanted them to be my friends and giggle with them (Bill Murray), and they were handsome enough so that I wanted to do things to them I was only starting to understand (Aykroyd, obviously
fn16
). And those things still hold true, onscreen and, it turns out, off.
In early 2014 I was sent by the
Guardian
, where I work when I’m not watching eighties movies, to Los Angeles to cover the Oscars and the
Vanity Fair
party, the famous post-ceremony event. It so happened that Bill Murray had presented an award and had made an impromptu tribute to Harold Ramis, who’d died that year. When I saw him at the party, I didn’t even stop to think or take the time to feel shy. I just instinctively ran up to him in an unashamedly starstruck way.
‘Mr Murray,
Ghostbusters
is my favourite movie in the world. What is the secret of
Ghostbusters
’ everlasting appeal?’ I burbled breathlessly, simultaneously terrified and elated in that way you are when you meet your heroes.
He looked down at me (Murray is surprisingly tall), his hair now grey, but still as skew-whiff as Peter Venkman’s after a ghost shoot-out. For a mortifying second, I thought he’d tell me to get lost.
‘Friendship,’ he replied without a pause. And then he gave me a noogie.
TOP FIVE MONTAGES
(yes, I left out the Rocky training montage. Too easy)
5 The volleyball game, ‘Playing with the Boys’ by Kenny Loggins,
Top Gun
Topless sweaty men playing sport and a song called ‘Playing with the Boys’ by Kenny Loggins – seriously, what else can you possibly want from an eighties montage?
4 The Ghostbusters get successful, ‘Ghostbusters’ by Ray Parker Jr,
Ghostbusters
Classic montage with newspaper front pages spinning across the screen, and a VERY cute photo of Aykroyd on the cover of
Time
magazine.
fn17
The cameos from real eighties DJs, such as Casey Kasem and Larry King, make me go a little weepy.
3 Alex practises dancing, ‘Maniac’ by Michael Sembello,
Flashdance
She welds – and then she dances! And when she dances there are a thousand close-ups on her arse. This is pure Bruckheimer and Simpson as they were hitting their stride.
2 Baby learns to dance, ‘Hungry Eyes’ by Eric Carmen,
Dirty Dancing
So sexy, so adorable. I just love the bit when her trainers suddenly morph into dancing shoes. I could watch this montage a million times, and I probably have.
1 The trip to the Chicago Institute of Art, ‘Please, Please, Please’ by the Dream Academy,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
John Hughes’s self-described ‘self-indulgent’ scene, and all the more moving for it. This is the scene that confirms
Ferris Bueller
to be the most poetic of all the eighties teen films, and perhaps of all teen films ever.
The eighties, goes the general thinking, was the decade of venality. No one in America – heck, in the WORLD – had been interested in making money before the 1980s came along and corrupted us all. It was, apparently, the era in which everyone walked around in gold lamé and regarded Ivana Trump as the last word in understated chic. Seriously, you couldn’t take the dog for a walk in the eighties without tripping over a giant Versace gold logo. And a pair of giant shoulder pads. And a massive pile of cocaine. And cocaine plays absolute HAVOC with one’s Armani stilettos.
Maybe it was – far be it from me to cast aspersions on lazy descriptions of an era – but a little-remarked-upon truth is that this is not, in fact, the mentality depicted in many mainstream eighties movies. Many Hollywood movies argued for, if not actual class warfare, then certainly a suspicion of wealth. Repeatedly, wealthy people are depicted as disgusting, shallow and even murderous, while working-class people are noble and good-intentioned, such as in not exactly niche films like
Wall Street
,
fn1
Beverly Hills Cop
,
Ruthless People
,
Raising Arizona
and
Overboard
. Contrast this with today’s films like
Iron Man
, in which the billionaire is the superhero (and is inspired by actual billionaire Elon Musk), and the deeply, deeply weird
The Dark Knight Rises
, in which the villain advocates the redistribution of wealth – HE MUST BE DESTROYED. But the eighties films that were the most interested in issues of class were, of all things, the teen films.
The motivating force of almost every single classic eighties teen film was not, in fact, selling soundtracks, watching an eighteen-year-old Tom Cruise try to get laid or seeing what ridiculous hairdo Nicolas Cage would sport this time round, but social class. There’s
The Karate Kid
, in which the son of a single mother unsuccessfully tries to hide his poverty from the cool kids at school who make fun of his mother’s car;
Dirty Dancing
, in which a middle-class girl dates a working-class boy, much to her liberal father’s horror;
Can’t Buy Me Love
, in which a school nerd gains popularity by paying for it;
Valley Girl
, in which an upper-middle-class girl dates working-class boy;
Say Anything
, in which a privileged girl dates lower-middle-class army brat and her father turns out to be a financial criminal;
The Flamingo Kid
, in which a working-class kid is dazzled by a wealthy country club and starts to break away from his blue-collar father; and all John Hughes’s teen films.
Of course, issues of class can be found in the undercurrents of pretty much any American movie, from
The Philadelphia Story
to
The Godfather
. The difference with eighties teen films is that they were completely overt in their treatment of it: class is the major motivator of plot, even if it’s easy to miss next to the pop songs and Eric Stoltz’s smile. All these films stress emphatically that the money your family has determines everything, from who your friends are, who you date, your social standing in school, your parents’ happiness and aspirations and your future. They, to varying degrees, rage against the failure of the American Dream. They stress that true class mobility is pretty much impossible, and certainly interclass friendships and romances are unlikely, for the simple reason that rich people are assholes and lower-middle-class and working-class people are good. Which was unfortunate because according to the vast majority of eighties teen movies, the only way a teenager could truly move up out of their socio-economic group was if they dated someone wealthier than them, Cinderella-style.
The one exception to this rule is
Back to the Future
, which definitely does not rage against the American system; instead, it concludes that, yes, money does buy happiness and that’s just great. When Marty returns from 1955 to 1985, he realises that he has inadvertently changed history so that now his parents, formerly poor and therefore miserable and barely on speaking terms, are now rich and therefore happy and cheerfully smack each other’s backsides: ‘I remember how upset Crispin [Glover, who played George McFly] and Eric [Stoltz, who was originally cast as Marty] were about the ending of
Back to the Future
: now that they have money they’re happy,’ recalls Lea Thompson, who played Lorraine Baines McFly. ‘They thought it was really outrageous. It went right over my head, of course. Maybe because I was poor and when I got wealthy I was happy!’
‘The point was that self-confidence and the ability to stand up for yourself are qualities that lead to success,’ says Bob Gale, co-writer of
Back to the Future
. ‘So we showed George and Lorraine had an improved standard of living, we showed them loving toward each other, and we showed that George was a successful author. It was the way to show the audience that George had indeed become a better man. And, of course, in the beginning, we depicted George as a loser, Lorraine as a drunk, with a terrible car and a house full of mismatched and worn-out furnishings.’
Back to the Future
is such a charming film that it’s easy to be swept along by it and not notice this equation of lower-middle-class status with being a ‘loser’. But it does echo precisely the same message that other eighties teen films sent: the class you are born into dictates every aspect of your life.
‘Class has always been the central story in America, not race – class,’ says Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and producer of
Dirty Dancing
. ‘And when you’re a teenager you really start to notice this.’ And there was no teen filmmaker who felt this as deeply as Hughes.