Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (25 page)

But because these movies were asking ‘Why are adults so weird?’, this meant adults were made more of a central feature of teen films than ever before.

Teenagers are supposed to be rebellious: that’s what movies had been saying ever since the 1950s. Teenagers in eighties films, however, had a very different kind of rebellion. Not for them did biking across the country high on cocaine appeal. Ferris Bueller skives off school to go to a fancy restaurant, the stock exchange, a museum and a parade. Ren (Kevin Bacon) in
Footloose
wants to have a prom. Daniel (Ralph Macchio) in
The Karate Kid
wants his mother to have a nice house. Sam in
Sixteen Candles
wants to have a birthday cake. As rebellion goes, these kids make Milhouse from
The Simpsons
look like Johnny Rotten. Far from rebelling against middle-class capitalism, they are striving to be more stolidly average and middle class. Even Joel (Tom Cruise) in
Risky Business
, who would seem to be the most rebellious teenager of all when he runs a brothel out of his parents’ suburban house when they go away, is actually living by his parents’ ideals, as the film makes clear, because he is taking the money-making capitalistic lifestyle that his friends aspire to (and his parents subscribe to) to the extreme. He is rewarded for doing so when he gets offered a place at Princeton precisely because the admissions tutor is so impressed by his pimping skills (in the pantheon of films about prostitution,
Risky Business
makes
Pretty Woman
look grittily realistic). In
Back to the Future
, Marty’s meddling in the past results in his parents living in a nicer house, with chicer furnishings, posher breakfast dishes and even domestic help in the form of Biff Tannen in 1985. Marty’s triumph is to lift his family up to middle-class status.

As much as teen films railed against the importance of social class in America, the teen protagonists themselves all aimed very much to be part of the mainstream middle-class world. This is part of the reason why eighties teen films still hold so much appeal to middle-class kids today: the forms of rebellion depicted in them feel eminently accessible and familiar. When life is as comfortable as it largely is today for middle-class white kids in the western world, there’s nothing, really, to rebel against without hurting themselves, so they may as well help their parents buy a bigger house. This is anti-rebellion as a form of rebellion, and its popularity in the eighties reflects this cosiness and the conservatism of the decade.

Back to the Future
proved to teen filmmakers that they needn’t be scared of making parents part of their story. In fact, teen audiences rather liked seeing their parents humanised. Even if there has been no teen film since in which the parents are quite as centre stage as they are in
Back to the Future
, many of the funniest, smartest and sweetest depictions of parents in teen films have come in
Back to the Future
’s wake: Dan Hedaya as the terrifying litigator father in
Clueless
(so much more fun than his nineteenth-century counterpart, the profoundly irritating Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s
Emma
); Larry Miller as the neurotically protective Mr Stratford in
10 Things I Hate About You
; Eugene Levy showing those whippersnappers how comedy is done in
American Pie
; the mighty Amy Poehler as ‘the cool Mom’ in Juicy Couture in
Mean Girls
, doing her usual thing of being at once hilariously exaggerated and wholly credible.

Back to the Future
is one eighties film that would definitely be made now – plenty of spectacle, guaranteed franchise material – and it’s not too hard to imagine a studio remaking it, maybe starring Channing Tatum or some such. But it would be a completely different film because Lorraine and George would not be at the heart of it. As much as movie marketers want to reach as many quadrants of an audience as possible, teen movies today are just about teenagers and not adults, so as to keep the focus on the most important audience members: teenagers. A teen movie in which the love story is the one between the parents would be unthinkable. More obviously, the idea of a mom trying to seduce her son in a mainstream teen movie would just never fly today because that would be too risky, too ick, too dependent on subtle acting and storytelling. Stiffler’s mom seducing her son’s friends in
American Pie
? Raunchy good fun. Stiffler’s mom unwittingly seducing her son? No. Hollywood is far too risk-averse for such things now.

Teen films in the 1980s taught kids three things about their parents: if they are divorced, they’ll get back together for you; they will never notice when you’ve had a party; and they are deeply, deeply square. But George McFly and Lorraine Baines taught them something else, as well: parents are weird, but they’re weird just like you’re weird, and no matter what the kids in
The Breakfast Club
say, some day you will be them, too, and that’s why parents in smart teen films are so fun. Because while you might be able to change destiny and become a sci-fi writer instead of a bullied wimp, George McFly-style, you can’t ever change that.

TOP FIVE EIGHTIES STEVE GUTTENBERG MOMENTS

Plenty of eighties stars saw their careers die out in the nineties: Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson. But no one vanished quite as spectacularly as Guttenberg, the man who was ubiquitous in the eighties only to disappear entirely in the nineties. These are his greatest moments.

5
Short Circuit

How much you accept Guttenberg could be a scientist for the military depends on how much you rate his acting skills.

4
Three Men and a Baby

The beginning of the end for Guttenberg, I suspect, as he is totally out-charisma-ed by Tom Selleck and Ted Danson. Still, it’s one of his best films.

3
Cocoon

Why doesn’t anyone watch
Cocoon
these days? It’s such a lovely film full of such cool older people. Guttenberg doesn’t get to do much here and is acted off the screen by Don Ameche, but that’s fair enough, really.

2
Diner

Mickey Rourke – and Steve Guttenberg. Truly, a natural pairing! Guttenberg is sweet in this, playing the virginal bridegroom. You’d almost think watching it that he might become an actual actor one day.

1
Police Academy

No, I would not claim that
Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow
is the greatest contribution to the world of film since
Citizen Kane
. But I would strongly argue that Mahoney, the cheeky police recruit, is Guttenberg at his finest.

Batman
:

Superheroes Don’t Have to be Such a Drag

Along with every other over-sensitive kid of the eighties, it was love at first sight for me and the films of Tim Burton. Which was something of a surprise because the first film I saw of his – which was also the first feature film he made – was
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
. Now, despite being very much an American child of the eighties, I did not like Pee-Wee Herman. In fact, it would be fair to say that I actively disliked Pee-Wee Herman. As I was seven when the film came out, I didn’t quite have the ability to articulate what it was I didn’t like about him, but now that I’m thirty-six I very much do: I thought he was creepy.
^fn1
I might have been only a kid, but I wasn’t stupid and I could see that Pee-Wee was not so pee-wee – he was an adult. And yet, he was an adult pretending to be a kid. That’s creepy. On
Sesame Street
(my children’s TV show
du choix
), the adults acted like adults, the children acted like children and the muppets acted like muppets, just as God intended. There was no confusion between the ages or species, and that was how my hardened little conservative heart liked it.

But a girl in my first grade class, Alison Schnayerson,
^fn2
was having a birthday party, which involved going to see
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
. Obviously, you can’t turn down an invite to a seventh birthday party without incurring social death so, with a heart as heavy as when my mother dragged me to my weekly swimming lessons, I set out to meet my school friends at the 86th Street and Lexington Avenue cinema. Reader, I loved him. No, that’s not right – I never loved Pee-Wee Herman. But I loved it, the film, with its cartoonish over-exaggerations (Pee-Wee’s dreams about his bike are so theatrical they are like the fantasy dance sequence, ‘Broadway Melody’, in
Singin’ in the Rain
), the heightened colours (the rich green wooden postboxes especially appealed to me, probably because they were so far from the anonymous metallic pigeonholes we had in our apartment building) and the depiction of suburbia as a place with all sorts of nefariousness simmering beneath the manicured lawns, and worse was beyond its rose bush borders. I still thought Pee-Wee himself was weird, but somehow, getting him out across America on a task, as happens in the film, made him seem slightly less creepy than he did on his TV show,
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
, where he just sat inside and talked to the window.
^fn3
Also, he spoke less in that blaring horn-like tone in the movie than he did in the show, and that helped A LOT.
^fn4

So I liked
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
, in other words, for many of the qualities I would later recognise in all Burton’s films. Burton himself said about the movie, ‘I could add, but I wasn’t imposing my own thing on it completely. I got to take the stuff that was there and embellish it.’ It wasn’t until he made
Beetlejuice
three years later that he got to impose a lot of himself on a film, and my initial spark of love turned into a lifelong burning affair.

Beetlejuice
, which is about a couple (Geena Davis and a bizarrely miscast and visibly uncomfortable Alec Baldwin) who die and try to scare a family out of their home with the aid of the eponymous Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), is such a weird and interesting film that I’m not even going to try to discuss it here as it deserves its own chapter. So I’ll limit myself to noting just that so many of the qualities and tropes that are now seen to define a Burton film have their roots in
Beetlejuice
: the misunderstood male loner; the soulful female outsider; the permanent black sky; the raggedy rooftops; the black and white stripes; the model village.
Beetlejuice
also has the look and tone of what would become Burton’s distinctive style: cartoonish artifice coupled with noirish comedy, plus a character with whom the movie seems to feel such a strong sense of emotional affinity that it’s hard not to suspect there’s some autobiography going on. In
Beetlejuice
, this character is Lydia (Winona Ryder), the angry, gothy teenager who is filled with such righteous disgust towards her boring bourgeois father (Jeffrey Jones) and stepmother (Catherine O’Hara) and their obsession with interior decoration that she rejects them to live in the Underworld – and what teenager has not fantasised about doing that at some point? Lydia’s predicament is one that Burton repeats throughout his work: the freak stuck in an artificially beautiful world, echoing the frustration he felt when growing up in Burbank, California – Lydia even has Burton’s skew-whiff hair and his all-black uniform. ‘I know people say [my work] is slightly autobiographical but if I think about it too closely I get freaked out. It’s weird; I need to feel connected but also distanced,’ Burton said.

Kids and teenagers are pretty good at spotting phoneys, especially people who pretend they’re in touch with their younger selves when they’re really just putting on a baby voice. Burton, for better or worse, was no phoney. Despite being in his early thirties by the time the eighties ended, his films of that era expressed the mentality of a disaffected kid, one who felt ostracised from his school friends and family and told himself that this proved he was morally superior. And yet, he had the maturity to construct this mentality into wonderful and strange stories. I loved to read about his early, miserable years working as an illustrator at Disney, which he joined when he was twenty-one: ‘I was very strange back then. I could see I had a lot of problems. I was always perceived as weird. I would sit in a closet a lot of the time and not come out, or I would sit on top of my desk, or under my desk, or do weird things like get my wisdom teeth out and bleed all over the hallways … I was having emotional problems at that stage. I didn’t know who I was,’ he said.

Already by the age of ten, I was starting to cultivate my own sense of estrangement from my peers, holding it close to my chest and stroking it jealously, like Blofeld petting his white cat. I had neither the emotional problems nor, arguably, the courage of Burton to externalise my sense of inner weirdness as much as he did, but it thrilled me to know I could watch things made by someone who, I felt sure, understood my own increasingly lonely confusion. What nineties teenagers felt about Kurt Cobain, I felt about Tim Burton in the late eighties.

I think part of the reason I and so many other former eighties kids feel such a strong affinity with Burton is because, in many ways, he grew up alongside us. Although he is about two decades older than my generation, having been born in 1958, his films seemed to go through the same life-stages as us in real time: there were his childlike playful years when he started, with
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
,
Beetlejuice
and
Batman
;
^fn5
his step into teenagehood in the nineties with his more self-consciously gothy films that celebrated outsiders and loners, such as
Edward Scissorhands
, as well as
Ed Wood
and
Mars Attacks!
; his stumble into adulthood in the 2000s, with sentimental films about the impact of the death of one’s parents (
Big Fish
,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
^fn6
), half-hearted attempts at big-budget films for grown-ups (
Planet of the Apes
) and kids (
Alice in Wonderland
), and a creative stasis with films apparently made on sleepy autopilot (
Sweeney Todd
,
Sleepy Hollow
); his eventual happy maturity, with films that featured his familiar interests (
Frankenweenie
) but without the narcissistic tendency of his youth to make films only about himself (
Big Eyes
).