Eugene Hernandez: It Came from the ‘80s by Eugene Hernandez (August 10, 2009)
Images from two 1984 films, Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise" and John Hughes' "Sixteen Candles".
East Hampton, NY, August 9, 2009—As crazy as it sounds, we’re closing in on the end of another decade. But, before focusing on the the best movies of the past ten years, I’m drawn to dwell on a different decade altogether. The 1980s. I was chatting with my new colleague Anne Thompson the other day and she implored me to start writing a weekly column for indieWIRE. “Spend a few hours on a Sunday, writing,” she advised me. Frankly, the task is a bit daunting, but by Friday morning I realized that if I spent some time at my laptop today I’d have a topic worth exploring (at least this week). The deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day earlier this summer inspired a deeper look at the music & TV of the ‘80s. And then, Thursday’s sudden passing of writer/director John Hughes cast a spotlight on the mainstream movies of that much maligned decade, an era that was actually even more interesting because of what was happening on the margins of moviemaking. “I don’t think I’m alone among my cohorts in the belief that John Hughes was our Godard, the filmmaker who crystallized our attitudes and anxieties with just the right blend of teasing and sympathy,” wrote New York Times critic A.O. Scott in a tribute to Hughes on Friday. “Mr. Godard described ‘Masculin Féminin’, his 1966 vehicle for Jean-Pierre Leaud and Ms. Karina, as a portrait of ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Ringwald, in ‘Pretty in Pink’, were corresponding icons for the children of Ronald Reagan and New Coke.” “In Godard, there is ‘God’,” I heard a film critic say—in front of Godard—at the Cannes Film Festival nearly ten years ago. To compare Hughes to that deified French auteur is quite bold, but I see what Scott is getting at. As a guy who was in high school in the ‘80s (“Don’t You Forget About Me” was a song at my graduation), I appreciated Hughes’ sincere cinematic attempts to look at my generation. I like his movies, yet his smart talking Midwestern characters couldn’t have felt more foreign to a Latino kid at a Catholic school in Southern California. Even so, Hughes’s movies captured that decade (and its conservatism) better than any others of the era. As A.O. Scott wisely noted, “The haircuts, the music, the clothes—it’s all there, and also something of the buoyancy and confusion of being young in those days when VCRs were still a novelty, and vinyl records were not yet obsolete, when text was not a verb, and the potential of the Internet was something not even the nerds of ‘Weird Science’ could intuit.” What makes the ‘80s so interesting, to me, is that while Hughes was exploring teen lives from Hollywood, in other parts of the country, a whole different set of artists were sowing the seeds of an American film movement brimming with promise. (One that would deliver both great thrills and some tremendous disappointments along the way). Back on January 20th of this year, Inauguration Day, I moderated a panel at the Sundance Film Festival aimed at exploring the 25 year history of the festival. Steven Soderbergh, Barbara Kopple, Gregg Araki and Tom DiCillo were tapped to help discuss where independent film had been and where it was going.
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There was some good films in the 80’s. How about Repo Man?
But I can’t help thinking that the 80’s was the beginning of the end for film (and music and art). Even at the time, it was pretty clear that it was an uninspired time for film. It was when the corporations really took over the studios, laws preventing their dominance in the theaters were relaxed, multi-media empires started to form and the blockbuster film came into its own. It was also when Katzenberg and others started dumbing scripts down to appeal to foreign markets. Any stylistic breakthroughs of the 70’s (remember the jump cut?) were basically dismissed in the conservative, Reagan 80’s. Art houses started to close as VHS became popular. Artists grants vanished.
But the artists, also, were just not as cool. Think of Sting compared with Mick Jagger. One is cool, the other was just acting cool - guess which one. That was the 80’s all over, just posing, trying to be cool, but not really being cool. I don’t think anyone would call Soderbergh cool. Tom DiCillo was a classic poser. Jarmusch was pretty cool, but he was also riffing on Wim Wenders style before him. While someone like Karismaki took that style and made it their own, Jarmusch sort of fizzled out and his new work looks dated, or worse, boring.
I remember thinking in the 80’s that it couldn’t get any worse for art, but, of course, it did.