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

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Source ISBN: 9780007585618

Version: 2016-05-20

Dedication

For Andy, who is even better than Andrew McCarthy,
Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy,
Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd.

Combined.

Contents

Dirty Dancing
: Abortions Happen and That’s Just Fine

The Princess Bride
: True Love Isn’t Just About the Kissing Parts

Pretty in Pink
: Awkward Girls Should Never Have Makeovers

When Harry Met Sally
: Romcoms Don’t Have to Make You Feel Like You’re Having a Lobotomy

Ghostbusters
(with a Segue into
Top Gun
): How to be a Man

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
: The Impact of Social Class

Steel Magnolias
: Women are Interesting

Back to the Future
: Parents are Important

Batman
: Superheroes Don’t Have to be Such a Drag

Eddie Murphy’s Eighties Movies
: Race can be Transcended

‘Whatever happened to chivalry? Does it only happen in eighties movies? I want John Cusack holding a boombox outside my window. I wanna ride off on a lawnmower with Patrick Dempsey. I want Jake from
Sixteen Candles
waiting outside the church for me. I want Judd Nelson thrusting his fist into the air because he knows he just got me. Just once, I want my life to be like an eighties movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life.’

I am not actually quoting myself here, though heaven knows I could be (except for the part about wanting the moronic Jake from
Sixteen Candles
for reasons that shall be explained soon enough). That monologue comes from the film
Easy A
, which was released in 2010, and is spoken by Olive, played by Emma Stone, an actress who was born years after most of the movies her character mentions came out. Two years after
Easy A
was released,
Pitch Perfect
arrived and, once again, a film made thirty years earlier was the inspiration and crucial plot point for a twenty-first-century teen film: ‘
The Breakfast Club
, 1985, the greatest ending to any movie ever. [The Simple Minds’] song perfectly sums up the movie in that it’s equally beautiful and sad,’ Jesse (Skyler Astin) tells a sceptical Beca (Anna Kendrick). But, of course, Beca’s scepticism is as misplaced as the assistant principal’s mistrust in Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and the rest of the kids in the 1985 film, because it is only when she watches John Hughes’s
The Breakfast Club
that Beca learns to open up emotionally (moviespeak for ‘stop being such a frigid cow and snog some dude’) and, more importantly, win the a cappella competition. (Winning an a cappella competition. That is what teens have to live for today. To quote one of the greatest of all eighties teen films,
^fn1‘I weep for the future.’) Every week, it seems, it’s announced that another eighties film is being remade, sequelised or turned into a stage musical, from
Top Gun
to
The Goonies
to
Dirty Dancing
, invariably starring actors who weren’t even born when the originals came out. In 2013 the pop band The 1975 said of their newly released eponymous debut album, ‘We’re massive fans of John Hughes. We wanted to make a record [that] was almost a soundtrack to our teenage years. If he made a movie about us, this would be the soundtrack.’
Their lead singer was born in the nineties.

I was born in New York City in 1978 meaning that, while I did exist in the eighties as more than a zygote, I wasn’t yet a teenager either. Instead, actual teenagehood for myself felt as distant and desirable as the moon. I was a typical older child from a middle-class Jewish family: well-behaved, anxious, bookish, and therefore especially curious about the vaguely imagined freedoms I fancied being a teenager would bring. My little sister and I weren’t allowed to watch television stations that showed commercials – yes, I come from one of those families – meaning that our viewing options were limited to
Sesame Street
and whatever our mother allowed us to rent from East 86th Street Video. When I was nine years old, she, for the first time, allowed me to rent something that featured neither animation nor starred Gene Kelly:
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
. I couldn’t believe it. How on earth could she – the dorkiest mother EVER, who only ever gave us FRUIT for dessert, I mean I ask you – let me watch such a film? This movie featured BOYS, actual real life BOYS! Kissing girls – with their tongues! Within the extremely limited framework of my life experience on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, my mother had basically allowed me to rent hardcore porn (tongues!).

Ferris
proved to be a mere gateway drug, and I became such a heavy user of East 86th Street Video that for my tenth birthday my parents gave me my own membership card. I was soon mainlining the classics:
Mannequin
,
Romancing the Stone
,
Good Morning Vietnam
,
The Breakfast Club
,
Short Circuit
,
Indiana Jones
,
E.T.
,
Spaceballs
,
Coming to America
,
Three Amigos!
,
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
, anything produced by Touchstone Pictures and absolutely everything featuring the two actors who I assured my little sister were the real talents of our era: Steve Guttenberg and Rick Moranis. My highbrow taste, which has lasted all my life, was forged then.

These movies, which were largely seen as junk when they came out, were deeply formative, and everyone I know in my generation feels exactly the same way. They provided the lifelong template for my perceptions of funniness (Eddie Murphy), coolness (Bill Murray) and sexiness (Kathleen Turner). They also taught me more about life than any library or teacher ever would. My parents could have saved literally thousands of dollars, jacked in the schools and kept the membership to East 86th Street Video and I’d still be essentially the same person today.

But for a long time, these films had a terrible reputation, critically speaking. They were – and largely still are – dismissed as being as drecky as Ray, Egon, Winston and Peter at the beginning of the
Ghostbusters
sequel. Sold out and bloated, something faintly embarrassing from the past that has left an ugly legacy of franchises and superheroes. Eighties Hollywood, goes the popular critical thought, is when movies started to go wrong: they became obsessed with money and sequels and explosions and cheap gags as opposed to Art. Whereas the far more respected 1970s was the era of the auteur, when Hollywood directors like Robert Altman and Michael Cimino were allowed to pursue their creativity unhindered by studio meddling, the 1980s was the era of the producer, when entertainment took precedence and cartoonish figures like creepy Don Simpson and Jon Peters – who started his career as Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser – were the ones with the power.

Many have bemoaned this shift in power from the seventies to the eighties, aghast that the man who once permed Yentl’s hair commanded the kind of industry respect once accorded to Altman. But my personal feeling is, when working in the entertainment business, an emphasis on actual entertainment is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it means producing something like
Top Gun
instead of
Heaven’s Gate
. After all, pretty much everyone, if they’re honest, is happy to watch some eighties Cruise on a Friday night, but only a very special few would kick off the weekend by cracking open a Cimino DVD.

Yet snooty critics aside, eighties movies have maintained an astonishing level of popularity among actual audiences, now, it feels, more than ever. It is taken as a given that mainstream American films from the 1980s have a kind of ironic appeal – everyone wants to watch
Trading Places
,
Scrooged
and
Die Hard
at Christmas – to the point that to use a photo from an eighties movie as your Facebook avatar is pretty much a hopeless cliché. Partly this veneration comes from what I call the thirty-year rule. This is when movies – and fashions, and TV shows, and pop music – that were dismissed as trash in their day are given their overdue status when their original fans grow up and insist that the culture of their youth was ACTUALLY really important and ACTUALLY nothing’s been as good since. But adults today who saw those eighties movies as kids still adore them in a way that those who came of age in, say, the sixties most definitely do not of the
Beach Party
franchise, the teen movies of their youth. If anything, I love these eighties movies even more than when I first saw them, which is not something I’d say about anything else that I considered cool in the eighties (sorry, Milli Vanilli. Although if it’s any consolation, you’re still on my iPod and I’m not ashamed of that). More strikingly, teenagers today who were born long after the decade itself love eighties movies in a way I certainly never did of the movies my parents grew up with.

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