The 80s are back, baby.
There's this idea in media criticism called "The Thirty-Year Cycle." When it comes to nostalgia, well really there's a lot of cycle.
There's a 40-year cycle, a 20-year cycle.
It's no coincidence that we're seeing so many sequels and reboots from movies from the mid-1990s.
And in the 90s, there was a lot of media that reflected nostalgia for the 60s and 70s.
And in the 70s and 80s, there was a particular fondness for 1950s nostalgia,
with the likes of Happy Days, Back to the Future, American Graffiti, and Grease.
But I find the 30-year cycle is particularly relevant when it comes to visual mass media,
as that's the one that reflects filmmakers, now probably parents themselves,
portraying their vision of their own childhood. And on the consumer side,
you've got this market of people who now have disposable income and a lot of rose-colored glasses for their own childhoods.
But it's not just that this 80s revival is happening.
It's that it's really really popular, and not always in the fun way,
when we've somehow managed to elect the man who was directly parodised in "Back to the Future II."
"Who would have thought that with Back to the Future II, you essentially predicted the
"situation we're in right now with Biff and Donald Trump."
"You know, we didn't have-- no no no no, we never, we never were audacious enough to think that even Biff would run for president."
Thor: Ragnarok features an aesthetic greatly influenced by pulpy sci-fi from the 1980s,
from the color scheme, to the editing, and especially the score:
[80s-style synth music plays]
This was played up heavily in the marketing, and Thor: Ragnarok is already the highest-grossing and most critically successful Thor movie.
But the real barnburners here are IT, the feature adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 novel,
and Netflix's streaming sensation Stranger Things.
IT defied all expectations by being an R-rated horror movie that grossed approximately
1 sh**-million dollars.
It is currently the #5 grossing movie for the year. And this on a budget of $35 million and with a cast of unknown children.
The nostalgia pendulum still moves, and this year it swung hard to the 80s.
"This is finger-lickin' good."
Just like in the 80s, when we were fondly looking back to a sanitized version of the 50s.
So is this just the same old nostalgia pendulum?
Or is the cycle of nostalgia ever going to evolve, grow more sophisticated than, "Hey, remember the thing?"
"God, you are such a nerd."
The study of nostalgia as it pertains to media trends hit the mainstream with Marc LeSueur's essay,
"Anatomy of Nostalgia Films: Heritage and Methods" in 1977.
And wouldn't you know, that was the year Star Wars came out,
itself a product of a 30-year cycle based on serials from the 1940s and 50s,
as well as the highest-grossing film in history at the time of its release.
The success of Star Wars meant that the nostalgia pendulum wasn't going to go away, so film academics were like,
"Hey, we should probably figure out what this means and why audiences respond to it." For LeSueur,
nostalgia was a concept of history, one for which few have attempted to establish the general working principles.
LeSueur's ideas were expanded upon by Svetlana Boym in the 1990s,
developing two main types of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, and reflective nostalgia.
Restorative nostalgia represents a somewhat aggressive impulse, motivating attempts to recapture and revitalized an imagined past.
To make America great again, if you will.
Reflective nostalgia is escapist in nature, and characterized by wistful longings for what has become lost to time. According to LeSueur,
reflective nostalgia is most typically experienced for eras historically unremarkable, devoid of momentous or sociopolitical events,
and thus characterized by simplicity and stability.
Which is why 50s nostalgia in the 80s is so relevant. The 1950s was not a stable time in world history.
"Be like Burt. When there is a flash, duck-and-cover, and do it fast."
But the day-to-day kind of felt like that for some people, and nostalgia has framed it as such.
Simplicity and stability certainly do figure into mythic conceptions of the 1950s.
"You know I saw it on a re-run."
"What's a re-run?"
And nostalgia does indeed become attached to moments immediately preceding significant change,
which is why, in America at least, nostalgia is more attached to the 1950s than to the 1960s.
"Isn't it great there's only white people here?"
LeSueur suggests that nostalgia attaches itself to aspects of the past which have not fully exhausted themselves,
including practices and desires which continue to have relevance into the present.
But in addition to this idea of restorative and reflective nostalgia,
I'd like to suggest another type of nostalgia:
deconstructive.
"We can duck and cover. There's a fallout shelter right--"
"There's no way to survive this, you idiot!"
"You mean we're all going--?"
"To die, Mansley, for our country."
It's still nostalgic.
There's always something comforting about retreating into the past.
But it's also more critical of the past, rather than affirming or reconstructive.
One of the best examples of a movie that is deconstructive is The Iron Giant,
which was made in the 1990s, and takes place in the 1950s.
"You think this metal man is fun, but who built it? The Russians, the Chinese, Martians, Canadians?
"I don't care!
"All I know is, we didn't build it, and that's reason enough to assume the worst and blow it to kingdom come!"
To borrow a term from Stranger Things,
deconstructionist is the "upside down" of reflective and restorative media.
And this dichotomy doesn't always have to be nostalgic. It can take place in the culture as it happens.
"...challenges our own sense of priority in the universe."
Well, let's look at two examples of paranormal action movies from the 1980s.
First, Ghostbusters. A much more, erm,
Reagan-y movie than a lot of people remember it.
"I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
Ghostbusters is effectively the story of four righteous entrepreneurs
who start a business with a service that everyone needs and appreciates,
but the EPA keeps trying to shut them down because regulation bad.
Ghostbusters carries some serious pro-capitalist, pro-business subtext.
So, in a lot of ways, the "upside down" of Ghostbusters
is John Carpenter's They Live.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.
And I'm all out of bubblegum.
They Live was based on a 1963 short story inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
which itself is a product of anxieties over secret communists among us in the 1950s.
"They have to be destroyed. All of them."
"They will be. Every one of them."
They Live is about a man who, through the use of a pair of magic glasses,
realizes that the ruling class are aliens grooming humans to consume and stay in line.
There are those out there since the release of this movie
who takes stories like this to their literal extreme,
but most people, including Carpenter himself, see They Live as a parable of consumerism.
Ghostbusters is more affirming of the 1980s hyper capitalist culture.
They Live is critical and deconstructionist.
But that isn't to say that there is necessarily a hard line between
deconstructionist and nostalgic.
The Wolf of Wall Street is a good example of a movie that tries to have it both ways.
The 80s sure were debauched and immoral--look at these awful people--but aren't they kind of awesome and fun?
Look at the consequences--but don't you also kind of want to be them?
So, where do Stranger Things and IT fall into all of this?
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that a huge component to the success of Stranger Things
is in the way it invokes 80s iconography.
From the Drew Struzan-inspired posters,
to the Stephen King-inspired opening credits,
to the TV movie-of-the-week inspired score,
to pulling its plot directly from 80s movies like E.T.,
Poltergeist,
Firestarter,
The Goonies,
A Nightmare on Elm Street,
and Stand By Me.
It is not a remake, by any stretch,
but it contains a lot of homage.
There is some historical revisionism, yes. According to Mike Bartlett,
In a lot of ways, they don't talk and act like 80s kids, because then they might come across
to modern audiences as unsympathetic.
But Stranger Things, for all its horror theming and bleak tone, ultimately hews way closer to celebratory and nostalgic
than deconstructionist and critical of the 1980s.
According to Mike Bartlett,
But if there's any deconstruction of 80s nostalgia in this new crop, it's IT.
And IT is already a strange adaptational beast.
For one thing, IT was itself a product of a 30 year cycle within the text, with half of the book taking place
in the 1980s, with the Losers Club as adults, and the other half in the 1950s,
with the Losers Club as kids.
The way the movie handles this - smartly, by the by - is by cutting the book into two movies:
Chapter One with the kids' timeline, and the as-yet-unmade Chapter Two with adults.
And having Chapter One take place in our 30-year cycle of the 1980s,
rather than the original flashback date of the 1950s.
The new movie did make some changes that I don't quite get.
Mike in the book is more the researcher character,
but in the movie, the role of researcher is given to Ben.
Presumably so Ben will be less useless and more sympathetic as a love interest.
Which means that Mike's character is relegated to just, like, the black guy.
I also think Pennywise kidnapping Bev at the end was kind of lame and doesn't really make much sense.
But it also made changes that make it more thematically streamlined,
and most of the changes were positive ones.
The book kind of reads like it was written on a months-long cocaine bender in a single draft.
Which it probably was.
The themes played up in the movie of injustice and abuse are definitely there,
but you kind of have to dig to find it.
But one noteworthy change, I find, is the shift in what are in the book grisly murders, to disappearances.
Which is especially relevant to the 1980s, because there was a national fixation and paranoia at the time with child abduction.
Especially with some high-profile cases, one of which, the case of Jacob Wetterling, who disappeared in 1989,
the year this movie is set, was only closed this year.
So one element of the 80s that the new movie includes that the book didn't, is this memory of this period of history where
child abductions were at the forefront of everybody's mind.
In the book, there are plenty of sympathetic authority figures. In the new movie, there are NONE.
All of the adults are part of the sickness that embody the town.
When Georgie disappears, for instance, this lady sees a pool of blood
but doesn't say or do anything.
The question of what Pennywise is, exactly,
is pushed to the subtext because the metaphor is more important: Pennywise is the embodiment of
racism,
bigotry,
abuse,
even neglect.
The movie does add in little nostalgic nods, like Ben being into New Kids on the Block.
But overall the film does not paint a very comforting picture of the 80s.
"Stop!"
"Let me light his hair like Michael Jackson."
Does that mean IT is deconstructionist rather than nostalgic?
Well, yes and no.
It falls more on The Wolf of Wall Street side of things where it kind of goes both ways.
Its mere existence harkens to nostalgia. People remember the Tim Curry movie, probably as being better than it was.
But it does not paint a reassuring, comfortable picture of the 1980s.
It does not evoke, in either a storyline or its filmmaking, the fun part of the 80s.
Stranger Things owes a lot to the work of Stephen King,
but if you read Stephen King's writing, which I did a LOT when I was in high school because we didn't have YA yet,
you see that he's fascinated with the dark underbelly of the mundane,
including the way that we frame the past, which is why half of IT is set in the 50s.
So when you look at the 80s Stranger Things remembers, it's the fun adventure movies part,
whereas the 80s IT remembers is "stranger danger."
And also NKOTB.
The study of nostalgia, be it restorative, reflective, or deconstructive,
is relevant because when we as a culture bury our own sorrows by retreating into the past, it provides a lens to now.
These two examples of IT and Stranger Things provide a palatable version of the 80s, sure, but it's no coincidence either
that they are horror and suspense.
There's always mirror elements in these nostalgia time cycles.
The 80s: being a post-war, post-recession, and a conservative government,
looking back to the 50s: a post-war, booming economy, and a conservative government.
And now us looking back on the 80s from the present day, with our post-war, post-recession, okay economy, and a cons-- Ugh.
Maybe a part of why we feel this need to escape the dumpster fire of today into the past
is because the past is a mirror.
"We're in deep shit."
And we survived it then. Maybe we'll survive this now.
Right?
[80s music plays]