It Came from The 80’s: What We Can Learn from Maybe The Most Interesting Decade of Film.
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Being born in 1979, having my most formative years shaped by countless hours spent in worlds other than my own, worlds that appeared on my TV screen during the formative years of the 80's aesthetic. I cannot claim this piece to be impartial, or unbiased. I am an ardent cinephile, I've seen many of the seminal film school standards. I love Marnau, Kurosawa, Hawks, Wilder, DeSica, Scorsese, and Wong Kar-wai as much as the next person, and yet I can and do claim that the 80s was one of the best decades for film. It was an era that was far more inventive, at least as influential, and inclusive than it’s given credit for, and far less top heavy than any era of cinema before it. Much like the fashion and music, the 80's in film was a bit of an anomaly. It was in many ways a bastard child of its predecessors, and a reluctant parent to its successors. Conceived in American imagination, ingenuity, and post modernism as a reaction to the counter culture of the 60’s and 70’s. Both a reduction and an inflation of imagination born of (at least one) of the heights of American hubris, exceptionalism, and hypocrisy. In this vacuum, 80's cinema became a free-for-all, indicative of a lopsided economic windfall, avarice, and repetition, that ultimately does a lot to dispel our ideas about creativity. While the socio economic world of those of us who lived outside the margins were beleaguered by many of these qualities, the world of make-believe seems to have been bolstered by them. With the advent of the high concept film, ( the brain child of mega producer Don Simpson meaning a film that could easily be explained in a couple of sentences) itself the the outgrowth of the major success of Jaws and Star Wars, the wallets of major studios expecting similar results opened up the door for an anything goes attitude amongst those that might otherwise have been shaky about green-lighting some of the wildest and most imaginative ideas put on celluloid.
Joe Dante's "Inner space" was one of many zany imaginative, ideas to make it to the silver screen in the 80s
Out of the ether.
Think about some of the films that came out in the 80s considering nothing like them had ever been made before.. Conan the Barbarian, An American Werewolf in London, Escape from New York, Blade Runner, Die Hard, The Terminator, Beverly Hills Cop, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Predator, Big Trouble in Little China. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the action pic were definitely not invented in this era, but they most certainly endured a prominence, effect, and popularity never seen before or after for that matter. Many of them defining not only their genre, but the decade.
The Princess Bride, Die Hard, The Breakfast Club and and The Terminator became synonymous with the 80s.
Both Science fiction and fantasy had been explored infrequently and incompletely in previous decades I would gather mostly due to the fact that the technology to properly explore these worlds wasn't yet available. Following the lasting creature effects of Jaws, and the special effects in Star Wars the floodgates of money opened, and interestingly enough it seemed when wallets open so to did minds, especially as it concerns the imagination. Later some of the decades most harrowing misses would become the tipping point that would bend the scale towards the risk averse marketing heavy principality of the current state. The effect of the outlandish approach of the Eighties in my world, was that film (and to some extent television) began to rival my precious books in ability to take me to other worlds to imagine possibilities other than my own. I, a black kid from the inner city of San Bernardino, California began to imagine worlds of my own, and from that formed a desire and a passion to become a storyteller myself, and from that - a belief I could. ESPECIALLY when in the 80s black men (Black women, unfortunately were largely left out of this upward mobility until the 90s - ) started being peppered into major roles in major Sci-fi, action, comedy, and to a much much smaller extent fantasy films. After all It can be argued that besides comedy it's been the realm of fantasy, horror, or action/adventure where marginalized people have thrived on film. From 1932's Freaks(Horror), to Coffy/Cleopatra Jones (action), Enter the Dragon (Action), Star Wars, Set it off, The Matrix, Blade, and of course Black Panther. If there are first to be accomplished on film it is usually in these genres. As a black male child in the 80s I watched the ascension of black men in these genres. Billy Dee Williams (Return of the Jedi) James Earl Jones (Conan the Barbarian) Eddie Murphy (48 hrs, Beverly Hills Cop) Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters) Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon) Bill Duke (Commando, Predator) Reginald Val Johnson (Die Hard) Moses Gunn (The Never ending Story) - began to aid in (even the slightest of ways) my ability to envision my place in these worlds. Thusly to me the decade in film represents two important themes ; 1. The importance of imagination. 2. Representation. These outlier performances and roles allowed me to form my own ideas about representation so that the stale statuesque visual identification of diversity presented in the 80s, led to my full bodied understanding of true representation as one of autonomous character motivation that interacts with, but possesses agency free of the other characters in the film. In other words I got to think about what it might,and should look like, by seeing what did and didn't work.
The steady but still top heavy appearance of African American males in prominent roles in Fantasy, Comedy, Science fiction, and Action films was vital to my youth.
Take for example “John Milius's Conan the Barbarian”. It was the first and maybe only fantasy film produced even well after it premiered that allowed for women, black people and people of color in the world of Fantasy. Conan's open, ambiguously-aged magical world was big enough and imaginative enough to include women and people of color in roles that didn't subject them to tropes or limitations common to storytelling before and for some time after 1982. In the lesser sequel both Grace Jones, and Wilt Chamberlain would join the cast, and it only made sense. In this world where Giant pythons the size of some dinosaurs exist, along with witches, and sorcerers who can transform themselves into snakes, and horned monsters, why not black men, and women, latino’s and asian men? These people were not just props, but skilled combatants, and powerful magicians, in places I had not and could not see myself. At the forefront of the film is James Earl Jones performance as Thulsa Doom. Large, regal, captivating, camp, Shakespearean. It was the earliest I can remember feeling the acting bug. His performance, and the richness of it, in combination with the way the film paid no mind to it, called no attention to it as if it had accomplished some great deed…Well that’s what made it feel great. This helped me : A. Imagine that there could be a world in which people of color existed in realms in/and outside of known reality as powerful or more powerful than any reality I seen to date. B. Imagine people of color in realms that even in the great literature of giants like Tolkien, Herbert, and Lewis, seemed populated only by white people. C. Imagine myself one day playing a role as any number of characters I found myself enamored with without restrictions. Those who decry, and dismiss fantasy as escapism, insisting on some inherent superiority of realism dismiss not only the importance of escapism as an art form itself, but the importance of imagination and curiosity not only as a coping mechanisms, but as teachers.
“Taking one step away from reality to that “safe “ place of pretend, prepares us to look at the world’s harsh realities in the face. From there we can name the horrors and celebrate the joys before going back, with a clearer perspective on situations that bother us. ”
“We know encouraging an active imagination and curiosity in children benefits them immensely, including:
the development of problem-solving skills
fostering creativity
formulation of healthy coping skills for intense emotions”
F*** it.. Do it
Conan was the start of a 10 year run of fantasy films seeking a major audience. In the same year as Conan was released, Jim Henson released a film made entirely of muppets set in a mythological world of made up creatures called The Dark Crystal. And the most interesting factor here is that neither of these films were hugely successful. In fact a great deal of high concept fantasy or science fiction films did not even recoup their budget, yet it didn't stop the constant influx. The constant support these films received despite being mostly disastrous is a phenomenon in Hollywood I cannot explain, but it’s one I wish would return. The Dark Crystal, Legend, Willow, Blade Runner, Tron, Dune, Labyrinth, all now considered cult films were moderate to disappointing critically and profit wise and yet it didn't stop Hollywood from producing Ghostbusters, Buckaroo Bonzai, The Princess Bride, Red Sonja, “The Golden Child”, or “The Highlander”. If there is anything to be mined from that decade it's not the half resurrected pet semetary that is nostalgia, or reboots of the mega franchises steeped in Reagan era exceptionalism. It’s definitely not the era's white saviorism tropes or its tokenism as one stop progress while ignoring a more wholistic expression of identity (Stranger Things I'm looking at you) or post racial messaging and white saviorism tropes. It's that very particular hubris, or can do spirit of persistence above and beyond the limited ambition of profit, or whatever it was that allowed or emboldened the industry to continue to give these films a chance to find an audience. The films were largely misunderstood, marketed incorrectly, or placed against stiff competition, and yet despite so many middling receipts in both the Sci-fi and fantasy realm Hollywood was admirably persistent in releasing at least two or three a year. Considering the output of films on the whole was considerably less than in our current era and thusly how many of those were genres outside of fantasy, science-fiction, and action it makes no sense that we see even less fantasy these days, and far less imagination. When a film like the criminally underseen "Hanna" which shares DNA with 80’s films like “D.A.R.Y.L.” , “Firestarter,” and “Cloak and Dagger” is made on a modest budget of 30 million, doubles its budget, and disappears into the ether with nothing learned, gained, or extracted from it, it is woeful to me.
Action makes it mark.
Action films in the way that we know them now, were most certainly defined by the 80s. They found their surest footing in the years ranging from 84 to 87 with a prolific release of several major franchises, and the creation of sub genres within the burgeoning genre like the buddy cop film (which had its origins in films like the “Defiant Ones”) and incentivized by the success of Walter Hill's “48 hrs” which begot films like Beverly Hills Cop, Running Scared, Lethal Weapon, and lesser copies like Tango and Cash, Red Heat, and a Dragnet remake to follow in successive years. Snobbery about what makes a film that extends from the rigid confines of auteurism, relegated these films to some sub category of good, for reasons I can’t get anyone to properly define. What exactly makes Lethal Weapon or Jumping Jack Flash, lesser films? Jumping era’s if I may to make a point, I love Le Circle Rouge, I just love Point Break more. Bigelow’s commitment to bringing the wild premise down to earth and grounding it in subtextual sensuality, and air tight precision is nothing short of amazing. The chase sequence is arguably one of the 10 or so best action sequences in film history. Heading back to the 80’s what about the emotional heft of the opening Martin Riggs scene in Lethal Weapon, and the detailed slow burn of Riggs and Murtaugh’s growing love of each other both in Lethal Weapon and along the franchise as a whole. Along with Die Hard, Lethal Weapon is a masterclass in structure, pacing, and delivery that any filmmaker worth their salt should study. Furthermore I would put John Carpenter’s work in “Big Trouble”, George Miller’s in “The Road Warrior”, or Paul Veerhoeven in “Robocop” up against any of the best of filmmaking over the years. These movies exist in a bat shit crazy narrative limbo so well defined, and yet so nebulous that their replication appears impossible, and that alone is worth some acknowledgement as to their singular greatness. The most beautiful part of all this, is while the action picture was successful to a level almost beyond reproach (similar to the comic book film today) this did not stop other genres from being equally as popular in the same decade.
The Johns
While the 80s churned out an increasing number of the genres I most loved, it's didn't leave other already established ones wanting. It’s something you definitely don’t see in our current era of film or any other. In the 80’s there really wasn’t a genre that didn’t seem to be in its full on heyday, and a great deal of them were established in that very era. The three Johns (Carpenter, Hughes, and Landis) almost certainly helped define the look and feel of an eighties film, and became the authors of the decade to the point their films and names are almost synonymous with it. The fact that all of them accomplished it with the versatility of a Michael Curtiz furthers my point. Horror, Teen dramedies, buddy comedies, science fiction and fantasy the John’s (especially Carpenter dabbled in it all, providing the 80’s with the eclectic spirit that I feel distinguished it from other eras of film. Looking out on the landscape how many teen dramas have you seen? Though recently they seem to be making a comeback with Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade, Love Simon, and Lady bird, notice how many of them are set in that very era. Horror of course never left, but what about what your horror consist of? In the 80’s it was unstoppable slashers, gremlins, critters, poltergeists, a possessed doll, werewolves, vampires, bad seeds, a guy with pins in his head, and whatever the hell Pumpkinhead was? It’s not purely the diversity of these horror projects, (horror has always been pretty diverse) but rather the gonzoness of these concepts, and that wild fact that they were actually greenlit in the first place. For his part Carpenter remade a classic with another classic, adapted one of Stephen King’s wilder short stories about a killer car, and brought us a Science Fiction/horror classic about consumerism (amongst other things) in “They Live”. Landis would delve into horror with “An American Werewolf in London” , and “Twilight Zone: The Movie” while also helming some of the definitive adult comedies of any time in “Animal House”, “The Blues Brothers”, “Trading Places”, and “Coming to America”. And Hughes, well Hughes all but created and then defined the teenage comedy , while still churning out comedies like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and Uncle Buck. These are incredible bodies of work indicative of an incredibly flexible and agile approach to movies.
Hughes , Carpenter, and Landis we're most certainly autuers, and provided much of the landscape for the 80s filmmaking.
Don Simpson's " High Concept " film ideology though maybe slightly contemptible at first glance, was really quite genius in its simplicity. By splicing together two genres of film that might not otherwise be put together you might be courting disaster, but also form the ingredients for something unique and unforgettable. Like combinations of primary colors you can blend primary genres and concoct something not altogether original and yet it's own. So when you splice a John Hughes film with vampire lore in horror you might get "The Lost Boys". The buddy cop genre with science fiction, and occult horror and arrive at the Ghostbusters. The hard boiled noir film with horror and conceive the underrated "Angel Heart". Never mind the political body horror brought on by the heyday of Cronenberg, or lynchian existential dread x pot boiler thriller in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark”. For all the lip smacking, and kissing of teeth about that era by prominent film historians ( Wikipedia suggests Kent Jones believes it the worst decade for filmmaking, though I can't find, nor have I read, or heard it from his mouth) and even one of my favorite directors (Quentin Tarantino) the 80s was far more substantive than its given credit for, and of course it bears saying that much of the criticism around its supposed lack of quality boils down to cinematic snobbery for some, and a more specifically an elitist attitude and language that still permeates cinephilic circles today represented by terms like “Elevated Horror”.
““I’ve been reading comic books since I was a kid, and I’ve had my own Marvel Universe obsessions for years,” Tarantino responded. “So I don’t really have a problem with the whole superhero thing right now, except I wish I didn’t have to wait until my 50s for this to be the dominant genre. Back in the ’80s, when movies sucked — I saw more movies then than I’d ever seen in my life, and the Hollywood bottom-line product was the worst it had been since the ’50s — that would have been a great time.””
The 80’s was in fact not run by franchises and blockbusters. We saw a great deal of the rises of, and some of the greatest works from our greatest directors in the 80's. Never mind the great films that came from directors we might not have seen be as successful afterwards. Stephen Frears ( Dangerous Liasons) saw his rise in the 80's, Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark) David Lynch (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet) Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle) David Cronenberg, (Videodrome, Scanners, The Fly) Terry Gilliam ( Time Bandits, Brazil) Michael Mann ( Thief, Manhunter) Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) , The Coen Brothers ( Blood Simple, Raising Arizona), and of course Spike Lee ( Shes Got to have it, Do the Right Thing) all saw their rise in the 80s. Meanwhile without missing a beat already proven master craftsman or imagination stations like Scorcese, Kubrick, and Spielberg were still churning out some of their best work (Raging Bull, After Hours, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Indiana Jones, The Color Purple) . Even outside the realm of American cinema Kurosawa (Ran) Shohei Imamura ( The Ballad of Narayama) Ingmar Bergman ( Fanny and Alexander) Louis Malle (My Dinner with Andre, Au Revoir les enfants) and Truffaut (The Last Metro) delivered outstanding material. The 80s seemed like a decade hell bent on recognizing the profitability, and merits of a great variety of stories. In mid-stride 1985 saw Peter Weir's "Witness" with Harrison Ford, Terry Gilliam's “Brazil”, “Back to the Future”, “The Breakfast Club”, “The Color Purple”, “Fright Night”, “The Goonies”, “The Last Dragon”, “Krush Groove”, “Pee Wee's Big Adventure”, “Prizzi's Honor”, “Ran”, “To Live and Die in LA”, “Teen Wolf”, and “A Room with a view”. 1985 is a great prism with which to grade this decade by. It is a testament to what I think makes the 80s one of the absolute best decades in cinema; genre parity, novelty, and quality.
Art by any other name.
As I’ve alluded to before, at the center of the argument that the 80’s is the worst decade in film is in my mind a long held snobbish cinematic prejudice against genre films. It limits the realm of prestige to those films that blare out their importance from the top of a mountain carved in realism and the most traditional elements of storytelling. The aesthetics must be muted -almost drab, the pacing so gradual it can on many occasions feel like a chore. This framing is not inclusive, it doesn't allow for the fact that while storytelling is in essence the same no matter what story is being told, the components, elements, and structure of different genres require and ask of us different things. This mimics the limitations of its ownership and creates hierarchies where none need be. Art by any other name/genre is still art. This stale, reduction of quality of story and importance can be dated back thousands of years, so obviously it is not new, though still on its face rather silly and egotistical...
““Then it seems that our first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest. “”
Remarking on storytelling and its role in shaping and reinforcing narratives in society - plato argued for a (rather misogynistic if you read the rest in its entirety) kind of censorship continued from the prejudices of literature that treated newer genres of storytelling like Sir Larry Wildman treated Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street”. This bias of prestige in art found its way into the early stages of Hollywood some thousands of years after Plato. A tradition that created genre ghettos only just now being addressed. Meanwhile in the here and now the 80’s engenders a strange dichotomy of thought and emotion. On the tail end of a re-emergence into the American Storytelling consciousness (because most of us who grew up in it are of age to become its champion) there have been plenty of trips down memory lane in current cinema and television. But I would argue that the Abrams, Duffer Brothers, Gunn's and to some extent Letich's of the world have only put forth an effort to haphazardly reanimate a childhood remembered for all the wrong reasons. What's missing is the true magic of delving into the void of the impossible, absurd, ludicrous, or wild in today's cinema. We have been hijacked by realism, and the most banal conceptions of creativity and fabrication. In this world of safe bets, risk-aversion, and demure pragmatism, creating entirely new worlds rarely goes beyond the conceits and restraints of this one. So you may imagine the far reaches of the universe in something like Besson's "Valerian", or even in Villanueve's upcoming “Dune" adaptation, but still confine it within the realm of a benign white supremacy. When you do imagine something as wonderful as a “Wrinkle in Time” with people of color, and black folk, the bland tableau of digital VFX built on the ruins of the human imagination tames the gesture. Here the crossing into the veil of what we don't see is never really explored, or mined to find its borders. Nothing remotely resembling the absurdity of Labyrinth, the weird and strange beauty of Fantasia, or the fanciful, and repugnant inhabitants of Jim Henson's worlds based off of the work of a Brian Froud, the scale and grandiose camp of Harryhausen (Clash of the Titans) or the iconic weirdness and texture of HR Giger (Alien), never gets into the cinematic pipeline. I wonder the effect of this on new children. My childhood was a constant state of living in between two worlds... the one I actually inhabited, and the ones I frequently visited in my head. These world's were largely inspired by the books and films of my childhood. A decade of film that allowed me to imagine broader possibilities in my own life. The elasticity of my world came by way of celluloid dreams, and my inner thoughts became expanded and emboldened by the likes of “Star Wars”, “DragonSlayer”, “LadyHawke”, “Star Trek”, “Rankin and Bass”, “Clash of the Titans”, “Heavy Metal”, and “The Neverending Story”. These movies were of course themselves limited by aspects of racism, sexism and other such worldly hindrances, but nonetheless much more fantastic and uninhibited than most of the supposedly daring films that came before or after. I miss having a sense of wonder about my world. I miss reading about the eight wonders of the world, the lochness monster, and the awe of invention. More importantly I miss having it backed up by the moving image in “Indiana Jones”, “Real Science”, and “The Abyss”. I don’t want reboots, the prostitution of nostalgia, and second class citizenship amongst film lovers. I want new explorations into new realms, with newer faces, and ideas. Made and greenlit with the same wild eyed devil- may-care attitude that regardless of why, seemed the convention in the 80’s.
1981's Possession remains one of the most daring, insane, and harrowing experiences cinema has had to offer.