The 80s, myth and reality?

[Frunobulax]

I mean in the sense of showing a f....d up world.

Well, for that you'd have to buy the world was f'ed up. A lot of good came from that period of time. Hollywood is the last place to look for an honest reflection of any period.

 

[Edward]

I remember reading some years ago that the most common trend in 'nostalgia' among any age-group is one which fixes on a decade immediately prior to that during which the age-group were primarily born. Seems fairly accurate from what I see in pop culture / on the street, though with my students I see little difference as time passes. There is a large photo up in our department's lobby of the intake of postgrad law students the first year we moved into the current building (2007), and how those students are dressed looks little different to how they look now - or, indeed, how they did in 1999. I recall noticing a bit of eighties influence on the undergrad girls, then nineties, in recent years, but the differences were subtle. The boys at undergrad level dress just how my peers did back in the 90s.

 

[Seb Lucas]

I experienced the 80's differently. My wife and I travelled Europe and Africa for 14 months 79 - 1980. When we returned we got our old jobs back but we were changed. The shock of Africa stayed with us. Not being able to stomach the sight of fly encrusted meat in the markets we became vegetarian. Attended vegan cooking retreats/learning organic farming. Then we bought 6 acres of land on a gulf island and prepared to homestead. My career blossomed in spite of myself and in the late 80;s found my dream job and career. We settled in as career folks and abandoned our homestead dream although kept the land just in case. So for us we delayed the excess of the 80's until the 90's. Both of us making great money we engaged for a few years in consumption....still have the Rolex and bespoke shoes but avoided jail, cocaine. We soon tired of that and realizing I really did not want to be a Vice Pres we each quit 6 figure jobs, travelled to Portugal for 3 months to lay on the beach and wonder..."what the F**k have we done now." The last 20+ years have been a circuitous journey that brings me to this moment.....which is pretty great!

Very nice. Not really the 1980's as people tend to think of them. You both sound like the antidote to that tawdry time.

 

[belfastboy]

Very nice. Not really the 1980's as people tend to think of them. You both sound like the antidote to that tawdry time.

We had our moments of greed/acquisition but thankfully i guess it didn't take.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What about Knight Rider? Was it a good "mirror of society", crime, depression, wrecked world?

It was more a sense of showing the kind of goofy escapism that American television fed people in the eighties. If it wasn't futuristic robotic cars, it was gel-haired masters-of-the-universe in tasseled loafers and glitzy rictus-faced soap-opera queens with towering poofed-up hair, or Captain Picard sailing thru space in the lobby of a suburban Best Western. There was very little grit and realism in anything that ever came out of American eighties television.

The most '80s TV show ever? A tossup between "Knots Landing" and "Manimal." It's just a shame they never did a crossover.

 

[MikeKardec]

I've always found that in Film (as well as other mediums but in the case of film it is extreme) American product is more of a product of American fears and fantasies than it is in other cultures. Some of that is because it was started by people who aspired to more than they could easily achieve otherwise, people who were looked down on by the culture at large. Some of that is because, in the US, it has always been completely private and capitalistic. Most other countries have a government funding track for the movies that they make. This influences the product because the promise of government funding comes with different strings attached. The most common is that the subject matter must reflect the history or culture of the funding country. Sometimes this means accurately reflect, sometimes not, but the condition is still there.

Having worked in Australia I used to joke that, because the Australian Film Finance operation, the Aussies, on their own, would never produce a Science Fiction film (they actually have done a couple). Film Finance offered up to 50% funding but you had to have a film that reflected Australian History or Culture. This isn't intended to limit film production but films are so hard to get made that it is powerful bait. The situation was somewhat similar in South Africa. I've often wondered if District 9 qualified. They were actually down there to make a film based on the Halo game but something went wrong and they shifted projects so I'm not sure that they received public funds. But the film could have been a contender because of how its subject interfaced with current and apartheid issues.

My comments here are not really an argument in one direction or another, just some observations. Here's one more observation: I went to see District 9 with a good friend who is Palestinian who was born in a camp in Syria. The reaction was very positive, "They've finally made a Science Fiction film for me!"

 

[MisterCairo]

I have enjoyed reading the vitriol from some over the 80s. How it single handedly represented the worst of humanity. Superficial, plastic, greedy, power hungry, etc. Big hair, shoulder pads, garish makeup.

If I had access to a laptop now, I would fill this thread with golden era examples of all of the above. There is not now, nor has there ever been, anything new under the sun!

 

[belfastboy]

I have enjoyed reading the vitriol from some over the 80s. How it single handedly represented the worst of humanity. Superficial, plastic, greedy, power hungry, etc. Big hair, shoulder pads, garish makeup.

If I had access to a laptop now, I would fill this thread with golden era examples of all of the above. There is not now, nor has there ever been, anything new under the sun!

and bellbottoms were never a good look in any era....except maybe for a sailor.

 

[Harp]

There is not now, nor has there ever been, anything new under the sun!

Several seasons ago, Chicago Bears v Green Bay Packers, 2nd half opening play,
Aaron Rodgers came out, and proceeded to destroy the Bears secondary, aced 1.5 second
passing against a severely winded Chicago defense and virtual non-coverage of Packer receivers.
Attributed to Coach Nagy's forfeiture of preseason preparation games. Rodgers continued the
assault, nailed his receivers with inside two second release accurate passing.

And I knew this was going to happen. Packers wore down the Bears. The damn Packers.
A winnable game too-Bears had a fantastic first half. But the dumbass head coach didn't
understand that his men had to be conditioned for four quarters of football.

Back in 1984, I rode the Rock Island home and the entire car sang Bear Down Chicago Bears,
some Irish ballads, and some of the ladies sang the Brady Bunch intro for good measure.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Super Bowl celebration long time past but fondly remembered.

 

[Trenchfriend]

and bellbottoms were never a good look in any era....except maybe for a sailor.

Yes!! I still have no idea, why these extreme boot cut jeans suddenly appeared in the early 2000s.

 

[Edward]

I've often wondered if District 9 qualified. They were actually down there to make a film based on the Halo game but something went wrong and they shifted projects so I'm not sure that they received public funds. But the film could have been a contender because of how its subject interfaced with current and apartheid issues.

My comments here are not really an argument in one direction or another, just some observations. Here's one more observation: I went to see District 9 with a good friend who is Palestinian who was born in a camp in Syria. The reaction was very positive, "They've finally made a Science Fiction film for me!"

Cracking little film, which - in the best traditions of sci-fi - commented on the "Now and recent past" through the medium of allegory. If you really want to learn about any culture, look at how it envisages the future. I chanced across this in the cinema. It was during my years as an external examiner at Glasgow Caledonian University; typically, the exam board met in the morning, finished with lunch, then I had a few hours to kill ahead of the 6pm train back to London. One wet afternoon I decided to hit the cinema, intending to give Inglorious Basterds a second viewing. That ended too late for my train, so I figure I'd give this a go as it's what was on. Glad I did.

Yes!! I still have no idea, why these extreme boot cut jeans suddenly appeared in the early 2000s.

The fashion industry has a weird fixation with flares. They were trying to bring them back for years; I remember even in the eighties there were fashion people insisting they were coming back. Always hated them; I hate flares so much I even disliked a wider leg (which I now prefer) for years.

 

[Seb Lucas]

I have enjoyed reading the vitriol from some over the 80s. How it single handedly represented the worst of humanity. Superficial, plastic, greedy, power hungry, etc. Big hair, shoulder pads, garish makeup.

If I had access to a laptop now, I would fill this thread with golden era examples of all of the above. There is not now, nor has there ever been, anything new under the sun!

I think we all know that and it's a salient point. But I guess the OP's question was addressed to people who lived through the 1980's. I didn't live through the 1930's. Answers to these sorts of questions are impressionistic follies, aren't they? If I were a young jackaroo living on a cattle station in far north Queensland in the 1980's, the decade would have looked almost the same as the ones before it. My father, who is 97, groups the 1960's to the 1980's together as the 'same thing' a three act play of entitled narcissism and greed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Over in the Era Day By Day thread we've just gone thru the entire year 1940, and are now in 1941, thru close daily readings of the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Daily News, and the Chicago Tribune. We've covered some of the most gruesome gangland crimes you could imagine -- and we aren't talking Hollywood gangsters here, we mean the real kind, who puncture you a hundred times with an icepick after killing you so you won't bloat and float to the surface when they throw you in the river -- plus wave after wave of political and corporate corruption and mendacity seasoned with day after day after day of greasy sex scandals, empty-headed attention-grabbers, deranged religious cults, bloodthirsty juvenile delinquents, alcoholic borderline-psychotic baseball owners, fistfights on the floor of Congress, and assorted trashy celebrity gossip. Anyone who was ever given to idealizing The Era as A Gentler, Simpler, More Decorous Time, will come away from this thread with their illusions broken into small, gritty pieces.

But I will say, the music was incalculably better than in the 80s. Until the ASCAP contract dispute, anyway.

 

[MikeKardec]

Anyone who was ever given to idealizing The Era as A Gentler, Simpler, More Decorous Time, will come away from this thread with their illusions broken into small, gritty pieces.

I discovered this too while reading newspapers from the midwest and upper midwest during the 1920s and '30s. If it wasn't "democratic lynchings" (the KKK) it was ax murderers and, the more things change the more they stay the same, school bombings. The numbers are more shocking when you realize that with minimal wire services it wasn't the same crime showing up in paper after paper. There were a lot of discrete moments of horror that never made it out of the local news.

 

[Trenchfriend]

When I hear german people, which were teens back then, talking about the 80s, I can always hear two main, but contrasting opinions, coming out.
The ones say, 80s were fun. The others, which seem to be majority, say, that in the (german) 80s was much more boring stuff, than you think, today.

The interesting point is, that many people say, in 80s-Germany, there was a huge discrepancy between "Adult Germany" and "Young Germany". They say, the underground clubbing scene and the adult world were light years away from each other and there was nothing really between.

 

[Turnip]

This discrepancy is as old as young and adult folks exist.

As well as the quote that those who can remember that era didn’t really experience it...

Go back to Schiller... and you’ll find the same old song, just in a roundabout way.

Though it might make a difference on which side of the fence the guys you asked lived at that time in Germany.

During 80s in FRG the („revolutionary“) youth of 68 became or were parents and began their long march up the instances, many things changed here, Peace Movements, Green Party in parliaments... so maybe the chasm between youth and parental generation has never been smaller than during 80s, at least in the West.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing with the 80s isn't so much that they look bad in retrospect -- it's that it was so easy to see thru the flood of propaganda surrounding them *while they were going on.* The glitter and the flash and the short-fingered vulgarity really didn't make much of an effort to hide thier essential emptiness. The 1950s were equally crass in their own way, but at least tried to pretend they weren't. The 80s weren't just crass, they *embraced* crassness as a flat-out positive trait.

That's another difference between the 80s and the Era. Immerse yourself in the media of 1941, and you'll find nobody telling you that you're living in "morning in America." The people of the time knew that their world was a mess, and that the time and the nation they were living in was far from perfect. There was an optimism, sure, but it wasn't any kind of strutting, in-yer-face We're So Great attitude. Maybe the best expression of it was a line in a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet -- "As a country, I think we try." The 80s could have used a dose of that kind of humbleness instead of all the hollow and incessant breast-beating.

 

[Frunobulax]

The optimism didn't happen in a vacuum. It was the direct result of the "malaise" from previous years.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

WARNING: spoilers.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

 

[Seb Lucas]

The thing with the 80s isn't so much that they look bad in retrospect -- it's that it was so easy to see thru the flood of propaganda surrounding them *while they were going on.* The glitter and the flash and the short-fingered vulgarity really didn't make much of an effort to hide thier essential emptiness. The 1950s were equally crass in their own way, but at least tried to pretend they weren't. The 80s weren't just crass, they *embraced* crassness as a flat-out positive trait.

That's another difference between the 80s and the Era. Immerse yourself in the media of 1941, and you'll find nobody telling you that you're living in "morning in America." The people of the time knew that their world was a mess, and that the time and the nation they were living in was far from perfect. There was an optimism, sure, but it wasn't any kind of strutting, in-yer-face We're So Great attitude. Maybe the best expression of it was a line in a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet -- "As a country, I think we try." The 80s could have used a dose of that kind of humbleness instead of all the hollow and incessant breast-beating.

That's very true.

It's curious what people focus on. Younger folk sometimes ask me about 1980's and say things like, "They must have been really cool, huh?" But all they are thinking of is a few bands that were big, three movies and a hairstyle or two. The 1980's as a decade are really don't interest them - it's just down a few aesthetic blips, like most content free nostalgia for previous times.