I’m talking about the ‘80s. I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff about the ‘80s lately, and people wax so nostalgic about the decade that it makes me wonder if I lived on the same planet. Of course there were sweet times, going to the Blockbuster to rent a movie, then sitting around the TV with the family, eating popcorn, laughing and crying together – when these days, most families don’t even sit down to dinner together. Everyone cobbles together a semblance of a meal, and eats it alone in their bedroom while watching something streaming on their phone. Even DVDs are considered outdated dinosaurs that no one buys.
It WAS different. There was no internet, and high-tech meant having a VCR and maybe more than one TV in the house. Computers were the villains in science fiction movies, just warm-ups for the ultimate evil computer, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They were foreign and mechanical and not to be trusted. They weren’t human, so to put them in charge of things was foolhardy at best. Now, you can’t get away from them. Your refrigerator talks to you, even if your mother doesn’t. But this isn’t about that. It’s about three movies from the ‘80s that I just watched over the past 3 nights.
The first one was a Sherlock Holmes
movie called The Seven Per Cent Solution. Right off the top, the casting immediately made me miss Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. THIS Holmes was a drug addict going through
agonizing cocaine withdrawal, supervised by no less a figure than Sigmund
Freud. Really, it was a completely absurd premise that didn’t quite come off
(though Alan Arkin made an interesting, if highly improbable Freud. I’ll watch anything
with Alan Arkin in it, he had such a knowing look and the sexiest eyes of any man
born).
I guess we just kind of suspended our disbelief in these things, as the plot got more and more absurd. Back then it was seen as a sophisticated thriller. But Nicol Williamson sweating and thrashing and raving seemed almost comical, way over the top, and Robert Duvall as Watson – wait, ROBERT DUVALL as Watson?? It was ridiculous casting, and Duvall could scarcely disguise his Texan accent as he strained to look and sound like an English gentleman.
But back in the ‘80s, cocaine abuse was just coming out of the closet as a really evil thing, rather than the harmless fun it seemed to be in the ‘70s. Drug addiction in a classic literary figure was seen as something really novel and original, even daring. We were more willing to buy this far-fetched stuff due to a kind of – what, innocence? It seems like it, in retrospect. Maybe just ignorance. But even more formally-presented dramas are now kind of hard to swallow, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend.
With great anticipation, I watched A Room with
a View, a movie I absolutely adored when it first came out, loving it just as
much when I saw it several more times on VHS tape. This time, well – I WAS
charmed by the first half-hour or so, maybe just due to nostalgia. But the best
moment in it – dashing George Emerson sweeping up prim Miss Lucy Honeychurch
and giving her a ferocious kiss in a field of barley – came in the first
twenty minutes or so. It was all downhill from there. Maggie Smith as Lucy’s
chaperone made me want to SCREAM, her character was so over-the-top and
gratingly annoying. Judi Dench as the “lady novelist” was even worse, just ridiculously
overstated, a stereotype I was willing to buy before, but this time - .
And it was LONG. That was the
biggest difference of all. When I first watched it an astonishing forty years
ago, I didn’t want it to end. This time I kept looking at my watch. It just
sort of lumbered along, and it felt stuffy, like the atmosphere in all those
ornate parlours it took place in. Denholm Elliot was almost worse than the
prissy, twittering ladies we were supposed to find funny. His “yes, and yes,
and YES” line embarrassed me. Of course we knew the whole thing was careening
towards a highly-unlikely happy ending, but this time I was kind of grateful
for that last scene of George and Lucy making out like bandits in their magical pensione in
All in all, the best part by far was Kiri te Kanawa singing a glorious aria by Puccini while the lovers kissed in the field of barley. But even at that, Renee Fleming did it better.
Like Humphrey Bogart materializing to Woody Allan in Play it Again, Sam, Siggy
kept appearing to the Dudley Moore character, who was of course called an
“analyst” (and whatever happened to analysts? Now they’re called therapists, I
guess). This ersatz Freud spouted intellectual
theories about why Dr. Dudley had sexually engulfed a vulnerable young patient,
treating it more as an amusing mid-life crisis than something that should
rightly be against the law.
It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. Why didn’t it occur to me before how
disgusting and even disturbing his behaviour was, skulking around behind the
scenes at the theatre where she worked, following her home, breaking into her
apartment when she was out so he could read her diary, and generally acting
like a disgusting creep. And, of course, she fell for him. Hard.
The thing just did not play. Is it because we’re far less tolerant of creepiness in men, in trying to find comedy in a situation like hiding in the woman’s shower while she made out with another man in the next room? (Ewwwwwwww!)
Then, of course, she turns on the shower, and he turns it off, and she turns it on. . . then she discovers him crouching like a criminal in her bathtub, and goes all smiles and gooey affection. Then, of course, they immediately have sex. I barely got through this one, nearly shut it off several times, but had the thought that this was the third ‘80s film I had watched in 3 nights, and that this might Mean Something. Not sure what, except that what was charming and romantic then was just kind of offensive, weak, even dull.
The eighties just don’t play well
for so many reasons. Maybe acting has changed. I don’t know, because acting
doesn’t exist any more – it’s all superhero garbage, Lord of the Rings 9 and
stuff like that. In the 1990s, I actually went to the movies once a week, and
most of them were watchable, enough, if not always worth the price. I have to
confess I can’t think of too many examples. It was just something I did,
usually alone, part of my weekly routine. Sometimes the popcorn was the best
part.
So the options are: the films changed; the culture changed; I changed. The latter two are pretty obvious. I’m no longer entertained by caricatures and people woodenly trying to bring historic figures to life. Alan Arkin was cute and appealing, as always, but bore no resemblance whatsoever to Sigmund Freud. Nicol Williamson shouldn’t have bothered, and Robert Duvall. . . But it seems that movies in the’80s were trying to sell us something, something that now seems so unpalatable that I can’t even imagine why I loved them to begin with. What was it? Caricature over character? Cliché over reality? Contrivance that we can’t get past?
Simpler times, or just more blinkered times? Why did people think an emotionally screwed-up psychiatrist having steamy sex with a vulnerable young patient was charming and fun? I’m beginning to think of the ‘80s as a cultural Dark Ages rather than the warm and cozy time people keep talking about. We seem to be missing something we never had in the first place.